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263,424	Richard Hakluyt	1,171,593,361	English author, editor and translator (1553–1616)	[ "1550s births", "1616 deaths", "16th-century English Anglican priests", "16th-century English writers", "16th-century male writers", "17th-century English Anglican priests", "17th-century English male writers", "17th-century English writers", "Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford", "Burials at Westminster Abbey", "Doctors of Divinity", "English people of Welsh descent", "English political writers", "English travel writers", "Fellows of Christ Church, Oxford", "People educated at Westminster School, London", "People from Hereford", "Writers from Herefordshire" ]	Richard Hakluyt (/ˈhæklʊt, ˈhæklət, ˈhækəlwɪt/; 1553 – 23 November 1616) was an English writer. He is known for promoting the English colonization of North America through his works, notably Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (1582) and The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589–1600). Hakluyt was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. Between 1583 and 1588 he was chaplain and secretary to Sir Edward Stafford, English ambassador at the French court. An ordained priest, Hakluyt held important positions at Bristol Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and was personal chaplain to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, principal Secretary of State to Elizabeth I and James I. He was the chief promoter of a petition to James I for letters patent to colonize Virginia, which were granted to the London Company and Plymouth Company (referred to collectively as the Virginia Company) in 1606. The Hakluyt Society, which publishes scholarly editions of primary records of voyages and travels, was named after him in its 1846 formation. ## Family, early life and education Hakluyt's patrilineal ancestors were of Welsh extraction, rather than Dutch as is often suggested; they appear to have settled in Herefordshire in England around the 13th century, and, according to antiquary John Leland, took their surname from the "Forest of Cluid in Radnorland." Some of Hakluyt's ancestors established themselves at Yatton in Herefordshire, and must have ranked amongst the principal landowners of the county. A person named Hugo Hakelute, who may have been an ancestor or relative of Richard Hakluyt, was elected Member of Parliament for the borough of Yatton in 1304 or 1305, and between the 14th and 16th centuries five individuals surnamed "de Hackluit" or "Hackluit" were sheriffs of Herefordshire. A man named Walter Hakelut was knighted in the 34th year of Edward I (1305) and later killed at the Battle of Bannockburn, and in 1349 Thomas Hakeluyt was chancellor of the diocese of Hereford. Records also show that a Thomas Hakeluytt was in the wardship of Henry VIII (reigned 1509–1547) and Edward VI (reigned 1547–1553). Richard Hakluyt, the second of four sons, was born in Eyton in Herefordshire in 1553. Hakluyt's father, also named Richard Hakluyt, was a member of the Worshipful Company of Skinners whose members dealt in skins and furs. He died in 1557 when his son was aged about five years, and his wife Margery followed soon after. Hakluyt's cousin, also named Richard Hakluyt, of the Middle Temple, became his guardian. While a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School, Hakluyt visited his guardian, whose conversation, illustrated by "certain bookes of cosmographie, an universall mappe, and the Bible," made Hakluyt resolve to "prosecute that knowledge, and kind of literature." Entering Christ Church, Oxford, in 1570 with financial support from the Skinners' Company, "his exercises of duty first performed," he set out to read all the printed or written voyages and discoveries that he could find. He took his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) on 19 February 1574, and shortly after taking his Master of Arts (M.A.) on 27 June 1577, began giving public lectures in geography. He was the first to show "both the old imperfectly composed and the new lately reformed mappes, globes, spheares, and other instruments of this art." Hakluyt held on to his studentship at Christ Church between 1577 and 1586, although after 1583 he was no longer resident in Oxford. Hakluyt was ordained in 1578, the same year he began to receive a "pension" from the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers to study divinity. The pension would have lapsed in 1583, but William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, intervened to have it extended until 1586 to aid Hakluyt's geographical research. ## At the English Embassy in Paris Hakluyt's first publication was one that he wrote himself, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Ilands Adjacent unto the Same, Made First of all by our Englishmen and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons (1582). Hakluyt's Voyages brought him to the notice of Lord Howard of Effingham, and Sir Edward Stafford, Lord Howard's brother-in-law. At the age of 30, being acquainted with "the chiefest captaines at sea, the greatest merchants, and the best mariners of our nation," he was selected as chaplain and secretary to accompany Stafford, now English ambassador at the French court, to Paris in 1583. In accordance with the instructions of Secretary Francis Walsingham, he occupied himself chiefly in collecting information of the Spanish and French movements, and "making diligent inquirie of such things as might yield any light unto our westerne discoveries in America." Although this was his only visit to Continental Europe in his life, he was angered to hear the limitations of the English in terms of travel being discussed in Paris. The first fruits of Hakluyt's labours in Paris were embodied in his important work entitled A Particuler Discourse Concerninge the Greate Necessitie and Manifolde Commodyties That Are Like to Growe to This Realme of Englande by the Westerne Discoueries Lately Attempted, Written in the Yere 1584, which Sir Walter Raleigh commissioned him to prepare. The manuscript, lost for almost 300 years, was published for the first time in 1877. Hakluyt revisited England in 1584, and laid a copy of the Discourse before Elizabeth I (to whom it had been dedicated) together with his analysis in Latin of Aristotle's Politicks. His objective was to recommend the enterprise of establishing English plantations in the unsettled [by Europeans] region of North America, and thus gain the Queen's support for Raleigh's expedition. In May 1585 when Hakluyt was in Paris with the English Embassy, the Queen granted to him the next prebendary at Bristol Cathedral that should become vacant, to which he was admitted in 1585 or 1586 and held with other preferments till his death. Hakluyt's other works during his time in Paris consisted mainly of translations and compilations, with his own dedications and prefaces. These latter writings, together with a few letters, are the only extant material out of which a biography of him can be framed. Hakluyt interested himself in the publication of the manuscript journal of René Goulaine de Laudonnière, L'histoire notable de la Floride située ès Indes Occidentales in Paris in 1586. The attention that the book excited in Paris encouraged Hakluyt to prepare an English translation and publish it in London under the title A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages Made by Certayne French Captaynes unto Florida (1587). The same year, his edition of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera's De Orbe Nouo Decades Octo saw the light at Paris. This work contains an exceedingly-rare copperplate map dedicated to Hakluyt and signed F.G. (supposed to be Francis Gualle); it is the first on which the name "Virginia" appears. ## Return to England In 1588 Hakluyt finally returned to England with Douglas Sheffield, Baroness Sheffield, after a residence in France of nearly five years. In 1589 he published the first edition of his chief work, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, using eyewitness accounts as far as possible. In the preface to this he announced the intended publication of the first terrestrial globe made in England by Emery Molyneux. Between 1598 and 1600 appeared the final, reconstructed and greatly enlarged edition of The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation in three volumes. In the dedication of the second volume (1599) to his patron, Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, Hakluyt strongly urged the minister as to the expediency of colonising Virginia. A few copies of this monumental work contain a map of great rarity, the first on the Mercator projection made in England according to the true principles laid down by Edward Wright. Hakluyt's great collection has been called "the Prose Epic of the modern English nation" by historian James Anthony Froude. On 20 April 1590 Hakluyt was instituted to the clergy house of Wetheringsett-cum-Brockford, Suffolk, by Lady Stafford, who was the Dowager Baroness Sheffield. He held this position until his death, and resided in Wetheringsett through the 1590s and frequently thereafter. In 1599, he became an adviser to the newly-founded East India Company, and in 1601 he edited a translation from the Portuguese of Antonio Galvão's The Discoveries of the World. ## Later life In the late 1590s Hakluyt became the client and personal chaplain of Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley's son, who was to be Hakluyt's most fruitful patron. Hakluyt dedicated to Cecil the second (1599) and third volumes (1600) of the expanded edition of Principal Navigations and also his edition of Galvão's Discoveries (1601). Cecil, who was the principal Secretary of State to Elizabeth I and James I, rewarded him by installing him as prebendary of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster on 4 May 1602. In the following year, he was elected archdeacon of the Abbey. These religious occupations have occasioned reconsideration of the role played by spiritual concerns in Hakluyt's writings on exploration, settlement, and England's relations with its Catholic rivals. Hakluyt was married twice, once in or about 1594 and again in 1604. In the licence of Hakluyt's second marriage dated 30 March 1604, he is described as one of the chaplains of the Savoy Hospital; this position was also conferred on him by Cecil. His will refers to chambers occupied by him there up to the time of his death, and in another official document he is styled Doctor of Divinity (D.D.). Hakluyt was also a leading adventurer of the Charter of the Virginia Company of London as a director thereof in 1589. In 1605 he secured the prospective living of Jamestown, the intended capital of the intended colony of Virginia. When the colony was at last established in 1607, he supplied this benefice with its chaplain, Robert Hunt. In 1606 he appears as the chief promoter of the petition to James I for letters patent to colonise Virginia, which were granted on 10 April 1606. His last publication was a translation of Hernando de Soto's discoveries in Florida, entitled Virginia Richly Valued, by the Description of the Maine Land of Florida, Her Next Neighbour (1609). This work was intended to encourage the young colony of Virginia; Scottish historian William Robertson wrote of Hakluyt, "England is more indebted for its American possessions than to any man of that age." Hakluyt prepared an English translation of Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius' Mare Liberum (1609), a treatise that sought to demonstrate that the Dutch had the right to trade freely in the East Indies, contrary to Spanish and Portuguese claims of sovereignty over the seas, in the early 17th century. Helen Thornton has suggested that the translation was commissioned by Thomas Smythe who became treasurer of the Virginia Company in 1609 and was also Governor of the East India Company. In that year, Hakluyt was a consultant to the Company when it was renewing its charter. Grotius' arguments supported England's right to trade in the Indies. The translation may also have been part of the propaganda encouraging English people to settle in Virginia. In Mare Liberum, Grotius denied that the 1493 donation by Pope Alexander VI that had divided the oceans between Spain and Portugal entitled Spain to make territorial claims to North America. Instead, he stressed the importance of occupation, which was favourable to the English as they and not the Spanish had occupied Virginia. Grotius also argued that the seas should be freely navigable by all, which was useful since the England to Virginia route crossed seas which the Portuguese claimed. However, it is not clear why Hakluyt's translation was not published in his lifetime. George Bruner Parks has theorized that publication at that time would have been inconvenient to England because after England had successfully helped Holland and Spain to negotiate the Twelve Years' Truce during the Eighty Years' War, the work would have supported English claims for free seas against Spain, but not its claims for closed seas against Holland. Hakluyt's handwritten manuscript, MS Petyt 529, in Inner Temple Library in London was eventually published as The Free Sea for the first time in 2004. In 1591, Hakluyt inherited family property upon the death of his elder brother Thomas; a year later, upon the death of his youngest brother Edmund, he inherited additional property which derived from his uncle. In 1612 Hakluyt became a charter member of the North-west Passage Company. By the time of his death, he had amassed a small fortune out of his various emoluments and preferments, of which the last was the clergy house of Gedney, Lincolnshire, presented to him by his younger brother Oliver in 1612. Unfortunately, his wealth was squandered by his only son. Hakluyt died on 23 November 1616, probably in London, and was buried on 26 November in Westminster Abbey; by an error in the abbey register his burial is recorded under the year 1626. A number of his manuscripts, sufficient to form a fourth volume of his collections of 1598–1600, fell into the hands of Samuel Purchas, who inserted them in an abridged form in his Pilgrimes (1625–1626). Others, consisting chiefly of notes gathered from contemporary authors, are preserved at the University of Oxford. Hakluyt is principally remembered for his efforts in promoting and supporting the settlement of North America by the English through his writings. These works were a fertile source of material for William Shakespeare and other authors. Hakluyt also encouraged the production of geographical and historical writings by others. It was at Hakluyt's suggestion that Robert Parke translated Juan González de Mendoza's The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof (1588–1590), John Pory made his version of Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600), and P. Erondelle translated Marc Lescarbot's Nova Francia (1609). ## Legacy The Hakluyt Society was founded in 1846 for printing rare and unpublished accounts of voyages and travels, and continues to publish volumes each year. A 14-volume critical edition of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations is being prepared by the Hakluyt Edition Project for Oxford University Press under the general editorship of Daniel Carey, National University of Ireland, Galway, and Claire Jowitt, University of East Anglia. Westminster School named a house after him as recognition of achievement of an Old Westminster. In Svalbard (Spitsbergen), the Hakluythovden headland and Hakluytodden landspit in the northwestern region of Amsterdam Island are named after Richard Hakluyt. ## Works ### Authored - Quarto. Reprint: - - Reprints: - - - Folio. Reprint: - 2 vols. - 3 vols.; folio. Reprints: - 16 vols. Full-text of this edition available as follows: Volume 1; Volume 2 (Latin); Volume 3; Volume 4; Volume 5; Volume 6; Volume 7; Volume 8; Volume 9; Volume 10; Volume 11; Volume 12; Volume 13; Volume 14. - 12 vols. Full-text of this edition available as follows: Volume 1; Volume 2; Volume 3; Volume 4; Volume 5; Volume 6; Volume 7; Volume 8; Volume 9; Volume 10; Volume 11; Volume 12. ### Edited and translated - [] It seems likely that this work was not by Hakluyt: see "At the English Embassy in Paris" above. - Quarto. - Octavo. - Quarto. Reprint: - - Quarto. ## See also - Étienne Bellenger
23,711,726	Henry Edwards (entomologist)	1,172,738,872	English-born actor and entomologist (1827–1891)	[ "1827 births", "1891 deaths", "19th-century English male actors", "Deaths from nephritis", "English lepidopterists", "English male stage actors", "Male actors from San Francisco", "People associated with the American Museum of Natural History", "People from East Harlem", "People from Ross-on-Wye", "Writers from Boston", "Writers from Manhattan", "Writers from San Francisco" ]	Henry Edwards (27 August 1827 – 9 June 1891), known as "Harry", was an English stage actor, writer and entomologist who gained fame in Australia, San Francisco and New York City for his theatre work. Edwards was drawn to the theatre early in life, and he appeared in amateur productions in London. After sailing to Australia, Edwards appeared professionally in Shakespearean plays and light comedies primarily in Melbourne and Sydney. Throughout his childhood in England and his acting career in Australia, he was greatly interested in collecting insects, and the National Museum of Victoria used the results of his Australian fieldwork as part of the genesis of their collection. In San Francisco, Edwards was a founding member of the Bohemian Club, and a gathering in Edwards' honour was the spark which began the club's traditional summer encampment at the Bohemian Grove. As well, Edwards cemented his reputation as a preeminent stage actor and theatre manager. After writing a series of influential studies on Pacific Coast butterflies and moths he was elected life member of the California Academy of Sciences. Relocating to the East Coast, Edwards spent a brief time in Boston theatre. This led to a connection to Wallack's Theatre and further renown in New York City. There, Edwards edited three volumes of the journal Papilio and published a major work about the life of the butterfly. His large collection of insect specimens served as the foundation of the American Museum of Natural History's butterfly and moth studies. Edwards' wide-ranging studies and observations of insects brought him into contact with specimens not yet classified. Upon discovering previously unknown insects he would give them names, which led to a number of butterfly, moth and beetle species bearing "Hy. Edw." (for Henry Edwards) as an attribution. From his theatre interests to entomology, Edwards carried forward an appreciation of Shakespeare—in the designation of new insect species he favoured female character names from Shakespeare's plays. ## Early career Henry Edwards was born to Hannah and Thomas Edwards (c. 1794–1857) at Brook House in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, England, on 27 August 1827, and was christened on 14 September. From his older brother William, he picked up an interest in examining insects. He collected butterflies as a hobby, and studied them under the tutelage of Edward Doubleday. His solicitor father intended a law career for his son, but after a brief period of unsuccessful study, Edwards took a position at a counting house in London, and began acting in amateur theatre. He then journeyed to join his brother William who had settled in Australia, nine miles (14 km) north-west of Melbourne along the bank of Merri Creek, a location then called Merrivale. Aboard the sailing ship Ganges from March to June 1853, he wrote descriptions of creatures such as the albatross that he encountered for the first time. After arriving in Melbourne, Edwards began collecting and cataloguing the insects he found on his brother's land, and further afield. Within two years, he had gathered 1,676 species of insects, shot and mounted 200 birds, and pressed some 200 botanical specimens. This collection and that of William Kershaw were purchased by Frederick McCoy to form the nucleus of the new National Museum of Victoria. The first Australian stage appearance by Edwards was with George Selth Coppin's company at the Queen's Theatre in Melbourne. Later, he joined Gustavus Vaughan Brooke's theatrical group. The part of Petruchio, the male lead in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, was filled by Edwards at the Princess's Theatre in Sydney in November 1859, playing opposite tragedian Avonia Jones as Katharine. In December that year Brooke retired from management, yielding the reins of his company to the team of Edwards and George Fawcett Rowe, English actor and playwright. Brooke continued to act under Edwards and Rowe: his starring performance in April 1860 as Louis XI in Dion Boucicault's play of the same name was a stirring portrayal that Edwards, playing Jacques d'Armagnac, Duke of Nemours, recalled vividly for the rest of his life. Sharing the stage again in August, Brooke and Edwards were well received in their portrayal of twin brothers in a production of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors in Melbourne, the first Australian mounting of that work. As a twist to pique public interest, Edwards and Brooke exchanged roles after two weeks' run. However, not all of Edwards' performances were successful: his turn at Angelo in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure was called "invertebrate" by drama critic William John Lawrence; in Lawrence's estimation, Edwards and his fellow actors paled against the powerful performance of Avonia Jones as Isabella. The renowned entomologist and collector William Sharp Macleay was sought out by Edwards whenever his stage appearances took him to Sydney. Beginning in 1858, Macleay mentored Edwards and encouraged him to search for more insect specimens when his theatre obligations allowed. Robust and adventuresome, Edwards occasionally trekked out into the wilds of Australia on the hunt for insects. While in Sydney, Edwards went up two times in a hot air balloon as a favour to George Coppin, narrowly avoiding severe injury or death in the first ascent. Edwards' further travels included New Zealand, Peru, Panama and Mexico in pursuit of insects and dramatic roles. ## San Francisco In 1865, Edwards began a 12-year residence in San Francisco, California. At the 1870 United States Census, Edwards reported himself as a non-voting foreign-born resident, a comedian by trade, living in a home worth \$1,000. Edwards lived in San Francisco with a white woman listed in the census as "Mariana", born in England, age 40, and a 16-year-old Chinese servant named Heng Gim. The woman Mariana was likely Edwards's wife, the former Marianne Elizabeth Woolcott Bray who was born about 1822–1823 in New Street, Birmingham. In 1851 at the age of 28, Bray married Gustavus Vaughan Brooke, and the two went to Australia to manage Brooke's then-new theatre company. It was there that Edwards met Brooke and his wife, but after several years of the two men working together, Brooke remarried in February 1863, taking Avonia Jones (1836–1867) as his second wife. Brooke died in an accident at sea in January 1866, and Avonia Jones Brooke died in New York City the next year. Later reports spoke of Edwards marrying Brooke's widow, without naming her. In 1868–1869 Edwards leased and managed the Metropolitan Theater, and he was a founding member of the acting company of the California Theatre, which opened in January 1869. The theatre was directed and managed by actor John McCullough, and among the more notable productions was As You Like It in May 1872, with McCullough playing Orlando and Edwards the banished Duke Senior. Walter M. Leman, who carried the part of Adam, opined in 1886 that "never since time was has Shakespeare's charming idyl been better put upon the stage." Edwards was one of the founders and the first vice-president of the Bohemian Club, and served two terms as president, 1873–1875. He hosted Shakespeare celebrations at the club in April 1873, 1875 and 1877, and a Bohemian Christmas celebration in December 1877: "The Feast of Reason and Flow of Soul". Edwards became a director of the San Francisco Art Association, and spoke for Lotta Crabtree at the dedication of Lotta's Fountain in September 1875. Still very much interested in insects, Edwards spent his spare time at the California Academy of Sciences studying butterflies under Hans Hermann Behr, the academy's curator for Lepidoptera, the scientific order of moths and butterflies. Elected a member of the academy in 1867, he concentrated on describing the structure and habits of moths and butterflies on the Pacific coast from British Columbia to Baja California. He went to visit John Muir in Yosemite Valley in June 1871, with a letter of introduction from Jeanne Carr, the wife of California's chief geologist Ezra S. Carr. The letter described Edwards as "one of Nature's truest and most devoted disciples", a sojourner who "has the keys to the Kingdom". After the visit, Muir occasionally sent specimens from the Sierras to add to Edwards' collection, carried to San Francisco by men such as geologist and artist Clarence King who were returning from Yosemite field study. Edwards presented a series of papers to the academy entitled Pacific Coast Lepidoptera, and classified two species as new to science. He named one Gyros muiri for Muir, with "Hy. Edw." as the attribution. In 1872, Muir sent Edwards a letter, writing "You are now in constant remembrance, because every flying flower is branded with your name." In 1873, Edwards became the curator of entomology at the academy, and began to serve on the Publications Committee which produced the journal Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences. Beginning early that year, he befriended George Robert Crotch. Although it is sometimes claimed that he accompanied Crotch on his insect collecting tour of California, Oregon and British Columbia, Edwards was only aware of Crotch's travels as a correspondent. Edwards independently visited British Columbia in 1873, missing Crotch by several days at Vancouver Island. In 1874, Edwards began to serve as one of the academy's vice-presidents, and for the academy in late 1874 after Crotch's death from tuberculosis, he published a memorial tribute to the man. Edwards also wrote one of many tributes to academician Louis Agassiz at his death in late 1873. At the academy on 2 January 1877, Edwards was elected member for life. Though successful in San Francisco, Edwards decided to head for Boston and New York City to see if his career as an actor could benefit from appearances in the eastern United States. On 29 June 1878, somewhat fewer than 100 of his Bohemian friends gathered in the woods near Taylorville, California (present-day Samuel P. Taylor State Park), for a night-time send-off party in Edwards' honour. Bohemian Club historian Porter Garnett later wrote that the men at the "nocturnal picnic" were "provided with blankets to keep them warm and a generous supply of liquor for the same purpose". Japanese lanterns were used for illumination and decoration. This festive gathering was repeated without Edwards by club members the next year, and every year thereafter, eventually evolving and expanding into the club's annual summer encampment at the Bohemian Grove, famous (or infamous) for the casual commingling of top politicians and powerful captains of industry in attendance. ## Boston to New York In late 1878, Edwards joined a theatre company in Boston, replacing another actor as "Schelm, Chief of Police" at a revival of the spectacle The Exiles at the Boston Theatre on Washington Street. After a four-week run, he performed in other productions at the theatre through the 1879–1880 season. In June, Edwards answered the 1880 census to report himself an England-born actor living with his English wife "Marian" and his Chinese servant, Gim Hing. From Boston, Edwards moved to New York to stay for some ten years, performing on stage and participating in insect studies. He was active in the Brooklyn and New York Entomological Societies. In 1881, he co-founded and edited a butterfly enthusiast's periodical entitled Papilio, named for the genus Papilio in the swallowtail butterfly family, Papilionidae. Edwards served as editor until January 1884 when he gave the reins to his friend Eugene Murray-Aaron of Philadelphia. Papilio was published until 1885 when its subscription base was merged into the more general Entomologia Americana, published by the Brooklyn Entomological Society. Beginning in December 1880 under Lester Wallack, the charismatic son of the theatre's founder, Edwards was associated with Wallack's Theatre in New York, called the "finest theatre company in America". Now in his 50s, the entomologist and actor appeared in such representative British dramatic roles as Prince Malleotti in Forget Me Not, Max Harkaway in London Assurance, Baron Stein in Diplomacy, and Master Walter in The Hunchback, reprising James Sheridan Knowles's earlier portrayal. Edwards used Wallack's Theatre as his professional mailing address, and helped manage it upon occasion. Wallack, already head "Shepherd" of the Lambs Club, a modest meetinghouse of professional stage actors, invited Edwards to join. Once a Lamb, Edwards threw his energies in with those of Wallack and other club members to aid newspaper editor Harrison Grey Fiske in the organisation of a charitable fund to support destitute actors or their widows. Wallack was made president of the resulting Actors' Fund. A year after its first meeting on 15 July 1882 at Wallack's Theatre, Edwards was made secretary, a position he held for one year. His wife joined the Women's Executive Committee of the Fund. Edwards appeared in early 1882 at Palmer's Theatre on Broadway and West 30th Street in a production of the English comedy The School for Scandal. Wallack stalwart John Gibbs Gilbert reached the height of his fame in the production, playing Sir Peter Teazle. As Sir Oliver Surface, Edwards, too, was lauded—Gilbert and Edwards shared the stage with Stella Boniface, Osmond Tearle, Gerald Eyre, Madame Ponisi and Rose Coghlan. Gathering together under one cover his various short subjects, essays, and elegies to fallen friends, Edwards published in 1883 a wryly humorous book entitled A Mingled Yarn, including tales of travels and stories of his time in the Bohemian Club. Dedicated to the Bohemians, "with grateful memories, and feelings of affectionate regard," the book was favourably reviewed in the New York Tribune. This review was reprinted in the Literary News: "Mr. Edwards—remarkable for attainments in science no less than for versatile proficiency in the art of acting—presents a rare type of the union of talents greatly divergent and seldom found in one and the same person." In 1886, Edwards was interviewed for The Theatre, a weekly magazine published in New York. Edwards was described as "unusually popular and genial", with a "charming English" wife and a Chinese servant named Charlie who "adores his employers" and had served them for 17 years. The Edwards' home was observed to be comfortable but decorated with an astonishing collection of wonders from around the globe. Displayed amid the biological specimens, rugs, china, furniture, and valuable photographs were paintings executed by other actors, including ones by Edward Askew Sothern and Joseph Jefferson. Edwards showed letters he had received from a wide array of notables such as writers William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and naturalists Charles Darwin, Louis Agassiz and John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury. One floor of the residence was seen to be wholly devoted to the entomologist's collection of specimens, which Edwards said was insured for \$17,000, \$ in current value. Surrounded by his exotic possessions and "in the most perfect congeniality with his wife", Edwards was reported to be the host of a "cultivated home". ## Last years Two years after Alfred, Lord Tennyson, completed his Idylls of the King, a poetic telling of the King Arthur legend, Edwards and George Parsons Lathrop adapted it to the stage as a drama in four acts. The result was Elaine, a story of young love between Elaine of Astolat and Lancelot, fashioned with "flower-like fragility" and "winning touches of tenderness". Its first public presentation was a staged "author's reading" at Madison Square Theatre on 28 April 1887, at which Edwards played the part of Elaine's father, Lord Astolat. Months later it was presented by the company of A. M. Palmer, without Edwards in the cast, opening on 6 December 1887, at the same venue. The production proved both popular and profitable for Lathrop and Edwards. Annie Russell's Elaine was admired for her "sweet simplicity and pathos which captured nearly every heart". After a successful six-week New York run, Palmer took Elaine on the road. Actors associated with Wallack's Theatre announced to the public that beginning in February 1888 a final series of old comedies would be revived, after which the company would be disbanded. Edwards served as stage manager for the run, and reprised several of his earlier roles including those of Max Harkaway in London Assurance and Colonel Rockett in Old Heads and Young Hearts. Taking part once again in The School for Scandal, the sixth and final play of the nostalgic series, Edwards received high praise for his depiction of a wealthy Englishman recently returned from India: "there is probably no better Sir Oliver on our stage than Mr. Edwards." "Justly esteemed" in the role, he was called a "sterling player", representative "of a school which is fast disappearing". A testimonial production of Hamlet was mounted at the Metropolitan Opera House on 21 May 1888, to celebrate the life and accomplishments of an ageing Lester Wallack, and to raise money to ease the chronic sciatica that arrested his career. "One of the greatest casts ever assembled" was formed into a company composed of Edwards as the priest, Edwin Booth as Hamlet, Lawrence Barrett as the ghost, Frank Mayo as the king, John Gibbs Gilbert as Polonius, Rose Coghlan as the player queen and Helena Modjeska as Ophelia. Other stars made cameo appearances, and Wallack was assisted up onto the stage to address the standing room crowd at intermission. Notables such as Mayor Hewitt and General Sherman were in attendance. More than \$10,000 was raised for Wallack's care. In the following months, Edwards teamed with other actors and Wallack's wife to help him write his memoir; Wallack died in September. The next year, Edwards published a significant treatise entitled Bibliographic Catalogue of the Described Transformation of North American Lepidoptera. In response to an invitation and after arranging a business contract, he travelled back to Australia to accept a position as stage manager of a theatrical company in Melbourne. Frustrated with the experience, Edwards sailed back to New York the next year with the intention of returning to acting, but poor health kept him from full enjoyment of the limelight. In March, Edwards appeared as Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost at Augustin Daly's Daly Theatre, but was often short of breath and unable to keep pace with the run—his part was given to a young Tyrone Power who also covered Edwards' old role of Sir Oliver Surface for Daly's road show of The School for Scandal. To regain his strength, Edwards and his wife took a carriage to a rustic cottage refuge in Arkville in the Catskill Mountains but isolation, plain food and rest yielded little improvement. A physician was called and he informed Mrs. Edwards that there would be no recovery for her husband from the advanced Bright's disease with complications from chronic pneumonia so she brought him back to New York City. Edwards died at home at 185 East 116th Street in East Harlem late on 9 June 1891, just hours after returning. ## Legacy After his death, Edwards' collection of 300,000 insect specimens, one of the largest in the United States, was bought by his friends for \$15,000 for the financial benefit of his widow, and donated to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) as the cornerstone of their collection. Mrs. Harry Edwards also donated some of his other specimens, including two eggs of the order Rajiformes, the true rays. Museum trustees purchased the 500 volumes of entomology texts and 1,200 pamphlets owned by Edwards to form the "Harry Edwards Entomological Library", one of the handful of important book acquisitions made by the AMNH to expand their library in its early years. William Schaus, a student that Edwards guided and encouraged, but never met in person, went on to further define moth and butterfly characteristics in a large body of published work. The "Hy. Edw." designation appended to some butterfly species names indicates first description by Henry Edwards. This is not to be confused with the "Edw." designation which stands for William Henry Edwards, an unrelated contemporary and correspondent of Edwards'. At least two specimens were designated "Mrs. Hy. Edwards." because they were collected and identified by his wife. Edwards named many butterflies in the families Theclinae, Nymphalidae, Papilionidae and Lycaenidae, but his largest contribution was in the description of moth species in North America including Mexico: Arctiidae, Bombycidae, Hepialidae, Sesiidae, Noctuidae, Sphingidae, Lasiocampidae, Dalceridae, Dysderidae, Geometridae, Pyralidae, Saturniidae, Thyatiridae, Urodidae and Zygaenidae. In choosing names, Edwards favoured female characters from the plays of William Shakespeare, such as Ophelia from Hamlet, Hermia from A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Desdemona from Othello. For example, Edwards collected, classified and named the moth species Catocala ophelia and Catocala hermia in 1880, and Catocala desdemona in 1882. ### Birth dates The birth date that Edwards gave as his own varied depending on the time and place he was asked. Parish records show he was christened in England on 14 September 1827, and corroborating this date he gave his age as 25 in June 1853 when he first arrived in Australia. However, when questioned in San Francisco for the 1870 United States Census, he gave his birth year as 1830. Ten years later in Boston, he reported his age as 45, implying a birth year of 1835, but he returned to supplying the year 1830 along with the date 27 August for the brief biographical sketches used by theatre and entomological publications. Two years before he died, he told a reporter from the Lorgnette that he was born in 1832. A prominent obituary in The New York Times reported that his family gave his birthday as 23 September 1830, but that some published lists of actors' ages, "not always trustworthy", put his birth year at 1824.
51,375,442	Fort Vancouver Centennial half dollar	1,138,524,118	U.S. bank commemorative fifty-cent piece	[ "1925 establishments in the United States", "Currencies introduced in 1925", "Early United States commemorative coins", "Fifty-cent coins" ]	The Fort Vancouver Centennial half dollar, sometimes called the Fort Vancouver half dollar, is a commemorative fifty-cent piece struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1925. The coin was designed by Laura Gardin Fraser. Its obverse depicts John McLoughlin, who was in charge of Fort Vancouver (present-day Vancouver, Washington) from its construction in 1825 until 1846. From there, he effectively ruled the Oregon Country on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company. The reverse shows an armed frontiersman standing in front of the fort. Washington Representative Albert Johnson wanted a coin for Fort Vancouver's centennial celebrations, but was persuaded to accept a medal instead. But when another congressman was successful in amending a coinage bill to add a commemorative, Johnson tacked on language authorizing a coin for Fort Vancouver. The Senate agreed to the changes, and President Calvin Coolidge signed the authorizing act on February 24, 1925. Fraser was engaged to design the coin on the recommendation of the United States Commission of Fine Arts. The coins were flown from the San Francisco Mint, where they were struck, to Washington state by airplane as a publicity stunt. They sold badly; much of the issue was returned for redemption and melting, and the failure may have been a factor in one official's suicide. Due to the low number of surviving pieces, the coins are valuable today. ## Background Fort Vancouver, on the north bank of the Columbia River in what is today Vancouver, Washington, lay across the river from what would become Portland, Oregon. It was founded in 1825 by the Hudson's Bay Company chief factor for the area, Dr. John McLoughlin. The company sought furs and other trade goods, and was in competition with John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company, which had an outpost at what is now Astoria, Oregon. Fort Vancouver was named for the British sea captain George Vancouver, who also gave his name to Vancouver in Canada. Until the Oregon Treaty of 1846 settled the disputed claims of the United States and Britain, McLoughlin was what government there was in the Oregon Country. McLoughlin's word was obeyed by white man and Native American alike, and there were no significant wars there in that time. Fort Vancouver became the trading center for a large area, and the largest settlement west of the Great Plains. With the coming of American rule in 1846, McLoughlin resigned from the Hudson's Bay Company, going to live at Oregon City, which he had founded, and became its mayor in 1851, two years after becoming a U.S. citizen. He died in 1857; a century later, the Oregon Legislature named him the "Founder of Oregon", and Fort Vancouver is now a national historic site. ## Legislation The Fort Vancouver Centennial Corporation hoped to sell commemorative half dollars at the planned celebration, and persuaded Representative Albert Johnson of Washington state to introduce legislation in the House of Representatives. In May 1924, he and Senator Wesley Jones, also of Washington state, introduced legislation in their houses of Congress for a half dollar commemorating the centennial of Fort Vancouver. The bills were not given any hearings. Indiana Representative Albert Vestal, the chairman of the House Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures, met with Johnson and persuaded him to introduce a bill for a medal instead. Vestal reasoned that the Treasury Department was opposing more commemorative coin issues, as these were finding their way into circulation and confusing the public. On February 3, 1925, Jones introduced a bill for a medal, and on the 12th, Johnson did the same. Legislation for a Vermont Sesquicentennial half dollar had been introduced by that state's senior senator, Frank Greene, and had passed the Senate. When that bill came to the floor of the House of Representatives on February 16, California Representative John E. Raker moved to amend it to provide for a California Diamond Jubilee half dollar. Vestal asked to be heard in opposition to the amendment, stating that his committee, after recommending the Vermont bill, had decided to promote no further coin bills. He added that because of this, Johnson had agreed to withdraw his bill. The Minority Leader, Democratic Congressman Finis J. Garrett of Tennessee, asked why the committee had not set the rule before considering the Vermont bill, and Vestal admitted it was hard to answer. The House voted, and the amendment was added. Johnson—to applause from his colleagues—moved a further amendment, to add "and Vancouver, Wash." The amendment passed, as did the bill. Johnson realized that such a simple amendment might not result in a coin being issued. He therefore returned to the House floor soon thereafter, asking that the bill be reconsidered, so he could couch his amendment in the same phrasing as for the other two coins. Once the bill was again being considered, Johnson added his amendment, but Vestal moved that the bill be returned to his committee. Vestal's motion failed, 24 ayes to 67 noes. Lengthy procedural wrangling followed over whether that vote could be objected to because there was no quorum present. Once that was resolved, the House passed the bill again. The bill was returned to the Senate the following day. Kansas's Charles Curtis moved on behalf of Greene that the Senate agree to the House amendments, and though Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon urged President Calvin Coolidge to veto it, the bill, authorizing all three coins, was enacted by the President's signature on February 24, 1925. ## Preparation Once the coin had been approved by Congress, the Centennial Corporation submitted plaster models by an unknown artist, whose initials (SB) appeared on the obverse. They were sent to the Commission of Fine Arts, charged by a 1921 executive order by President Warren G. Harding with rendering advisory opinions regarding public artworks, including coins. The models showed McLoughlin on the obverse and the fort stockade with Mount Hood in the background for the reverse. These designs were likely dictated by the Centennial Corporation. On May 22, the Commission rejected the models, describing them as "interesting" but stating that an experienced medalist would be needed. It recommended Chester Beach, but when the corporation tried to hire him, it turned out he was traveling. The corporation instead hired the commission's second choice, Laura Gardin Fraser, an experienced designer of commemorative coins. Since the Centennial Corporation had decided what design elements it wanted to see on the half dollar, Fraser had to do her own interpretation of the designs SB had essayed. Hired on June 15, she completed her models by July 1, when Louis Ayres, a member of the commission, came to view them. He was enthusiastic, and sent a letter to commission chairman Charles Moore to that effect, writing "the whole coin looks very interesting to me, and I think is mighty good." The models were approved by the commission, and then by Mellon. Dies were prepared at the Philadelphia Mint, then shipped to San Francisco, where the coins were to be struck. ## Design The obverse features a portrait of McLoughlin, facing left. The name of his adopted country overarches him, and his name and 'HALF DOLLAR' are below him, with the centennial dates and 'IN GOD WE TRUST' flanking his bust. Fraser had no likenesses of McLoughlin to work with, and what she based her portrait of him on is unclear. It shows him as an older man than the 41 years he was at the time of Fort Vancouver's founding. The reverse shows an armed frontiersman, dressed in buckskins, with the stockade of Fort Vancouver behind him, and Mt. Hood in the distance. The inscription is somewhat broken up, but is intended to be read as 'FORT VANCOUVER CENTENNIAL VANCOUVER WASHINGTON FOUNDED 1825 BY HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY'. Numismatists have debated whether the absence of a mint mark was intentional; it is the only commemorative coin issue struck at Denver or San Francisco that lacks one. The artist's initials, 'LGF', are at lower right on the reverse, on the other side of the circle from the date '1825'. Anthony Swiatek and Walter Breen, in their 1988 book on commemorative coins, describe Fraser's design as "better than anything [Chester] Beach could have come up with". Cornelius Vermeule, in his volume on the artistry of U.S. coins and medals, deemed Fraser's half dollar "a most acceptable coin". He wrote, "the obverse tries Pisanello's spacing of the lettering and circumscribed roughness of the bust, while the reverse has too much scenery in the background, surrounded by too much lettering. This and the Hawaiian Sesquicentennial coin of 1928 prove that background scenery or geography ought to be omitted from commemorative half dollars". ## Production, distribution, and collecting Only 50,000 of the authorized mintage of 300,000 were coined, plus 28 pieces intended to be sent to Philadelphia to be available for inspection and testing at the 1926 meeting of the annual Assay Commission. The minting was done not later than August 1 at San Francisco. As a publicity stunt, the entire mintage (less the 28 assay coins) was flown by air to Vancouver, Washington, by United States Army Air Corps Lieutenant Oakley G. Kelly on August 1; the shipment, including packaging, weighed 1,462 pounds (663 kg). On arrival, the coins were received by Herbert Campbell, head of the centennial commission. The half dollars were intended to help pay for the centennial festivities in Vancouver. These were held from August 17 to 23, with a highlight being a pageant, "The Coming of the White Man", which was "based on historical fact". The coins were sold at \$1 each; several hundred were gilded, diminishing their future value as numismatic specimens; others were kept as pocket pieces, or were spent. The poor sales caused financial problems and may have caused a suicide, for on August 22, Charles A. Watts, secretary of the Centennial Corporation and described by Campbell as the real force behind the coin, killed himself. The day before he died, he told a meeting of the corporation there were funds enough to pay all debts, and that Fraser was not owed any money. Neither proved to be the case, and unpaid bills totaled \$6,000, with no money to pay them. In fact, Fraser's fee of \$1,200 was outstanding, and she tried to get paid even with the half dollars, but her bill was unsatisfied until a year later, when she was paid by check. The half dollars were not owned by the corporation, as the Vancouver National Bank had advanced money for them. Sales came to a virtual halt by the end of October. Texas coin dealer B. Max Mehl offered to buy the remainder of the issue at face value, but this was rejected as many people had paid \$1 for their coins. A total of 35,034 pieces were sent back to the mint for redemption and melting, leaving 14,966 pieces outstanding. According to Swiatek and Breen, "given the remoteness and exclusively local nature of the celebration, it is surprising that as many as fourteen thousand coins were sold." A sale of 1,000 coins was made to an executive of the Hudson's Bay Company, and they were placed in the Archives of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. They were stolen in 1982 by a caretaker, who spent them and redeemed some for Canadian currency at a bank. Many wound up in the hands of a coin dealer, who sold them widely. At the time, the coins were worth about US\$800 each. Once the theft was realized, the Province of Manitoba filed suit to recover the remaining coins, but a settlement allowed the dealer to retain them. The coins quickly commanded a premium after their 1925 issue due to their scarcity, rising to \$10 by 1928 before falling back to \$7 by 1930, in uncirculated condition. They peaked at about \$9 during the commemorative coin boom of 1936. They had subsided back to the \$6 level by 1940, but thereafter increased steadily in value, rising to \$1,600 during the second commemorative coin boom in 1980. The edition of R. S. Yeoman's A Guide Book of United States Coins published in 2017 lists the coin for between \$300 and \$975, depending on condition. A near-pristine specimen sold at auction in 2014 for \$8,225.
16,361,229	Mass Effect 2	1,172,823,483	2010 video game	[ "2010 video games", "Action role-playing video games", "BioWare games", "British Academy Games Award for Best Game winners", "D.I.C.E. Award for Game of the Year winners", "D.I.C.E. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Story winners", "D.I.C.E. Award for Role-Playing Game of the Year winners", "Electronic Arts games", "Golden Joystick Award for Game of the Year winners", "LGBT-related video games", "Mass Effect video games", "PlayStation 3 games", "Role-playing video games", "Science fiction video games", "Single-player video games", "Space opera", "Space opera video games", "Terrorism in fiction", "Unreal Engine games", "Video game sequels", "Video games developed in Canada", "Video games scored by Jack Wall", "Video games set in outer space", "Video games set in the 22nd century", "Video games set on fictional planets", "Video games with expansion packs", "Video games with gender-selectable protagonists", "Windows games", "Xbox 360 games" ]	Mass Effect 2 is an action role-playing video game developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 in 2010 and PlayStation 3 in 2011. It is the second installment in the Mass Effect series and a sequel to the original Mass Effect. The game takes place within the Milky Way galaxy during the 22nd century, where humanity is threatened by an insectoid alien race known as the Collectors. The player assumes the role of Commander Shepard, an elite human soldier who must assemble and gain the loyalty of a diverse team to stop the Collectors in a suicide mission. Using a completed saved game of its predecessor, the player can impact the game's story in numerous ways. For the game, BioWare changed several gameplay elements and further emphasized third-person shooter aspects, including limited ammunition and regenerable health. In contrast to the exclusive focus on the main story of the original Mass Effect, the developers opted to create a plot where optional missions had as much intensity as the main mission. Mass Effect composer Jack Wall returned to compose Mass Effect 2's music, aiming for a darker and more mature sound to match the game's mood. Mass Effect 2 also supports a variety of downloadable content packs, ranging from single in-game character outfits to entirely new plot-related missions. Notable packs include Kasumi – Stolen Memory, Overlord, Lair of the Shadow Broker, and Arrival. Released to critical acclaim, Mass Effect 2 was praised for its presentation and cinematography, diverse and complex characters, and improved combat over its predecessor. Some critics, however, expressed concerns about the game's simplified role-playing mechanics. The game received numerous year-end awards, including Game of the Year at the 14th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards and Best Game at the 2011 British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards. Mass Effect 2 is considered a significant improvement over its predecessor and one of the greatest video games of all time. A sequel, Mass Effect 3, was released in 2012. In 2021, Mass Effect 2 was remastered as part of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. ## Gameplay Mass Effect 2 is a single-player action role-playing game in which the player takes the role of Commander Shepard from a third-person perspective. Before the game begins, the player determines Shepard's gender, appearance, military background, combat training, and first name. The player may choose to import a character from a completed saved game of the original Mass Effect or start the game with a new character. Importing an old character allows several decisions the player made in the original game to impact the story of Mass Effect 2 and grants the player a set of starting bonuses. The game features six different character classes for the player to choose from. Each class is proficient in a different set of powers and weapon types. For example, the Vanguard class specializes in close-range combat and shotguns, while the Infiltrator class relies on stealth combat and sniper rifles. The game's overworld is a galaxy map the player can explore to find and complete quests. Most quests consist of combat missions, but some involve the player interacting with non-player characters during visits to settlements. Different locations and new squad members become available as the player progresses throughout the game. Experience points are gained by completing quests. Each time a sufficient amount of experience is obtained, the player "levels up" and is awarded Squad Points that can be used to develop powers for Shepard and squad members. Powers provide enhanced combat capabilities, with each power having four ranks that can be unlocked. Each rank costs the same number of Squad Points as its rank. For example, unlocking the first rank of a power requires one point, but unlocking all four ranks of a single power requires a total of ten points. Upon raising a power to its fourth rank, the player must evolve the power into one of two given forms. The player's primary mode of transportation is a starship which serves as Shepard's base of operations. Aboard the ship, the player can interact with the squad members, customize the player's armour, travel to numerous planetary systems, and scan planets for mineral resources. These resources allow the player to research numerous in-game upgrades found in the missions, providing benefits such as increasing weapon damage, fortifying the player's health, or extending the ship's fuel capacity, among others. Scanning requires the player to move a reticle over a planet and launch a probe when an oscilloscope warns of near resources. Additional upgrades, equipment, and non-essential items such as magazines and decorations for the ship can be purchased from merchants in settlements. ### Combat Combat in Mass Effect 2 is squad-based, and a maximum of two squad members may accompany the player on the battlefield. The player controls Shepard, while the game's artificial intelligence controls the squad members. Battles take place in real-time, but the player can pause the action at any time to calmly target enemies and select different powers for the squad members to use. The game uses an over-the-shoulder perspective akin to a third-person shooter and emphasizes using cover to avoid taking damage while fighting enemy forces. The player may also issue commands to the squad members, such as sending them to take cover behind a manually picked object or focus their fire on a designated target. Unlike the original Mass Effect, where weapons overheat if fired continuously for prolonged periods, the weapons of Mass Effect 2 have a finite magazine and must be reloaded after a certain number of shots. A damage-absorbing shield protects Shepard and the squad members. When the shield is fully depleted, further damage reduces the hit points of a secondary health meter. The shield bar and health meter regenerate when not taking fire for a brief period. The player can revive fallen squad members with the use of the Unity power. However, if Shepard dies, the player must start the game again from the last saved point. All enemies are protected by health, shields, armour, barriers, or a combination thereof. Each type of protection has its vulnerabilities. For example, armour is usually vulnerable to powers such as Incinerate, which burns enemies over time, and weapons with a low rate of fire, such as sniper rifles and heavy pistols. In contrast, shields are vulnerable to powers such as Overload and rapid-firing weapons like submachine guns and assault rifles. Barriers are typically used by boss-type enemies and are vulnerable to certain weapons and powers. When an enemy's shields, armour, or barriers have all been depleted, the player can use status-effect powers such as Pull, which temporarily levitates targets into the air, incapacitating them. Other powers may temporarily benefit the player; for instance, Adrenaline Rush puts the player in bullet time. Powers do not require any expendable resource; they only have a global cooldown. ### Dialogue and morality During conversations with characters, Mass Effect 2 employs a radial command menu called Dialogue Wheel, where the player's dialogue options depend on wheel direction. The left side of the wheel is typically reserved for options that will continue the conversation in-depth, while options on the right side tend to move the conversation towards completion. Responses at the top are generally more polite and selfless, while those at the bottom are more aggressive and hostile. The game also introduces a context-sensitive interrupt system, allowing players to interrupt the conversation with direct actions at certain times. Dialogue choices impact how others react to Shepard, the rewards for completing missions, possible discounts from merchants, romances, and the Commander's morality. Morality is measured by Paragon (charm) and Renegade (intimidate) points. These points affect the availability of new special Paragon and Renegade dialogue options with a significant impact on the game. For example, the game features some missions to gain the squad's loyalty. What the player does during one of these missions will determine whether they gain the loyalty of a squad member, which in turn will unlock a unique power and help in the final battle. Endings range from the entire team surviving to the entire team being killed, Shepard included, and everything in between. Upon completing the game, a New Game Plus option is unlocked, allowing players to replay the game using the same character with which they finished it. ## Synopsis ### Setting and characters Mass Effect 2 is set within the Milky Way galaxy during the 22nd century, where interstellar travel is possible through mass transit devices called Mass Relays, a technology believed to have been built by an extinct alien race known as the Protheans. A conglomerate body of governments known as the Citadel Council controls a large percentage of the galaxy and is responsible for maintaining law and order among races of the galactic community. Races that belong to the Citadel Council include humans, asari, salarians, and turians. Other alien races in the game include the reptilian krogan and drell, the environmental-suited quarians, and a hostile race of networked artificial intelligence called geth. During the events of the original Mass Effect, a geth army attempted to open a portal for the Reapers, a highly advanced machine race of synthetic-organic starships that are believed to eradicate all organic civilization every 50,000 years. The galactic community has since lived in fear of another possible invasion. Meanwhile, a human supremacist organization called Cerberus believes that humans deserve a greater role in the galactic community and supports the principle that any methods of advancing humanity's ascension are entirely justified, including illegal experimentation and terrorist activities. The game's protagonist is Commander Shepard (voiced by Mark Meer or Jennifer Hale), an elite human soldier who is the Commanding Officer of the SSV Normandy and Normandy SR-2 starships. Shepard's squad members include Cerberus operatives Jacob Taylor (Adam Lazarre-White) and Miranda Lawson (Yvonne Strahovski), recurring associates Garrus Vakarian (Brandon Keener) and Tali'Zorah (Liz Sroka), salarian scientist Mordin Solus (Michael Beattie), human criminal Jack (Courtenay Taylor), genetically engineered krogan super soldier Grunt (Steve Blum), drell assassin Thane Krios (Keythe Farley), asari Justicar Samara (Maggie Baird) or Samara's serial killer daughter Morinth (Natalia Cigliuti), and geth mobile platform Legion (D. C. Douglas). Other characters include the Normandy's pilot Jeff "Joker" Moreau (Seth Green), Cerberus leader the Illusive Man (Martin Sheen), and the Normandy SR-2's enhanced defence intelligence, also known as EDI (Tricia Helfer). ### Plot In 2183, shortly after the events of Mass Effect, the SSV Normandy, while patrolling for geth resistance, is attacked by an unknown vessel, forcing the crew to abandon ship. Shepard pushes Joker into the final escape pod before being blasted into space. After a suit breach, Shepard dies via asphyxiation as their body is pulled into the orbit of a nearby planet. The body is recovered by Cerberus, who begins the "Lazarus Project" with the sole purpose of bringing Shepard back to life. Two years later, Shepard is revived on an operating table and escapes a research station under attack by its security mechs alongside Jacob Taylor and Miranda Lawson. Shepard is brought to meet the Illusive Man, who reveals that entire populations of human colonies have disappeared all over the galaxy. Now working with Cerberus, Shepard is sent to investigate a recently attacked colony and encounters Tali and a contingent of quarians searching for their missing colleague. Clues uncovered by Shepard's team suggest that the Reapers are working by proxy through an insectoid alien race called the Collectors, who have abducted the colonists. The Illusive Man explains that the Collectors reside beyond the Omega-4 Relay, a place from which no ship has ever returned, and tasks Shepard with assembling a team to stop them. Shepard is also given command of a new starship, the Normandy SR-2, piloted again by Joker and equipped with an onboard AI named EDI. Shepard recruits Mordin Solus, Garrus Vakarian, Jack, and (optionally) Grunt, before the Illusive Man informs them that another human colony is under attack. With the help of Mordin's studies on Collector biology, Shepard defends the colony but cannot stop a large portion of the population from being captured. Shepard can recruit Tali'Zorah, Thane Krios, and Samara (who may be optionally replaced by Morinth) before being sent to explore a supposedly disabled Collector ship. There, Shepard learns that the Collectors were originally Protheans that were turned into slaves of the Reapers. With EDI's help, Shepard also finds out how to bypass the Omega-4 Relay before being ambushed by the Collectors. Although Shepard's squad escapes, their relationship with the Illusive Man is strained due to his prior knowledge of the trap. Shepard visits a derelict Reaper and acquires an IFF necessary to travel through the Omega-4 Relay safely. Shepard also acquires a disabled geth that, if activated, joins the squad as Legion. While Shepard and the squad leave in a shuttle, the Normandy SR-2 integrates the IFF into her systems. During their absence, the Collectors board the Normandy SR-2. Only Joker avoids capture and, with EDI's help, extracts the Normandy SR-2 to safety. When Shepard's squad returns, the team uses the Omega-4 Relay to reach the Collector base located in the Galactic Center. The team rescues any surviving crew members and fights their way to the central chamber. Squad members will either survive or perish depending on the upgrades made to the Normandy SR-2, their loyalty to Shepard, and the tasks they are assigned in battle. In the central chamber, Shepard discovers that the Collectors have been constructing a new Human-Reaper made from the genetic material of the abducted colonists. Shepard destroys the machine powering it and prepares to destroy the Collector base. However, the Illusive Man proposes sterilizing the base with a timed radiation pulse so that the Collectors' technology can be used against the Reapers. After deciding the base's fate, Shepard destroys the awakened Human-Reaper and escapes with the surviving squad members. If no squad members survive, Shepard fails to escape and dies. Back on the Normandy SR-2, after speaking with the Illusive Man one last time, Shepard meets the survivors in the cargo bay. There, Joker gives them schematics of a Reaper. The final scene shows the Reapers awakening in dark space and descending upon the galaxy. ## Development ### Game design Mass Effect 2 was developed by BioWare and directed by Casey Hudson, who previously led the production of the first Mass Effect game. Before actual production began, BioWare created a list of goals to work towards based on feedback from fans, reviewers, and internal staff members. The company's main goal was to "create an experience that was less about being a game and more about being an experience." In contrast to the exclusive focus on the main story of the original Mass Effect, Hudson explained that BioWare was interested in a plot where optional stories had as much intensity as the main story and decided that the idea of recruiting people and making them loyal to the player so that they could survive a suicide mission allowed to explore these possibilities. He noted, "the funny thing is that people will say 'other than gathering your crew and building your team and getting ready for this mission, there's not much story there.' But that is the story." During the first stages of development, the designers prioritized streamlining and polishing the shooting aspects; RPG elements were not added until this process was complete. According to lead designer Christina Norman, "we wanted more satisfying combat and a big part of that is making weapons more accurate and powerful at level one—basically saying 'let's take the RPG out of the shooter.'" Since BioWare had no experience with shooter games, the team spent roughly three months tuning how combat would work using the original Mass Effect as a basis. The camera was improved to offer a more precise aiming that included body-specific targeting like headshots. Norman explained that they wanted the weapons to have their own identity, noting that the game's final build has 19 weapons with 108 tuning variables. The inclusion of limited ammunition was initially not part of the game design and was implemented for some early playtesting. However, the developers ultimately felt it improved the tension and pacing of combat. Real-time gameplay with an emphasis on weapons and cover was a preference because the team felt that the constant pausing to select powers interrupts the intensity of the combat. As a result, more options were added to assign different abilities to the user interface for real-time use. Developers also decided to introduce regenerating health because it prevented players from playing erratically and relying on health kits. Norman remarked that it was important not to oversimplify the RPG elements but to make them easier to use. She explained that the original Mass Effect offered "too many choices that weren't particularly representative of how they would impact the game. In Mass Effect 2, the levelling options were pared down and made more descriptive." The developers wanted to create very different play styles for the character classes, "even if it meant cutting some of the possible choices." The powers were balanced with a unified refresh cooldown since the earlier system, where powers could be used sequentially, was considered "ridiculous and endgame easy." Keeping track of the enemies' strengths and weaknesses was made more consistent with different types of health bars so that players did not have to estimate the challenges they faced when fighting new enemies. The game's HUD was revised eight times during development. As the inventory management of the original Mass Effect received criticism, designing a new inventory system for Mass Effect 2 was one of the main concerns during development. Ideally, the inventory needed to handle many characters with simplicity. Norman spent time examining various inventory systems from other RPG games, but none could be applied to support the game's large number of characters. Ultimately, the team opted to replace it with different systems that provide the same functionality without any management. This concept allowed a character to use a weapon without taking it away from someone else. The planetary exploration of the original Mass Effect was revamped entirely. Instead of having vast barren landscapes, the designers opted to build distinct and interesting places. The goal was to encourage players to keep exploring the galaxy by changing their expectations about what they could find. Initially, the developers experimented with the idea of having a vehicle that could be used to navigate the planetary terrain more flexibly than in the original title. However, the vehicle was ultimately removed from the game's final build. The context-sensitive interrupt system, which was initially meant to be a feature in the original Mass Effect, was introduced in Mass Effect 2 to help blend the dialogue better with the rest of the action. The story's pacing was also improved because developers wanted to get players into the action faster. ### Production Since the Mass Effect series was envisioned as a trilogy from its inception, work on Mass Effect 2 started shortly before the original Mass Effect was released. The game was initially developed exclusively for the Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 platforms with the same level of dedication. As a result, each version features different user interfaces and controls. Like its predecessor, Mass Effect 2 was built using Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 in conjunction with a framework that BioWare specifically developed for the Mass Effect games. As most of these Mass Effect technologies were already developed in the first game, the development team focused on adding new content and perfecting new features rather than creating them from scratch. Technical improvements included better memory management, larger textures, a higher frame rate, and better lighting scenarios. According to Hudson, "I actually can't think of an aspect of the game that we haven't overhauled and made 100% better." Mass Effect 2 contains voices from 90 voice actors who play 546 characters and speak over 25,000 lines of dialogue. Voice recording for the game took twice as long as the original Mass Effect. The Unreal Engine 3's Matinee tool, allowing developers to animate characters during cinematics, was integrated into BioWare's digital acting and conversation technology. As Hudson explained, "Our writers write into a dialogue editor and that becomes fused with the way that you end up seeing many different pieces of Matinee play out in combination when you have a conversation with characters." Another Unreal Engine 3 technology, Kismet, was used for scripting how levels or enemies would respond to a particular action. After using it on the first Mass Effect game, the game's programmers were already familiar with Unreal Engine 3, so they did not need to communicate with Epic Games for support constantly. Although Mass Effect 2 was primarily developed at BioWare's Edmonton studio, a new team of 30 people was set to work at EA Montreal in March 2009 to supplement the teams already working on the game. The new team was composed of many people who worked on the original game, but most were new hires. Mass Effect 2 was developed over roughly two years and more than 150 people worked on the game. Hudson mentioned two significant challenges that interfered with the development: financial problems due to the Great Recession limited the game's budget, and the team had to get through it without impacting their ambitious goals. Additionally, due to the 2009 flu pandemic, a significant part of the team was ill during the last months of development, resulting in losing a man-year of time. Despite these factors, Hudson described the development of Mass Effect 2 as successful "on time, on budget, and exceeding quality goals." Lead writer Mac Walters considered Mass Effect 2 a very quick project, stating that the team did not have much time to second guess themselves. Initially, BioWare denied that a PlayStation 3 version was in the works. Despite this, it was reported that the Microsoft Windows version of the game featured lines of code referencing the PlayStation 3. BioWare responded that the Unreal Engine 3 is cross-platform, which is why it includes PlayStation 3 code. Eventually, a PlayStation 3 version of Mass Effect 2 was released a year later than the Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 versions. The PlayStation 3 version uses a modified version of the Unreal Engine 3 called the Mass Effect 3 engine, the same engine BioWare used for the then-upcoming Mass Effect 3. In this newer version, character models were slightly improved, and controls were updated to support the PlayStation 3 controller. An option which allowed to switch back to the Xbox 360 controls layout was also added. ### Music The music of Mass Effect 2 was primarily composed by Jack Wall. His previous work with BioWare was as the main composer for Jade Empire and the original Mass Effect. The score also features some pieces by Sam Hulick, David Kates, and Jimmy Hinson (better known as Big Giant Circles), with additional editing and in-game implementation by Brian DiDomenico. Unlike the original Mass Effect, the composers aimed for a darker and more mature sound to match the game's mood. The music incorporates orchestral and classic sci-fi arrangements, inspired by the soundtrack of the 1982 film Blade Runner and music by German electronic group Tangerine Dream. The harmonic structure of Wendy Carlos's Tron soundtrack also represented significant influences. To complement each character, the composers gave them themes to convey their personalities and backgrounds. According to Kates, "it was one of our mandates to create a dynamic score that expressed a wide range of emotions." Around 180 minutes of music were composed for Mass Effect 2, which totalled more than 700 assets. The song "Callista" by video game music composer Saki Kaskas, who wrote the music for five Need for Speed games, was used as the game's Afterlife Club theme. Music from the game has been released in several albums. BioWare released the main soundtrack album, Mass Effect 2: Original Videogame Score, on January 19, 2010. The soundtrack spans two discs and 27 tracks, covering a duration of 1:55:43. Mass Effect 2's score was nominated for Best Original Music at the 7th British Academy Games Awards and Best Soundtrack Album at the 9th Annual Game Audio Network Guild Awards. In 2012, Legacy, an album composed mostly of tracks written for Mass Effect 2 but not used in the game, was released by Big Giant Circles. ## Marketing and release Mass Effect 2 was formally unveiled at the Game Developers Conference on March 17, 2009, and a teaser trailer declared Shepard "killed in action". The announcement confirmed that the game would be released for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360. In June 2009, the game was presented at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, where it was confirmed that Shepard would be alive and playable in Mass Effect 2, but the character could die at the end of the game. Players could receive new in-game armours and weapons if the game were pre-ordered at certain retailers. Players could also redeem codes on specially marked Dr Pepper products for one of three pieces of headgear and registered copies of Dragon Age: Origins for a new armour set. In the months leading up to the game's release, BioWare released a final cinematic trailer and launched six class trailers narrated by Norman. Electronic Arts sold-in more than two million copies of the game to worldwide retailers for its first week of release. Mass Effect 2 was initially released for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 on January 26, 2010, in North America and on January 29, 2010, in Europe. Alongside the standard edition, digital deluxe and collector's editions were available. The collector's edition featured a different packaging, an artbook, bonus in-game content, a behind-the-scenes DVD, and one issue from the Mass Effect: Redemption comic series. Although Mass Effect 2 was released at the end of the month, it became the second best-selling game of January 2010 with 572,100 units sold, behind Nintendo's New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Shortly after Mass Effect 2 was released, the game's font size and colouring were criticized for being too difficult to read on some standard-definition televisions. Because BioWare considered it a design choice, the company could not resolve it but stated that they would consider it for future games. In February 2010, BioWare released a patch that addressed minor issues such as crashes and long load times on single-core computers. A second patch, which reduced the mining time required to acquire upgrades and fixed other minor issues, was released in June 2010. At Gamescom 2010, BioWare announced that a PlayStation 3 version of the game was in development. Microsoft responded to the announcement that, despite losing the game's exclusivity, the Xbox 360 was still the most appropriate console to play the game due to the game's compatibility with the original Mass Effect, which was only available for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 at the time. The PlayStation 3 version was released on January 18, 2011, in North America and on January 21, 2011, in Europe. After some PlayStation 3 players reported that their save files can become corrupted if the game crashes unexpectedly, BioWare released a patch designed to combat save bugs and crashes experienced. The PlayStation Network version accounted for more than 10% of the game's overall sales on PlayStation 3. As of April 2011, it was reported that the original Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 combined had sold more than seven million units worldwide. New game purchases are provided with a one-time use card granting an access code that unlocks the game's Cerberus Network, an online downloadable content and news service that enables bonus content for the game. However, users who bought a used copy would have to pay for the Cerberus Network separately if they wanted access to the new content. This policy allows publishers to combat the used-game market; companies like GameStop have allowed customers to sell used games back to the retailer so that the company can resell them at a slight discount to other customers, but the publisher does not make a profit. BioWare online development director Fernando Melo revealed that 11% of all Mass Effect 2's downloadable content revenue came from the Cerberus Network. The policy attracted criticism from some of the fan community, who have criticized downloadable content as being overpriced and an incentive for developers to leave items out of the initial release. In 2012, a compilation featuring the three main games of the series, Mass Effect Trilogy, was released for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. In 2016, Mass Effect 2 was added to the list of backward-compatible Xbox 360 games on Xbox One. In 2021, Mass Effect 2 was remastered as part of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. ### Downloadable content Mass Effect 2 supports additional in-game content in the form of downloadable content packs released from January 2010 to May 2011. These packs range from character outfits to entirely new plot-related missions. Major releases include Lair of the Shadow Broker and Arrival, which are vital to the series' plot. In Lair of the Shadow Broker, Shepard helps former squad member Liara T'Soni to find an information dealer known as the Shadow Broker. In Arrival, Shepard investigates evidence of a Reaper invasion, leading to events that bridge to Mass Effect 3. Other plot-related downloadable content packs include the loyalty missions Zaeed – The Price of Revenge and Kasumi – Stolen Memory, and Overlord, which adds five new missions to the game. Unlike the Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows versions, the PlayStation 3 version includes the Kasumi – Stolen Memory, Overlord, and Lair of the Shadow Broker packs. Because the first Mass Effect game was originally not released on PlayStation 3, BioWare released Genesis, a downloadable content pack that allows the player to impact the story of the game with major plot decisions of the first game. These decisions are made through a digital interactive comic appearing at the game's beginning. Genesis was released on May 17, 2011, for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 users. Some of the game's downloadable content packs were well-received by critics and nominated for Best DLC (downloadable content) at the Spike Video Game Awards. ## Reception ### Critical response Upon release, Mass Effect 2 received critical acclaim from video game publications. Substantial praise was given to the game's diverse characters, interactive storytelling, voice acting and art design. IGN reviewer Erik Brudvig called Mass Effect 2 a personal game with much emotion. He praised the option of importing a character, stating that the overall experience changes as different saved games from the previous game are used. Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer positively highlighted the weight of social interaction on the outcome of events and that players feel actual pressure for their decisions. Further praise was given to the game's characters. Edge credited them for their complex personalities and great characterization, while GameRevolution pointed out that the loyalty missions "reach deep enough into their characters to make you empathize with all of them". The game's visuals and atmosphere received similar praise. GameSpot reviewer Kevin VanOrd remarked that Mass Effect 2 is more detailed and darker than its predecessor. He wrote that "deep reds and glowing indigos saturate certain scenes, making them richer and more sinister; eerie fog limits your vision in one side mission, while rain pours down upon you in another. Subtle, moody lighting gives certain interactions great impact." Reviewer Adriaan den Ouden of RPGamer credited the conversations and cutscenes for featuring better cinematography than the first game, stating that "it's hard to imagine them becoming much better in Mass Effect 3". Critics also gave high marks to the game's extensive cast of voices; in particular, Martin Sheen's performance of the Illusive Man, which was singled out for "steal[ing] the show". Andrew Reiner, writing for Game Informer, opined that the music "flows beautifully" in both the story and action sequences. The game's presentation and direction were considered "miles ahead of the competition". Numerous publications declared that the gameplay was an improvement over the original. John Davison of GamePro wrote, "BioWare has done a spectacular job moving the role playing genre forward, and blending disparate gameplay styles into genuinely exciting sci-fi epic." VanOrd praised Mass Effect 2 for possessing an identity, which was something that its predecessor lacked. He noted that the shooting is "more immediate and satisfying, which keeps the pace moving and intensifies the violence of each encounter". Similarly, GameSpy's Gerald Villoria observed that the original Mass Effect "walked the line between RPG and shooter [...] Mass Effect 2 has become a much more focused shooter experience". Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com credited the combat for being more balanced, stating that the game encourages players to use different weapon classes and squad abilities when the situation requires it. Some publications, however, expressed concerns about the game's simplified RPG elements, calling it "stripped-down" and with a "dumbed-down feeling". The game's slow planet scanning was also criticized. GameRevolution felt it was a "chore, mandatory if you want upgrades and boring because there is no tension or challenge", but ultimately concluded that the game as a whole "does more than enough to live up to its predecessor". The reception for the PlayStation 3 version was similar. Colin Moriarty of IGN described it as "the best, most complete version of the game available" due to the upgraded game engine and the extra downloadable content packs. In contrast, VanOrd criticized the inclusion of the character Kasumi Goto from the Kasumi – Stolen Memory pack, stating that "she never fits in with her more fully developed cohorts." He also remarked that the PlayStation 3 version suffers from technical issues such as frame rate inconsistencies, graphical glitches, and other minor bugs, mostly present in the downloadable content sections of the game. Game Informer reviewer Joe Juba reacted negatively to the lack of save importation from the original Mass Effect, which was initially not released on PlayStation 3, and pointed out that the decisions made in the Genesis comic "have practically no context". Despite the criticism, he stated that the game is equally as good on PlayStation 3 as on Xbox 360. ### Accolades Mass Effect 2 received numerous Game of the Year awards for its writing, characters, and soundtrack. At the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards, the game won the Best Xbox 360 Game and Best RPG awards. BioWare was also recognized for its work on the game and was awarded Studio of the Year. At the 14th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, Mass Effect 2 won awards for Game of the Year, Role-Playing/Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year, and Outstanding Achievement in Story. Other notable awards that the game received include Best Game at the 7th British Academy Games Awards, Best Writing at the 2011 Game Developers Choice Awards, and two Golden Joystick Awards: Best RPG of the Year and Ultimate Game of the Year. At the 2011 Canadian Videogame Awards, Mass Effect 2 was awarded Game of the Year, Best Console Game, Best Game Design, and Best Writing. ## Legacy Mass Effect 2 continued to receive attention years after its release. GamesRadar editor Hollander Cooper explained that the game improved the technical issues of its predecessor significantly while at the same time "expanding the already-impressive universe without sacrificing what made the series special." He went so far as to call the game The Empire Strikes Back of video games, stating that "few sequels have trumped the original as handily as Mass Effect 2." The game's focus on characters and their deeper stresses and internal conflicts was highly praised. The way the game lets non-player characters carry the weight of the narrative progression has also attracted scholarly interest. Eurogamer editor Rick Lane described Mass Effect 2 as a darker, warmer, and overall more human game than its predecessor, noting that it is the player's responsibility to make sure these characters are prepared for the final mission, or they will die. He explained that Mass Effect 2 is a long quest that "works towards an epic climax", and when it arrives there, "it doesn't disappoint." A decade after the game was released, Eurogamer considered the game's finale "some of BioWare's best ever work" due to its choice complexity. Mass Effect 2 has been cited as one of the greatest video games of all time by multiple publications, including Slant Magazine in 2014, IGN in 2015, Polygon in 2017, Game Informer in 2018, and GQ in 2023. In 2011, the game was selected as one of 80 titles from the past 40 years to be placed in the Art of Video Games exhibit in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. According to the museum, the exhibit explored "the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies." ## Sequel The game's sequel, Mass Effect 3, was released in 2012. The sequel begins on Earth with Commander Shepard having been detained following the events in the Arrival downloadable content pack. The story of the game is influenced by decisions the player made in the original Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. However, if Shepard dies at the end of Mass Effect 2, the character cannot be imported into Mass Effect 3. BioWare stated that Mass Effect 3 ends Shepard's story arc and that future games in the series would feature a different context. Unlike its predecessors, Mass Effect 3 features a multiplayer cooperative mode in addition to the single-player campaign. Although the game received critical acclaim from video game publications, its ending was poorly received by fans and drew significant controversy.
47,203	Orpheus in the Underworld	1,171,374,500	Opéra bouffon by Jacques Offenbach	[ "1858 operas", "French-language operas", "Operas", "Operas about Orpheus", "Operas based on works by Virgil", "Operas by Jacques Offenbach", "Opéras bouffons", "Opéras féeries", "Works based on Georgics" ]	Orpheus in the Underworld and Orpheus in Hell are English names for Orphée aux enfers (), a comic opera with music by Jacques Offenbach and words by Hector Crémieux and Ludovic Halévy. It was first performed as a two-act "opéra bouffon" at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, Paris, on 21 October 1858, and was extensively revised and expanded in a four-act "opéra féerie" version, presented at the Théâtre de la Gaîté, Paris, on 7 February 1874. The opera is a lampoon of the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. In this version Orpheus is not the son of Apollo but a rustic violin teacher. He is glad to be rid of his wife, Eurydice, when she is abducted by the god of the underworld, Pluto. Orpheus has to be bullied by Public Opinion into trying to rescue Eurydice. The reprehensible conduct of the gods of Olympus in the opera was widely seen as a veiled satire of the court and government of Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. Some critics expressed outrage at the librettists' disrespect for classic mythology and the composer's parody of Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice; others praised the piece highly. Orphée aux enfers was Offenbach's first full-length opera. The original 1858 production became a box-office success, and ran well into the following year, rescuing Offenbach and his Bouffes company from financial difficulty. The 1874 revival broke records at the Gaîté's box-office. The work was frequently staged in France and internationally during the composer's lifetime and throughout the 20th century. It is one of his most often performed operas, and continues to be revived in the 21st century. In the last decade of the 19th century the Paris cabarets the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère adopted the music of the "Galop infernal" from the culminating scene of the opera to accompany the can-can, and ever since then the tune has been popularly associated with the dance. ## Background and first productions Between 1855 and 1858 Offenbach presented more than two dozen one-act operettas, first at the Bouffes-Parisiens, Salle Lacaze, and then at the Bouffes-Parisiens, Salle Choiseul. The theatrical licensing laws then permitted him only four singers in any piece, and with such small casts, full-length works were out of the question. In 1858 the licensing restrictions were relaxed, and Offenbach was free to go ahead with a two-act work that had been in his mind for some time. Two years earlier he had told his friend the writer Hector Crémieux that when he was musical director of the Comédie-Française in the early 1850s he swore revenge for the boredom he suffered from the posturings of mythical heroes and gods of Olympus in the plays presented there. Cremieux and Ludovic Halévy sketched out a libretto for him lampooning such characters. By 1858, when Offenbach was finally allowed a large enough cast to do the theme justice, Halévy was preoccupied with his work as a senior civil servant, and the final libretto was credited to Crémieux alone. Most of the roles were written with popular members of the Bouffes company in mind, including Désiré, Léonce, Lise Tautin, and Henri Tayau as an Orphée who could actually play Orpheus's violin. The first performance took place at the Salle Choiseul on 21 October 1858. At first the piece did reasonably well at the box-office but was not the tremendous success Offenbach had hoped for. He insisted on lavish stagings for his operas: expenses were apt to outrun receipts, and he was in need of a substantial money-spinner. Business received an inadvertent boost from the critic Jules Janin of the Journal des débats. He had praised earlier productions at the Bouffes-Parisiens but was roused to vehement indignation at what he maintained was a blasphemous, lascivious outrage – "a profanation of holy and glorious antiquity". His attack, and the irreverent public ripostes by Crémieux and Offenbach, made headlines and provoked huge interest in the piece among the Parisian public, who flocked to see it. In his 1980 study of Offenbach, Alexander Faris writes, "Orphée became not only a triumph, but a cult." It ran for 228 performances, at a time when a run of 100 nights was considered a success. Albert Lasalle, in his history of the Bouffes-Parisiens (1860), wrote that the piece closed in June 1859 – although it was still performing strongly at the box-office – "because the actors, who could not tire the public, were themselves exhausted". In 1874 Offenbach substantially expanded the piece, doubling the length of the score and turning the intimate opéra bouffon of 1858 into a four-act opéra féerie extravaganza, with substantial ballet sequences. This version opened at the Théâtre de la Gaîté on 7 February 1874, ran for 290 performances, and broke box-office records for that theatre. During the first run of the revised version Offenbach expanded it even further, adding ballets illustrating the kingdom of Neptune in Act 3 and bringing the total number of scenes in the four acts to twenty-two. ## Roles ## Synopsis ### Original two-act version #### Act 1, Scene 1: The countryside near Thebes, Ancient Greece A spoken introduction with orchestral accompaniment (Introduction and Melodrame) opens the work. Public Opinion explains who she is – the guardian of morality ("Qui suis-je? du Théâtre Antique"). She says that unlike the chorus in Ancient Greek plays she does not merely comment on the action, but intervenes in it, to make sure the story maintains a high moral tone. Her efforts are hampered by the facts of the matter: Orphée is not the son of Apollo, as in classical myth, but a rustic teacher of music, whose dislike of his wife, Eurydice, is heartily reciprocated. She is in love with the shepherd, Aristée (Aristaeus), who lives next door ("La femme dont le coeur rêve"), and Orphée is in love with Chloë, a shepherdess. When Orphée mistakes Eurydice for her, everything comes out, and Eurydice insists they abandon the marriage. Orphée, fearing Public Opinion's reaction, torments his wife into keeping the scandal quiet using violin music, which she hates ("Ah, c'est ainsi"). Aristée enters. Though seemingly a shepherd he is in reality Pluton (Pluto), God of the Underworld. He keeps up his disguise by singing a pastoral song about sheep ("Moi, je suis Aristée"). Eurydice has discovered what she thinks is a plot by Orphée to kill Aristée – letting snakes loose in the fields – but is in fact a conspiracy between Orphée and Pluton to kill her, so that Pluton may have her and Orphée be rid of her. Pluton tricks her into walking into the trap by showing immunity to it, and she is bitten. As she dies, Pluton transforms into his true form (Transformation Scene). Eurydice finds that death is not so bad when the God of Death is in love with one ("La mort m'apparaît souriante"). They descend into the Underworld as soon as Eurydice has left a note telling her husband she has been unavoidably detained. All seems to be going well for Orphée until Public Opinion catches up with him, and threatens to ruin his violin teaching career unless he goes to rescue his wife. Orphée reluctantly agrees. #### Act 1, Scene 2: Olympus The scene changes to Olympus, where the Gods are sleeping ("Dormons, dormons"). Cupidon and Vénus enter separately from amatory nocturnal escapades and join their sleeping colleagues, but everyone is soon woken by the sound of the horn of Diane, supposedly chaste huntress and goddess. She laments the sudden absence of Actaeon, her current love ("Quand Diane descend dans la plaine"); to her indignation, Jupiter tells her he has turned Actaeon into a stag to protect her reputation. Mercury arrives and reports that he has visited the Underworld, to which Pluton has just returned with a beautiful woman. Pluton enters, and is taken to task by Jupiter for his scandalous private life. To Pluton's relief the other Gods choose this moment to revolt against Jupiter's reign, their boring diet of ambrosia and nectar, and the sheer tedium of Olympus ("Aux armes, dieux et demi-dieux!"). Jupiter's demands to know what is going on lead them to point out his hypocrisy in detail, poking fun at all his mythological affairs ("Pour séduire Alcmène la fière"). Orphée's arrival, with Public Opinion at his side, has the gods on their best behaviour ("Il approche! Il s'avance"). Orphée obeys Public Opinion and pretends to be pining for Eurydice: he illustrates his supposed pain with a snatch of "Che farò senza Euridice" from Gluck's Orfeo. Pluton is worried he will be forced to give Eurydice back; Jupiter announces that he is going to the Underworld to sort everything out. The other gods beg to come with him, he consents, and mass celebrations break out at this holiday ("Gloire! gloire à Jupiter... Partons, partons"). #### Act 2, Scene 1: Pluton's boudoir in the Underworld Eurydice is being kept locked up by Pluton, and is finding life very tedious. Her gaoler is a dull-witted tippler by the name of John Styx. Before he died, he was King of Boeotia (a region of Greece that Aristophanes made synonymous with country bumpkins), and he sings Eurydice a doleful lament for his lost kingship ("Quand j'étais roi de Béotie"). Jupiter discovers where Pluton has hidden Eurydice, and slips through the keyhole by turning into a beautiful, golden fly. He meets Eurydice on the other side, and sings a love duet with her where his part consists entirely of buzzing ("Duo de la mouche"). Afterwards, he reveals himself to her, and promises to help her, largely because he wants her for himself. Pluton is left furiously berating John Styx. #### Act 2, Scene 2: The banks of the Styx The scene shifts to a huge party the gods are having, where ambrosia, nectar, and propriety are nowhere to be seen ("Vive le vin! Vive Pluton!"). Eurydice is present, disguised as a bacchante ("J'ai vu le dieu Bacchus"), but Jupiter's plan to sneak her out is interrupted by calls for a dance. Jupiter insists on a minuet, which everybody else finds boring ("La la la. Le menuet n'est vraiment si charmant"). Things liven up as the most famous number in the opera, the "Galop infernal", begins, and all present throw themselves into it with wild abandon ("Ce bal est original"). Ominous violin music heralds the approach of Orphée (Entrance of Orphée and Public Opinion), but Jupiter has a plan, and promises to keep Eurydice away from her husband. As with the standard myth, Orphée must not look back, or he will lose Eurydice forever ("Ne regarde pas en arrière!"). Public Opinion keeps a close eye on him, to keep him from cheating, but Jupiter throws a lightning bolt, making him jump and look back, and Eurydice vanishes. Amid the ensuing turmoil, Jupiter proclaims that she will henceforth belong to the god Bacchus and become one of his priestesses. Public Opinion is not pleased, but Pluton has had enough of Eurydice, Orphée is free of her, and all ends happily. ### Revised 1874 version The plot is essentially that of the 1858 version. Instead of two acts with two scenes apiece, the later version is in four acts, which follow the plot of the four scenes of the original. The revised version differs from the first in having several interpolated ballet sequences, and some extra characters and musical numbers. The additions do not affect the main narrative but add considerably to the length of the score. In Act I there is an opening chorus for assembled shepherds and shepherdesses, and Orpheus has a group of youthful violin students, who bid him farewell at the end of the act. In Act 2 Mercure is given a solo entrance number ("Eh hop!"). In Act 3, Eurydice has a new solo, the "Couplets des regrets" ("Ah! quelle triste destinée!"), Cupidon has a new number, the "Couplets des baisers" ("Allons, mes fins limiers"), the three judges of Hades and a little band of policemen are added to the cast to be involved in Jupiter's search for the concealed Eurydice, and at the end of the act the furious Pluton is seized and carried off by a swarm of flies. ## Music The score of the opera, which formed the pattern for the many full-length Offenbach operas that followed, is described by Faris as having an "abundance of couplets" (songs with repeated verses for one or more singers), "a variety of other solos and duets, several big choruses, and two extended finales". Offenbach wrote in a variety of styles – from Rococo pastoral vein, via pastiche of Italian opera, to the uproarious galop – displaying, in Faris's analysis, many of his personal hallmarks, such as melodies that "leap backwards and forwards in a remarkably acrobatic manner while still sounding not only smoothly lyrical, but spontaneous as well". In such up-tempo numbers as the "Galop infernal", Offenbach makes a virtue of simplicity, often keeping to the same key through most of the number, with largely unvarying instrumentation throughout. Elsewhere in the score Offenbach gives the orchestra greater prominence. In the "duo de la mouche" Jupiter's part, consisting of buzzing like a fly, is accompanied by the first and second violins playing sul ponticello, to produce a similarly buzzing sound. In Le Figaro, Gustave Lafargue remarked that Offenbach's use of a piccolo trill punctuated by a tap on a cymbal in the finale of the first scene was a modern recreation of an effect invented by Gluck in his score of Iphigénie en Aulide. Wilfrid Mellers also remarks on Offenbach's use of the piccolo to enhance Eurydice's couplets with "girlish giggles" on the instrument. Gervase Hughes comments on the elaborate scoring of the "ballet des mouches" [Act 3, 1874 version], and calls it "a tour de force" that could have inspired Tchaikovsky. Faris comments that in Orphée aux enfers Offenbach shows that he was a master of establishing mood by the use of rhythmic figures. Faris instances three numbers from the second act (1858 version), which all are in the key of A major and use identical notes in almost the same order, "but it would be hard to imagine a more extreme difference in feeling than that between the song of the King of the Boeotians and the Galop". In a 2014 study Heather Hadlock comments that for the former, Offenbach composed "a languid yet restless melody" over a static musette-style drone-bass accompaniment of alternating dominant and tonic harmonies, simultaneously evoking and mocking nostalgia for a lost place and time and "creating a perpetually unresolved tension between pathos and irony". Mellers finds that Styx's aria has "a pathos that touches the heart" – perhaps, he suggests, the only instance of true feeling in the opera. In 1999 Thomas Schipperges wrote in the International Journal of Musicology that many scholars hold that Offenbach's music defies all musicological methods. He did not agree, and analysed the "Galop infernal", finding it to be sophisticated in many details: "For all its straightforwardness, it reveals a calculated design. The overall 'economy' of the piece serves a deliberate musical dramaturgy." Hadlock observes that although the best-known music in the opera is "driven by the propulsive energies of Rossinian comedy" and the up-tempo galop, such lively numbers go side by side with statelier music in an 18th-century vein: "The score's sophistication results from Offenbach's intertwining of contemporary urban musical language with a restrained and wistful tone that is undermined and ironized without ever being entirely undone". Orphée aux enfers was the first of Offenbach's major works to have a chorus. In a 2017 study Melissa Cummins comments that although the composer used the chorus extensively as Pluton's minions, bored residents of Olympus, and bacchantes in Hades, they are merely there to fill out the vocal parts in the large ensemble numbers, and "are treated as a nameless, faceless crowd who just happen to be around." In the Olympus scene the chorus has an unusual bocca chiusa section, marked "Bouche fermée", an effect later used by Bizet in Djamileh and Puccini in the "Humming Chorus" in Madama Butterfly. ### Editions The orchestra at the Bouffes-Parisiens was small – probably about thirty players. The 1858 version of Orphée aux enfers is scored for two flutes (the second doubling piccolo), one oboe, two clarinets, one bassoon, two horns, two cornets, one trombone, timpani, percussion (bass drum/cymbals, triangle), and strings. The Offenbach scholar Jean-Christophe Keck speculates that the string sections consisted of at most six first violins, four second violins, three violas, four cellos, and one double bass. The 1874 score calls for considerably greater orchestral forces: Offenbach added additional parts for woodwind, brass and percussion sections. For the premiere of the revised version he engaged an orchestra of sixty players, as well as a military band of a further forty players for the procession of the gods from Olympus at the end of the second act. The music of the 1874 revision was well received by contemporary reviewers, but some later critics have felt the longer score, with its extended ballet sections, has occasional dull patches. Nonetheless, some of the added numbers, particularly Cupidon's "Couplets des baisers", Mercure's rondo "Eh hop", and the "Policeman's Chorus" have gained favour, and some or all are often added to performances otherwise using the 1858 text. For more than a century after the composer's death one cause of critical reservations about this and his other works was the persistence of what the musicologist Nigel Simeone has called "botched, butchered and bowdlerised" versions. Since the beginning of the 21st century a project has been under way to release scholarly and reliable scores of Offenbach's operas, under the editorship of Keck. The first to be published, in 2002, was the 1858 version of Orphée aux enfers. The Offenbach Edition Keck has subsequently published the 1874 score, and another drawing on both the 1858 and 1874 versions. ### Overture and galop The best-known and much-recorded Orphée aux enfers overture is not by Offenbach, and is not part of either the 1858 or the 1874 scores. It was arranged by the Austrian musician Carl Binder (1816–1860) for the first production of the opera in Vienna, in 1860. Offenbach's 1858 score has a short orchestral introduction of 104 bars; it begins with a quiet melody for woodwind, followed by the theme of Jupiter's Act 2 minuet, in A major and segues via a mock-pompous fugue in F major into Public Opinion's opening monologue. The overture to the 1874 revision is a 393-bar piece, in which Jupiter's minuet and John Styx's song recur, interspersed with many themes from the score including "J'ai vu le Dieu Bacchus", the couplets "Je suis Vénus", the Rondeau des métamorphoses, the "Partons, partons" section of the Act 2 finale, and the Act 4 galop. Fifteen years or so after Offenbach's death the galop from Act 2 (or Act 4 in the 1874 version) became one of the world's most famous pieces of music, when the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère adopted it as the regular music for their can-can. Keck has commented that the original "infernal galop" was a considerably more spontaneous and riotous affair than the fin de siècle can-can (Keck likens the original to a modern rave) but the tune is now inseparable in the public mind from high-kicking female can-can dancers. ### Numbers ## Reception ### 19th century From the outset Orphée aux enfers divided critical opinion. Janin's furious condemnation did the work much more good than harm, and was in contrast with the laudatory review of the premiere by Jules Noriac in the Figaro-Programme, which called the work, "unprecedented, splendid, outrageous, gracious, delightful, witty, amusing, successful, perfect, tuneful". Bertrand Jouvin, in Le Figaro, criticised some of the cast but praised the staging – "a fantasy show, which has all the variety, all the surprises of fairy-opera". The Revue et gazette musicale de Paris thought that though it would be wrong to expect too much in a piece of this genre, Orphée aux enfers was one of Offenbach's most outstanding works, with charming couplets for Eurydice, Aristée-Pluton and the King of Boeotia. Le Ménestrel called the cast "thoroughbreds" who did full justice to "all the charming jokes, all the delicious originalities, all the farcical oddities thrown in profusion into Offenbach's music". Writing of the 1874 revised version, the authors of Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique said, "Orphée aux enfers is above all a good show. The music of Offenbach has retained its youth and spirit. The amusing operetta of yore has become a splendid extravaganza", against which Félix Clément and Pierre Larousse wrote in their Dictionnaire des Opéras (1881) that the piece is "a coarse and grotesque parody" full of "vulgar and indecent scenes" that "give off an unhealthy smell". The opera was widely seen as containing thinly disguised satire of the régime of Napoleon III, but the early press criticisms of the work focused on its mockery of revered classical authors such as Ovid and the equally sacrosanct music of Gluck's Orfeo. Faris comments that the satire perpetrated by Offenbach and his librettists was cheeky rather than hard-hitting, and Richard Taruskin in his study of 19th-century music observes, "The calculated licentiousness and feigned sacrilege, which successfully baited the stuffier critics, were recognized by all for what they were – a social palliative, the very opposite of social criticism [...] The spectacle of the Olympian gods doing the cancan threatened nobody's dignity." The Emperor greatly enjoyed Orphée aux enfers when he saw it at a command performance in 1860; he told Offenbach he would "never forget that dazzling evening". ### 20th and 21st centuries After Offenbach's death his reputation in France suffered a temporary eclipse. In Faris's words, his comic operas were "dismissed as irrelevant and meretricious souvenirs of a discredited Empire". Obituarists in other countries similarly took it for granted that the comic operas, including Orphée, were ephemeral and would be forgotten. By the time of the composer's centenary, in 1919, it had been clear for some years that such predictions had been wrong. Orphée was frequently revived, as were several more of his operas, and criticisms on moral or musical grounds had largely ceased. Gabriel Groviez wrote in The Musical Quarterly: > The libretto of Orphée overflows with spirit and humour and the score is full of sparkling wit and melodious charm. It is impossible to analyse adequately a piece wherein the sublimest idiocy and the most astonishing fancy clash at every turn. [...] Offenbach never produced a more complete work. Among modern critics, Traubner describes Orphée as "the first great full-length classical French operetta [...] classical (in both senses of the term)", although he regards the 1874 revision as "overblown". Peter Gammond writes that the public appreciated the frivolity of the work while recognising that it is rooted in the best traditions of opéra comique. Among 21st-century writers Bernard Holland has commented that the music is "beautifully made, relentlessly cheerful, reluctantly serious", but does not show as the later Tales of Hoffmann does "what a profoundly gifted composer Offenbach really was"; Andrew Lamb has commented that although Orphée aux enfers has remained Offenbach's best-known work, "a consensus as to the best of his operettas would probably prefer La vie parisienne for its sparkle, La Périchole for its charm and La belle Hélène for its all-round brilliance". Kurt Gänzl writes in The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre that compared with earlier efforts, Orphée aux enfers was "something on a different scale [...] a gloriously imaginative parody of classic mythology and of modern events decorated with Offenbach's most laughing bouffe music." In a 2014 study of parody and burlesque in Orphée aux enfers, Hadlock writes: > With Orphée aux enfers, the genre we now know as operetta gathered its forces and leapt forward, while still retaining the quick, concise style of its one-Act predecessors, their absurdist and risqué sensibility, and their economy in creating maximum comic impact with limited resources. At the same time, it reflects Offenbach's desire to establish himself and his company as legitimate heirs of the eighteenth-century French comic tradition of Philidor and Grétry. ## Revivals ### France Between the first run and the first Paris revival, in 1860, the Bouffes-Parisiens company toured the French provinces, where Orphée aux enfers was reported as meeting with "immense" and "incredible" success". Tautin was succeeded as Eurydice by Delphine Ugalde when the production was revived at the Bouffes-Parisiens in 1862 and again in 1867. The first revival of the 1874 version was at the Théâtre de la Gaîté in 1875 with Marie Blanche Peschard as Eurydice. It was revived again there in January 1878 with Meyronnet (Orphée), Peschard (Eurydice), Christian (Jupiter), Habay (Pluton) and Pierre Grivot as both Mercure and John Styx, For the Exposition Universelle season later that year Offenbach revived the piece again, with Grivot as Orphée, Peschard as Eurydice, the composer's old friend and rival Hervé as Jupiter and Léonce as Pluton. The opera was seen again at the Gaîté in 1887 with Taufenberger (Orphée), Jeanne Granier (Eurydice), Eugène Vauthier (Jupiter) and Alexandre (Pluton). There was a revival at the Éden-Théâtre (1889) with Minart, Granier, Christian and Alexandre. 20th-century revivals in Paris included productions at the Théâtre des Variétés (1902) with Charles Prince (Orphée), Juliette Méaly (Eurydice), Guy (Jupiter) and Albert Brasseur (Pluton), and in 1912 with Paul Bourillon, Méaly, Guy and Prince; the Théâtre Mogador (1931) with Adrien Lamy, Manse Beaujon, Max Dearly and Lucien Muratore; the Opéra-Comique (1970) with Rémy Corazza, Anne-Marie Sanial, Michel Roux and Robert Andreozzi; the Théâtre de la Gaïté-Lyrique (1972) with Jean Giraudeau, Jean Brun, Albert Voli and Sanial; and by the Théâtre français de l'Opérette at the Espace Cardin (1984) with multiple casts including (in alphabetical order) André Dran, Maarten Koningsberger, Martine March, Martine Masquelin, Marcel Quillevere, Ghyslaine Raphanel, Bernard Sinclair and Michel Trempont. In January 1988 the work received its first performances at the Paris Opéra, with Michel Sénéchal (Orphée), Danielle Borst (Eurydice), François Le Roux (Jupiter), and Laurence Dale (Pluton). In December 1997 a production by Laurent Pelly was seen at the Opéra National de Lyon, where it was filmed for DVD, with Yann Beuron (Orphée), Natalie Dessay (Eurydice), Laurent Naouri (Jupiter) and Jean-Paul Fouchécourt (Pluton) with Marc Minkowski conducting. The production originated in Geneva, where it had been given in September – in a former hydroelectric plant used while the stage area of the Grand Théâtre was being renovated – by a cast headed by Beuron, Annick Massis, Naouri, and Éric Huchet. ### Continental Europe The first production outside France is believed to have been at Breslau in October 1859. In December of the same year the opera opened in Prague. The work was given in German at the Carltheater, Vienna, in March 1860 in a version by Ludwig Kalisch, revised and embellished by Johann Nestroy, who played Jupiter. Making fun of Graeco-Roman mythology had a long tradition in the popular theatre of Vienna, and audiences had no difficulty with the disrespect that had outraged Jules Janin and others in Paris. It was for this production that Carl Binder put together the version of the overture that is now the best known. There were revivals at the same theatre in February and June 1861 (both given in French) and at the Theater an der Wien in January 1867. 1860 saw the work's local premieres in Brussels, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Berlin. Productions followed in Warsaw, St Petersburg, and Budapest, and then Zurich, Madrid, Amsterdam, Milan and Naples. Gänzl mentions among "countless other productions [...] a large and glitzy German revival under Max Reinhardt" at the Großes Schauspielhaus, Berlin in 1922. A more recent Berlin production was directed by Götz Friedrich in 1983; a video of the production was released. 2019 productions include those directed by Helmut Baumann at the Vienna Volksoper, and by Barrie Kosky at the Haus für Mozart, Salzburg, with a cast headed by Anne Sophie von Otter as L'Opinion publique, a co-production between the Salzburg Festival, Komische Oper Berlin and Deutsche Oper am Rhein. ### Britain The first London production of the work was at Her Majesty's Theatre in December 1865, in an English version by J. R. Planché titled Orpheus in the Haymarket. There were West End productions in the original French in 1869 and 1870 by companies headed by Hortense Schneider. English versions followed by Alfred Thompson (1876) and Henry S. Leigh (1877). An adaptation by Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Alfred Noyes opened at His Majesty's in 1911. The opera was not seen again in London until 1960, when a new adaptation by Geoffrey Dunn opened at Sadler's Wells Theatre; this production by Wendy Toye was frequently revived between 1960 and 1974. An English version by Snoo Wilson for English National Opera (ENO), mounted at the London Coliseum in 1985, was revived there in 1987. A co-production by Opera North and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in a version by Jeremy Sams opened in 1992 and was revived several times. In 2019 ENO presented a new production directed by Emma Rice, which opened to unfavourable reviews. ### Outside Europe The first New York production was at the Stadt Theater, in German, in March 1861; the production ran until February 1862. Two more productions were sung in German: December 1863 with Fritze, Knorr, Klein and Frin von Hedemann and December 1866 with Brügmann, Knorr, Klein and Frin Steglich-Fuchs. The opera was produced at the Theatre Français in January 1867 with Elvira Naddie, and at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in April 1868 with Lucille Tostée. In December 1883 it was produced at the Bijou Theatre with Max Freeman, Marie Vanoni, Digby Bell and Harry Pepper. There were productions in Rio de Janeiro in 1865, Buenos Aires in 1866, Mexico City in 1867 and Valparaiso in 1868. The opera was first staged in Australia at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne in March 1872, in Planché's London text, with Alice May as Eurydice. A spectacular production by Reinhardt was presented in New York in 1926. The New York City Opera staged the work, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf, in 1956, with Sylvia Stahlman as Eurydice and Norman Kelley as Pluto. More recent US productions have included a 1985 version by Santa Fe Opera, and the 1985 ENO version, which was staged in the US by the Houston Grand Opera (co-producers) in 1986, and Los Angeles Opera in 1989. ### 21st century worldwide In April 2019 the Operabase website recorded 25 past or scheduled productions of the opera from 2016 onwards, in French or in translation: nine in Germany, four in France, two in Britain, two in Switzerland, two in the US, and productions in Gdańsk, Liège, Ljubljana, Malmö, Prague and Tokyo. ## Recordings ### Audio #### In French There are three full-length recordings. The first, from 1951 features the Paris Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by René Leibowitz, with Jean Mollien (Orphée), Claudine Collart (Eurydice), Bernard Demigny (Jupiter) and André Dran (Pluton); it uses the 1858 version. A 1978 issue from EMI employs the expanded 1874 version; it features the Chorus and Orchestra of the Toulouse Capitol conducted by Michel Plasson, with Michel Sénéchal (Orphée), Mady Mesplé (Eurydice), Michel Trempont (Jupiter) and Charles Burles (Pluton). A 1997 recording of the 1858 score with some additions from the 1874 revision features the Chorus and Orchestra of the Opéra National de Lyon, conducted by Marc Minkowski, with Yann Beuron (Orphée), Natalie Dessay (Eurydice), Laurent Naouri (Jupiter) and Jean-Paul Fouchécourt (Pluton). #### In English As at 2022 the only recording of the full work made in English is the 1995 D'Oyly Carte production, conducted by John Owen Edwards with David Fieldsend (Orpheus), Mary Hegarty (Eurydice), Richard Suart (Jupiter), and Barry Patterson (Pluto). It uses the 1858 score with some additions from the 1874 revision. The English text is by Jeremy Sams. Extended excerpts were recorded of two earlier productions: Sadler's Wells (1960), conducted by Alexander Faris, with June Bronhill as Eurydice and Eric Shilling as Jupiter; and English National Opera (1985), conducted by Mark Elder, with Stuart Kale (Orpheus), Lillian Watson (Eurydice), Richard Angas (Jupiter) and Émile Belcourt (Pluto). #### In German There have been three full-length recordings in German. The first, recorded in 1958, features the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Paul Burkhard, with Heinz Hoppe (Orpheus), Anneliese Rothenberger as Eurydice (Eurydike), Max Hansen as Jupiter and Ferry Gruber as Pluto. Rothenberger repeated her role in a 1978 EMI set, with the Philharmonia Hungarica and Cologne Opera Chorus conducted by Willy Mattes, with Adolf Dellapozza (Orpheus), Benno Kusche (Jupiter) and Gruber (Pluto). A recording based on the 1983 Berlin production by Götz Friedrich features the Orchestra and Chorus of Deutsche Oper Berlin, conducted by Jesús López Cobos, with Donald Grobe (Orpheus), Julia Migenes (Eurydike), Hans Beirer (Jupiter) and George Shirley (Pluto). ### Video Recordings have been released on DVD based on Herbert Wernicke's 1997 production at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, with Alexandru Badea (Orpheus), Elizabeth Vidal (Eurydice), Dale Duesing (Jupiter) and Reinaldo Macias (Pluton), and Laurent Pelly's production from the same year, with Natalie Dessay (Eurydice), Yann Beuron (Orphée), Laurent Naouri (Jupiter) and Jean-Paul Fouchécourt (Pluton). A version in English made for the BBC in 1983 has been issued on DVD. It is conducted by Faris and features Alexander Oliver (Orpheus), Lillian Watson (Eurydice), Denis Quilley (Jupiter) and Émile Belcourt (Pluto). The Berlin production by Friedrich was filmed in 1984 and has been released as a DVD; a DVD of the Salzburg Festival production directed by Kosky was published in 2019. ## Notes, references and sources
901,421	Alien vs. Predator (film)	1,173,616,419	2004 science fiction action horror film by Paul W. S. Anderson	[ "2000s American films", "2000s British films", "2000s Canadian films", "2000s English-language films", "2000s monster movies", "2000s science fiction horror films", "2004 action thriller films", "2004 films", "20th Century Fox films", "Alien vs. Predator (franchise) films", "American action adventure films", "American crossover films", "American prequel films", "American science fiction action films", "American sequel films", "Bouvet Island", "Brandywine Productions films", "British prequel films", "British science fiction action films", "Canadian science fiction action films", "Czech crossover films", "Czech prequel films", "Czech science fiction action films", "Davis Entertainment films", "English-language Canadian films", "English-language Czech films", "English-language German films", "Fiction set in the 4th millennium BC", "Films about ancient astronauts", "Films about archaeology", "Films about extraterrestrial life", "Films about invisibility", "Films based on Dark Horse Comics", "Films directed by Paul W. S. Anderson", "Films produced by Gordon Carroll", "Films produced by John Davis", "Films produced by Walter Hill", "Films scored by Harald Kloser", "Films set in 2004", "Films set in Antarctica", "Films set in Cambodia", "Films set in Nebraska", "Films set in Nepal", "Films set in New Mexico", "Films shot in the Czech Republic", "Films with screenplays by Dan O'Bannon", "Films with screenplays by Paul W. S. Anderson", "Films with screenplays by Ronald Shusett", "German prequel films", "Horror crossover films", "Interquel films", "Prequel films", "Science fiction crossover films", "Stillking Films films" ]	Alien vs. Predator (stylized as AVP: Alien vs. Predator) is a 2004 science fiction action horror film written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, and starring Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova, Lance Henriksen, Ewen Bremner, Colin Salmon, and Tommy Flanagan. It is the first film installment of the Alien vs. Predator franchise, the fifth film in the Alien franchise and third film of the Predator franchise, adapting a crossover bringing together the eponymous creatures of the Alien and Predator series, a concept which originated in a 1989 comic book written by Randy Stradley and Chris Warner. Anderson wrote the story, with the creators of the Alien franchise, Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett receiving additional story credit due to the incorporation of elements from the Alien series, and Anderson and Shane Salerno adapted the story into a screenplay. Their writing was influenced by Aztec mythology, the comic book series, and the writings of Erich von Däniken. In the film, scientists are caught in the crossfire of an ancient battle between Aliens and Predators as they attempt to escape a bygone pyramid. Alien vs. Predator was theatrically released on 12 August 2004. It received generally negative reviews and grossed \$177.4 million worldwide against a production budget of \$60–70 million. A direct sequel, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, was released in 2007. ## Plot In 2004, a Predator ship arrives on Earth and uses a heating device to melt a hole in Antarctic ice. Meanwhile, a satellite detects the heat bloom beneath Bouvetøya, an island about 1,000 mi (1,600 km) off the coast of Antarctica. Wealthy industrialist Charles Weyland discovers through thermal imaging that there is a pyramid buried 2,000 ft (610 m) beneath the ice. He assembles a team of experts to investigate, including archaeologists, linguists, mercenaries, and a mountaineering guide named Lex Woods. Terminally ill, Weyland desires to claim the discovery in his name. When the team arrives at the abandoned whaling station, they find a newly made tunnel running directly from the ice’s surface toward the pyramid beneath. The team descends the tunnel and begins to explore the pyramid, soon finding evidence of an ancient civilization and what appears to be a sacrificial chamber filled with human skeletons that all have ruptured rib cages. Meanwhile, three Predators ⁠— Scar, Celtic, and Chopper ⁠— arrive and kill the remaining team members on the surface. They make their way down to the pyramid and arrive just as the team unwittingly activates the structure and is trapped within it. The Xenomorph Queen awakens from cryogenic stasis and begins to produce eggs. When the eggs hatch, several facehuggers attach themselves to humans trapped in the sacrificial chamber. Chestbursters emerge from the humans and quickly grow into adult Xenomorphs. The humans take possession of the Predator's blasters, and conflict erupts between the Predators, Xenomorphs, and humans. Celtic and Chopper are killed by a Xenomorph, and Weyland buys Lex and Italian archaeologist Sebastian De Rosa enough time to escape from Scar, giving his life in the process. The two witness Scar kill a facehugger and a Xenomorph before unmasking and marking himself with the acidic blood of the facehugger. After Lex and Sebastian leave, another facehugger attacks Scar. Through translation of the pyramid's hieroglyphs, Lex and Sebastian learn that the Predators have been visiting Earth for thousands of years. They taught the early human civilization how to build pyramids and were worshipped as gods. Every 100 years, they visit Earth to take part in a rite of passage by which several humans sacrifice themselves as hosts for the Xenomorphs, creating the "ultimate prey" for the Predators to hunt. As a fail-safe, if overwhelmed, the Predators would activate a self-destruct device to eliminate the Xenomorphs. They deduce that the Predators lured them into the pyramid to use as a sacrifice. Lex and Sebastian decide that the Predators must be allowed to succeed so that the Xenomorphs do not escape to the surface. Sebastian is captured by a Xenomorph, and Lex returns the blaster to Scar. They are attacked by a Xenomorph, and Lex manages to kill it. Impressed, Scar uses parts of a dead Xenomorph to fashion weapons for Lex, and the two form an alliance. Lex finds Sebastian, who has become the host of a Xenomorph. She mercy kills him, but the Xenomorph Queen is freed from her restraints and, along with the other Xenomorphs, begins pursuing Lex and Scar. Scar detaches and uses a bomb in his wrist module to destroy the pyramid and the remaining Xenomorphs and eggs. Lex and Scar reach the surface, and Scar uses acidic Xenomorph blood to mark Lex with the Xenomorph hunter symbol. However, the Xenomorph Queen reappears and attacks. They defeat the Queen by hooking her chains to a water tank and pushing her over a cliff, so that she sinks to the ocean floor under the tank's weight. Scar is fatally wounded. A Predator spaceship appears, and its crew retrieves its fallen comrade. An elder Predator presents Lex with a spear as a gift as the spaceship departs. Lex walks over to a snowcat and leaves the area. On the Predator spaceship, Scar's body lies at rest when a Predalien chestburster erupts from his chest. ## Cast - Sanaa Lathan as Alexa "Lex" Woods, an experienced guide who spent several seasons exploring Arctic and Antarctic environments. She is loosely based on Machiko Noguchi from the self-titled quadrilogy. - Raoul Bova as Professor Sebastian De Rosa, an Italian archaeologist and member of the exploration team who is able to translate the pyramid's hieroglyphs. - Lance Henriksen as Charles Bishop Weyland, the billionaire head of Weyland Corporation and its subsidiary, Weyland Industries, who organizes the expedition. - Ewen Bremner as Dr. Graeme Miller, a Scottish chemical engineer, the main scientist of the exploration team. - Colin Salmon as Maxwell Stafford, assistant to Mr. Weyland and former British Special Forces officer. - Tommy Flanagan as Mark Verheiden, a member of the armed escort that accompanies the exploration team. - Carsten Norgaard as Rusten Quinn, head of the drilling team. - Joseph Rye as Joe Connors, a member of the armed escort that accompanies the exploration team. - Agathe de La Boulaye as Adele Rousseau, a member of the armed escort that accompanies the exploration team. - Sam Troughton as Thomas Parks, the second archaeologist of the exploration team, De Rosa's assistant. - Petr Jákl as Stone, a member of the armed escort that accompanies the exploration team. - Liz May Brice as The Supervisor at the Nebraska satellite receiving station that detects the heat bloom in Antarctica. - Karima Adebibe as a Sacrificial Maiden in the flashback to the ancient era. - Tom Woodruff Jr. as The Alien / "Grid". The Alien played by Woodruff is listed in the film's credits as Grid, referencing crosshatch scars from Predator net constriction in the battle with the Predator called "Celtic". - Ian Whyte as The Predator / "Scar", one of the three main Predators who come to Earth to create and hunt Aliens within the pyramid as a rite of passage. Whyte played the lead Predator, called Scar in the film's credits due to the Predator marking himself with the Alien's acidic blood. He is loosely based on Dachande from the self-titled quadrilogy. - Whyte also played the other three Predators: "Chopper", "Celtic" and "Elder" (leader of the Predators at the end of the film). ## Production ### Fifth Alien film and sequel Before 20th Century Fox gave Alien vs. Predator the greenlight, Aliens writer/director James Cameron had been working on a story for a fifth Alien film. Alien director Ridley Scott had talked with Cameron, stating "I think it would be a lot of fun, but the most important thing is to get the story right." In a 2002 interview, Scott's concept for a story was "to go back to where the alien creatures were first found and explain how they were created"; this project eventually became Scott's film Prometheus (2012). On learning that Fox intended to pursue Alien vs. Predator, Cameron believed the film would "kill the validity of the franchise" and ceased work on his story, "To me, that was Frankenstein Meets Werewolf. It was Universal just taking their assets and starting to play them off against each other...Milking it." After viewing Alien vs. Predator, Cameron remarked that "it was actually pretty good. I think of the five Alien films, I'd rate it third. I actually liked it. I actually liked it a lot." Conversely, Ridley Scott had no interest in the Alien vs. Predator films. When asked in May 2012 if he had watched them, Scott laughed, "No. I couldn't do that. I couldn't quite take that step." Director Neill Blomkamp would eventually go on to pitch his sequel to Aliens. However, Scott stated in 2017 that the project has been cancelled. ### Development The concept of Alien vs. Predator originated from the Aliens versus Predator comic book in 1989 and subsequent novelisations and novels. It was also hinted at when an Alien skull appeared in a trophy case aboard the Predator ship in Predator 2. Shortly after the release of Predator 2, Predator co-writer Jim Thomas discussed the possibilities of a Predator franchise and commented on the prospect of a crossover film, stating, "I think Predator vs. Alien is a good idea that will probably never happen". Screenwriter Peter Briggs created the original spec screenplay in 1990–1991, which was based on the first comic series. In 1991, he successfully pitched the concept to 20th Century Fox, who owned the film franchises, although the company did not move forward with the project until 2002; a video game produced by Capcom as a tie-in to the unmade film saw independent release in 1994. The project was delayed chiefly because the studio was working on Alien Resurrection. A draft penned by James DeMonaco and Kevin Fox described as "pretty much word-for-word like the Dark Horse comic book" was rejected by producer John Davis, who hoped to give the film an original approach by setting it on Earth. As there were six producers between the film franchises, Predator producer John Davis had difficulty securing the rights as the producers were worried about a film featuring the two creatures. Paul W. S. Anderson pitched Davis a story he worked on for eight years, adapting the Machiko Noguchi series, and showed him concept art created by Randy Bowen. Impressed with Anderson's idea, Davis thought the story was like Jaws in that it "just drew you in, it drew you in". Anderson started to work on the film after completing the script for Resident Evil: Apocalypse, with Shane Salerno co-writing. Salerno spent six months writing the shooting script, finished its development, and stayed on for revisions throughout the film's production. Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett received story credit on the film based on elements from their work on the original Alien. ### Story and setting Early reports claimed the story was about humans who tried to lure Predators with Alien eggs, although the idea was scrapped. Influenced by the work of Erich von Däniken, Anderson researched von Däniken's theories on how he believed early civilizations were able to construct massive pyramids with the help of aliens, an idea long debunked and based on misinterpretations of Aztec mythology. Anderson wove these ideas into Alien vs. Predator, describing a scenario in which Predators taught ancient humans to build pyramids and used Earth for rite of passage rituals every 100 years in which they would hunt Aliens. To explain how these ancient civilisations "disappeared without a trace", Anderson came up with the idea that the Predators, if overwhelmed by the Aliens, would use their self-destruct weapons to kill everything in the area. H. P. Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness (1931) served as an inspiration for the film, and several elements of the Aliens vs. Predator comic series were included. Anderson's initial script called for five Predators to appear in the film, although the number was later reduced to three. As Alien vs. Predator was intended to be a sequel to the Predator films and prequel to the Alien series, Anderson was cautious of contradicting continuity in the franchises. He chose to set the film on the remote Norwegian Antarctic island of Bouvet commenting, "It's definitely the most hostile environment on Earth and probably the closest to an Alien surface you can get." Anderson thought that setting the film in an urban environment like New York City would break continuity with the Alien series as the protagonist, Ellen Ripley, had no knowledge the creatures existed. "You can't have an Alien running around the city now, because it would've been written up and everyone will know about it. So there's nothing in this movie that contradicts anything that already exists." ### Casting The first actor to be cast for Alien vs. Predator was Lance Henriksen, who played the character Bishop in Aliens and Alien 3. Although the Alien films are set hundreds of years in the future, Anderson wanted to keep continuity with the series by including a familiar actor. Henriksen plays billionaire and self-taught-engineer Charles Bishop Weyland, a character that ties in with the Weyland-Yutani Corporation as the original founder and CEO of Weyland Industries. According to Anderson, Weyland becomes known for the discovery of the pyramid, and as a result the Weyland-Yutani Corporation models the Bishop android in the Alien films after him; "when the Bishop android is created in 150 years time, it's created with the face of the creator. It's kind of like Microsoft building an android in 100 years time that has the face of Bill Gates." Anderson opted for a European cast including Italian actor Raoul Bova, Ewen Bremner from Scotland, and English actor Colin Salmon. Producer Davis said, "There's a truly international flavor to the cast, and gives the film a lot of character." Several hundred actresses attended the auditions to be cast as the film's heroine Alexa Woods, loosely based on the comic and novel protagonist Machiko Noguchi. Sanaa Lathan was selected, and one week later she flew to Prague to begin filming. The filmmakers knew there would be comparisons to Alien heroine Ellen Ripley and did not want a clone of the character, but wanted to make her similar while adding something different. Anderson reported in an interview that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was willing to reprise his role as Major Alan "Dutch" Schaeffer from Predator in a short cameo appearance if he lost the recall election on condition that the filming should take place at his residence. Schwarzenegger, however, won the election with 48.58% of the votes and was unavailable to participate in Alien vs. Predator. Actress Sigourney Weaver, who starred as Ellen Ripley in the Alien series, said she was happy not to be in the film, as a possible crossover was "the reason I wanted my character to die in the first place", and thought the concept "sounded awful". ### Filming and set designs Production began in late 2003 at Barrandov Studios in Prague, Czech Republic, where most of the filming took place. Production designer Richard Bridgland was in charge of sets, props and vehicles, based on early concept art Anderson had created to give a broad direction of how things would look. 25 to 30 life-sized sets were constructed at Barrandov Studios, many of which were interiors of the pyramid. The pyramid's carvings, sculptures, and hieroglyphs were influenced by Egyptian, Cambodian, and Aztec civilisations, while the regular shifting of the pyramid's rooms was meant to evoke a sense of claustrophobia similar to the original Alien film. According to Anderson, if he was to build the sets in Los Angeles they would have cost \$20 million. However, in Prague they cost \$2 million, an important factor when the film's budget was less than \$50 million. Third scale miniatures several meters in height were created to give the film the effect of realism, rather than relying on computer generated imagery (CGI). For the whaling station miniatures and life-sized sets, over 700 bags of artificial snow were used (roughly 15–20 tons). A 4.5-meter miniature of an icebreaker with working lights and a mechanical moving radar was created, costing almost \$37,000 and taking 10 weeks to create. Visual effects producer Arthur Windus, claimed miniatures were beneficial in the filming process: "With computer graphics, you need to spend a lot of time making it real. With a miniature, you shoot it and its there." A scale 25-meter miniature of the whaling station was created in several months. It was designed so the model could be collapsed and then reconstructed, which proved beneficial for a six-second shot which required a re-shoot. ### Effects and creatures Special effects company Amalgamated Dynamics Incorporated (ADI) was hired for the film, having previously worked on Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection. Visual special effects producers Arthur Windus and John Bruno were in charge of the project, which contained 400 effects shots. ADI founders Alec Gillis, Tom Woodruff Jr. and members of their company, began designing costumes, miniatures and effects in June 2003. For five months the creatures were redesigned, the Predators wrist blades being extended roughly four times longer than those in the Predator films, and a larger mechanical plasma caster was created for the Scar Predator. The basic shape of the Predator mask was kept, although technical details were added and each Predator was given a unique mask to distinguish them from each other. These masks were created using clay, which was used to form moulds to create fiberglass copies. These copies were painted to give a weathered look, which Woodruff claims "is what the Predator is all about". A hydraulic Alien puppet was created so ADI would be able to make movements faster and give the Alien a "slimline and skeletal" appearance, rather than using an actor in a suit. The puppet required six people to run it; one for the head and body, two for the arms, and a sixth to make sure the signals were reaching the computer. Movements were recorded in the computer so that puppeteers would be able to repeat moves that Anderson liked. The puppet was used in six shots, including the fight scene with the Predator which took one month to film. The crew tried to keep CGI use to a minimum, as Anderson said people in suits and puppets are scarier than CGI monsters as they are "there in the frame". Roughly 70% of scenes were created using suits, puppets, and miniatures. The Alien queen was filmed using three variations: a 4.8-meter practical version, a 1.2-meter puppet, and a computer-generated version. The practical version required 12 puppeteers to operate, and CGI tails were added to the Aliens and the queen as they were difficult to animate using puppetry. The queen alien's inner-mouth was automated though, and was powered by a system of hydraulics. Anderson praised Alien director Ridley Scott's and Predator director John McTiernan's abilities at building suspense by not showing the creatures until late in the film, something Anderson wanted to accomplish with Alien vs. Predator. "Yes, we make you wait 45 minutes, but once it goes off, from there until the end of the movie, it's fucking relentless". ## Music Austrian composer Harald Kloser was hired to create the film's score. After completing the score for The Day After Tomorrow, Kloser was chosen by Anderson as he is a fan of the franchises. It was recorded in London, and was primarily orchestral as Anderson commented, "this is a terrifying movie and it needs a terrifying, classic movie score to go with it; at the same time it's got huge action so it needs that kind of proper orchestral support." The score album was released on iTunes on 9 August 2004, and on CD on 31 August 2004 and received mixed reviews. James Christopher Monger of Allmusic thought Kloser introduced electronic elements well, and called "Alien vs. Predator Main Theme a particularly striking and serves as a continuous creative source for the composer to dip his baton in." Mike Brennan of Soundtrack, however, said it "lacks the ingenuity of the previous trilogy (Alien) and the Predator scores, which all shared a strong sense of rhythm in place of thematic content. Kloser throws in some interesting percussion cues ("Antarctica" and "Down the Tunnel"), but more as a sound effect than a consistent motif." John Fallon of JoBlo.com compared it to character development in the film, "too generic to completely engage or leave a permanent impression." ## Release ### Home media Alien vs. Predator was released on VHS, DVD, and PSP UMD Movies in North America on 25 January 2005. The DVD contained two audio commentaries. The first featured Paul W. S. Anderson, Lance Henriksen, and Sanaa Lathan, while the second included special effects supervisor John Bruno and ADI founders Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff. A 25-minute "Making of" featurette and a Dark Horse AVP comic cover gallery were included in the special features along with three deleted scenes from the film. On release, Alien vs. Predator debuted at number 1 on the Top DVD Sales and Top Video Rental charts in North America. A two-disc "Extreme Edition" was released on 7 March 2005, featuring behind the scenes footage of the conception, pre-production, production, post-production, and licensing of the film. An "Unrated Edition" was released on 22 November 2005, containing the same special features as the Extreme Edition as well as an extra eight minutes of footage in the film. John J. Puccio of DVD Town remarked that the extra footage contained "a few more shots of blood, gore, guts, and slime to spice things up...and tiny bits of connecting matter to help us follow the story line better, but none of it amounts to much." ## Reception ### Box office Alien vs. Predator was released in North America on 13 August 2004 in 3,395 theatres. The film grossed \$38.2 million over its opening weekend for an average of \$11,278 per theatre, and was number one at the box office. The film spent 16 weeks in cinemas and made \$80,282,231 in North America. It grossed \$9 million in the United Kingdom, \$16 million in Japan, and \$8 million in Germany and totalled \$97,144,859 at the international box office. This brought the film's worldwide gross to \$177,427,090, making it the second highest-grossing film in either the Predator or Alien franchises, behind Prometheus, which grossed over \$403 million worldwide. It ranks third behind Aliens and Prometheus at the domestic box office. ### Critical response `On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 29 out of 100, based on 21 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.` Rick Kisonak of Film Threat praised the film stating, "For a big dumb production about a movie monster smackdown, Alien vs. Predator is a surprisingly good time". Ian Grey of the Orlando Weekly felt, "Anderson clearly relished making this wonderful, utterly silly film; his heart shows in every drip of slime." Staci Layne Wilson of Horror.com called it "a pretty movie to look at with its grandiose sets and top notch creature FX, but it's a lot like Anderson's previous works in that it's all facade and no foundation." Gary Dowell of The Dallas Morning News called the film, "a transparent attempt to jumpstart two run-down franchises". Ed Halter of The Village Voice described the film's lighting for fight sequences as, "black-on-black-in-blackness", while Ty Burr of The Boston Globe felt the lighting "left the audience in the dark". ## Other media ### Sequel A sequel titled Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem was released in December 2007. ### Related film A fourth Predator film, titled The Predator, was released in September 2018, featuring Lex Wood's Xenomorph-bone spear from the conclusion of Alien vs. Predator on display at Project Stargazer. ### Related video games ### See also - Alien franchise - Predator franchise - List of action films of the 2000s - List of horror films of 2004 - List of science-fiction films of the 2000s
23,330,085	Subway (Homicide: Life on the Street)	1,157,609,993	null	[ "1997 American television episodes", "Homicide: Life on the Street (season 6) episodes", "Maryland Transit Administration", "Underground railways in fiction" ]	"Subway" (sometimes referred to as "The Accident") is the seventh episode of the sixth season of the American police television drama Homicide: Life on the Street, and the 84th episode overall. It first aired on NBC in the United States on December 5, 1997. In the episode, John Lange (Vincent D'Onofrio) becomes pinned between a Baltimore Metro Subway train and the station platform. The Baltimore homicide department is informed that Lange will be dead within an hour and Pembleton tries to solve the case while comforting Lange in his final minutes. "Subway" featured guest star Bruce MacVittie as a man suspected of pushing Lange into the path of the train. The episode was written by James Yoshimura, who co-produced with David Simon. It was directed by Gary Fleder and was the only episode of Homicide: Life on the Street helmed by the feature film director. Yoshimura based "Subway" on an episode of the HBO hidden-camera documentary show Taxicab Confessions, in which a New York City detective described a real-life instance of a man trapped between a subway train and platform. "Subway" was filmed on location in a Mass Transit Administration (MTA) station. Fleder included cinematic elements that were uncommon in the traditionally naturalistic show. This led to conflicts between Fleder and director of photography Alex Zakrzewski. "Subway" received overwhelmingly positive reviews but ranked number three in its time-slot during its original broadcast, capturing 10.3 million viewers but falling behind ABC's 20/20 and CBS's Nash Bridges. The episode won a Peabody Award for excellence in television broadcasting and was nominated for two Emmy Awards, one for Yoshimura's script and one for D'Onofrio's guest performance. "Subway" was the subject of a two-hour PBS television documentary, Anatomy of a "Homicide: Life on the Street", which originally aired on the network on November 4, 1998. Screenwriter Vince Gilligan said "Subway" directly influenced an episode of The X-Files that he wrote, which in turn helped inspire the casting of Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad. ## Synopsis During an altercation on a crowded subway platform, John Lange (Vincent D'Onofrio) falls against a moving train and is pinned at waist level between a subway car and the edge of the platform. Detectives Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) and Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) arrive to investigate and are told the man's spinal cord is severed. Although Lange is not feeling much pain, emergency personnel tell the detectives he has less than an hour to live and will die as soon as he is moved. Bayliss questions Larry Biedron (Bruce MacVittie), who was involved with the altercation that led to Lange's fall. Biedron says he was bumped from behind with Lange, but witnesses give conflicting reports: Some say that Biedron pushed Lange, some that Lange pushed Biedron, and others say that it was an accident. Pembleton tries to talk to Lange, who becomes uncooperative and angry when told he is about to die. Lange says that his girlfriend, Sarah Flannigan (Laura MacDonald), is jogging near the harbor, so Pembleton sends detectives Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson) and Falsone (Jon Seda) to look for her. Lewis and Falsone talk about the nature of death while questioning random joggers; their search effort proves fruitless. Lange tries to convince EMT Joy Tolson (Wendee Pratt) to give him painkillers, but she refuses because it will reduce their chances of saving his life, even while she insists he cannot be saved. Pembleton keeps Lange company, despite his initial annoyance at Lange's hostility. The emergency personnel plan to use airbags to push the subway train away from the platform, then pull Lange free and rush him to the hospital. Pembleton and Lange grow closer; Lange experiences more pain as time passes, and switches among remorse, anger, and casual small talk during their conversations. Later, Pembleton holds Lange's hand to comfort him and confides about his recent stroke. Bayliss grows suspicious when Biedron says that he cannot recall his last place of work or when he moved to Baltimore. Biedron eventually admits that he had been criminally charged and placed into a psychiatric ward for pushing a man in front of a Chicago subway train for no reason. Biedron is arrested, and Bayliss confirms to Pembleton that Lange was pushed; Pembleton decides not to tell Lange because he does not think that it will comfort him, but Lange figures it out for himself by observing their conversation. Lange experiences greater pain and starts to lose consciousness. After saying "I'm OK" to Pembleton, Lange falls unconscious and the EMTs push the train with the airbags. Lange dies immediately after he is removed. A shocked and disoriented Pembleton leaves the subway and, after staring at Biedron in the back of a police squad car, walks to his vehicle while recalling a line about what happens to sugar maple leaves when it rains (a line that Lange said as he was dying). He then drives away with Bayliss. The episode ends with Flannigan jogging past the subway station. ## Pre-production ### Conception James Yoshimura, one of the Homicide: Life on the Street writers and supervising producers, first conceived the story for "Subway" after watching an episode of the HBO series Taxicab Confessions, which features hidden-camera footage of taxi passengers discussing their lives with the drivers. In the episode he saw, a New York Police Department detective discussed an experience in which a man was pushed and trapped between a subway train and station platform. Although the man was initially still alive, the homicide department was called in to investigate because emergency officials said they knew that he would eventually die. The detective said that the incident was the most upsetting thing he ever saw. He likened the twisting of the body to that of a plastic bag being spun around quickly and turning like a corkscrew, and said that when the train was removed and the body was twisted back, "All your guts fall down and in less than a minute, you're dead." Yoshimura first pitched the show to the Homicide: Life on the Street production team in May 1997 at the San Francisco production center of executive producer Barry Levinson. The episode was discussed and well-received during a round-table discussion involving Levinson, executive producer Tom Fontana, producer David Simon, supervising producer Julie Martin, and consulting producer Gail Mutrux. During that meeting, Markin suggested that the transit authority should pressure the police to resolve the homicide case quickly and get the trains moving again, an element which Yoshimura eventually added to the script. Levinson suggested ending the episode with the detectives walking back to the surface, then feeling the hum and vibration of the train starting back up under their feet. This suggestion, however, did not appear in the final episode. Distressed from a long stretch of poor ratings, NBC executives placed pressure on Homicide: Life on the Street producers to improve its viewership and become more popular than its higher-rated time-slot competitor, Nash Bridges. Yoshimura and the other producers, however, decided to continue pushing the envelope with "Subway" because they felt the series needed to maintain its quality and survive. "Subway" had to be greenlighted by NBC before a script could be written, and Yoshimura anticipated backlash about the episode. He said, "Every episode, we have trouble with NBC, so this is no different. We've fought that battle, we've had five years of that, so it doesn't matter to us." However, the executives were surprisingly enthusiastic about the premise. Warren Littlefield, then-president of NBC Entertainment, said his first reaction was "the classic response of a network programmer: 'Oh my God, this is scary'", but that he quickly came around to the idea and greenlighted the project. ### Writing In writing the script for "Subway", Yoshimura wanted the Pembleton character to be confronted with his own mortality, a theme that had continued from the previous season in which the character suffered a stroke. Although Pembleton does not typically discuss his own feelings, Yoshimura wanted him to be placed in a situation in which he not only discussed death, but is also led by the unique circumstance of Lange's subway incident to confide his stroke experience to an almost complete stranger. From the beginning of the writing process, Yoshimura specifically wanted the Lange character to be mean and unpleasant, rather than the nice and innocent victim more typically portrayed in such television episodes: "Tragedy can happen to jerky people too and I think it'd be much more interesting to see how that kind of character's circumstances transcends the typical clichéd TV kind of victim." Yoshimura wanted Braugher to treat D'Onofrio like he was "bad luck" and try to keep his distance at first, but gradually come to view him as a person and form a close bond with him by the end of the episode. A New York City firefighter, Tim Brown, was a consultant for most of the technical information in the episode. In addition to helping Yoshimura with the dialogue from medical staff characters, Brown advised Yoshimura on the method of using air bags to push the subway train forward and remove Lange's body. Yoshimura included conflicting reports from witnesses about how the incident took place, which the writer described as a "Rashomon thing", in reference to the 1950 Japanese film in which several characters offer differing descriptions of the same murder. "Subway" continued a sixth season trend in which the detectives became more personally involved with the victims, and thus becoming more emotionally drained at their deaths. For example, in the episode "Birthday", which aired a month earlier, Falsone interviewed a victim who eventually died at the conclusion of the episode. It was the first television script Attanasio ever wrote. Yoshimura included a B story of Lewis and Falsone looking for Lange's girlfriend to provide comic relief and so that the entire episode would not be confined to the subway platform location. Yoshimura wanted the two detectives to also discuss the nature of mortality and death, but deliberately included black humor in their dialogue and made sure the characters did not act "teary-eyed [or] philosophical", because he believed it would be clichéd and an inaccurate depiction of how real detectives would behave. Some viewers were offended or startled by the flippant nature of the discussions about death between the two characters. Lange's girlfriend jogged behind Lewis and Falsone during a scene in which the two detectives were distracted in a discussion; Yoshimura deliberately included this in the episode to create a moment of irony. The line by Falsone to a jogger, "Are you sure you're not Sarah?", and Lewis' mocking reaction to the question, were both ad-libbed by the actors. Executive producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana reviewed the script after it was finished and made minor suggestions for changes. In the original script, Yoshimura made Pembleton more confrontational with the firefighters and emergency personnel, but this aspect of the script was changed when Fontana suggested it was too distracting. NBC executives indicated they would have preferred Lewis and Falsone find Lange's girlfriend and bring her back to the subway station before Lange died, but Yoshimura described that scenario as a "typical TV ending" and was vehemently opposed to any such change. Fontana also defended the original ending because he said Pembleton ends up filling the role that Lange's girlfriend would have filled. On August 18, 1997, four days before shooting on the episode began, NBC censors provided 17 pages of notes to Yoshimura requiring changes regarding violence and language. A typical Homicide: Life on the Street episode usually results in only three or four pages. Yoshimura made several modifications with the help of his writing assistant Joy Lusco, a future writer on Simon's HBO series The Wire. The changes included removing several instances of the words "ass" and "bitch" from the script. Lange's line, "Why am I even saying the son of a bitch's name?" was changed to "Why am I even saying the twerp's name?", and his line, "Go find another train and throw your miserable stupid ass in front of it" was changed to "throw yourself in front of it". ### Casting and director hiring Consulting producer Gail Mutrux recommended feature film director Gary Fleder to direct "Subway" because she believed he would provide visually engaging direction without distracting from the story in the script. Other Homicide: Life on the Street producers were not familiar with Fleder. When Mutrux told them the name of one of his previous films, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, Yoshimura became concerned Fleder was "one of these indie kind of guys [who is] going to come in and try to reinvent our show", a problem he had experienced with other directors in the past. After watching Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, however, Yoshimura believed Fleder would be perfect to direct "Subway" because he felt that Fleder could provide strong visuals to a story that took place in one location, and prevent the script from becoming too static and boring. Upon being offered the job, Fleder thought that it would be a challenge due to most of the action being confined to a single set, but accepted the director position based on the strength of Yoshimura's script:, "The script was terrific. And for me, the big issue from day one was, 'How do I not screw it up?'" Yoshimura said that feature directors often struggle with Homicide: Life on the Street because they are used to working at a slower and more deliberate pace than the typical eight-day filming period of a single episode. Additionally, Yoshimura said, they have little time to adjust to the regular cast and crew, which he described as a "closed community [who are] used to shooting or working a certain way on this show, and then have their rhythms and their patterns and their habits". Casting director Brett Goldstein contacted Vincent D'Onofrio's agent about playing the part of John Lange, but the agent said D'Onofrio would never work in television and refused to even suggest the part to the actor. Goldstein remained convinced the actor was right for the role, and mailed the script directly to D'Onofrio; the actor liked the script and agreed to play the part. The agent later contacted Goldstein a second time, and they got into a dispute over how much money D'Onofrio would be paid. Yoshimura said that D'Onofrio was not the kind of actor he originally envisioned for the part, although he later praised his performance. D'Onofrio said he was attracted to the part based on the strength of the script and the reputation of Homicide: Life on the Street, although he had never seen the show himself. Fleder, D'Onofrio and Andre Braugher had only between two and three hours to read the script, discuss the characters and rehearse the material. Braugher said his first reaction to the episode premise was that it was a "horrifying idea" because he thought it would be sensational and end with a clichéd moral, which Braugher said "frankly, nauseated me, the idea of that". But Braugher said that he was extremely satisfied with Yoshimura's final script. Bruce MacVittie auditioned for the role of Larry Biedron by mailing a tape of himself performing to the show's producers. Yoshimura had previously seen MacVittie perform on the New York City stage and thought that he was a "wonderful, wonderful actor". After watching his rehearsal tape, Yoshimura settled on MacVittie for the part based not only on his acting, but also on his short physical stature. Yoshimura said, "I'm watching this tape and I'm thinking, 'Yeah, this little guy! Who would suspect this little guy to have these murderous kinds of tendencies.'" Laura MacDonald was also cast as Lange's girlfriend Sarah Flannigan based on an audition tape she sent to the show. Wendee Pratt was cast as emergency medical technician Joy Tolson, who works to help Lange throughout the episode but does not get along with him. Yoshimura said that he particularly enjoyed Pratt's performance "because she's not playing at all sympathetic. This guy's a pain in her ass." Shari Elliker, then a talk host on WBAL Radio, made a cameo appearance as a witness in the subway. ### Preparation NBC sought permission to film "Subway" in an MTA station, but the authority was initially hesitant to allow filming for a script that portrayed their train as the source of a fatal accident. Since it was too late to build a set, co-executive producer Jim Finnerty told Yoshimura to wait before writing the script because of the strong possibility that the episode could never be filmed. When Yoshimura insisted on continuing anyway, Finnerty angrily stormed out of the meeting. However, Finnerty was eventually able to convince the authority to allow filming in one of their stations. Yoshimura also sought 300 extras to play firefighters, emergency medical personnel, transit workers and commuters. Finnerty authorized the use of more extras than an episode usually received, but refused to pay for 300 extras, forcing Yoshimura to make minor modifications to the script. Seven days of pre-production began on August 15, 1997. On the first day, Fleder met with Yoshimura and Fontana to discuss the script and the director's vision for the episode. Fleder suggested modifying the prologue, and storyboarded the introduction which was included in the episode. The new prologue involved commuters coming down to the train station while a street band performed, leading up to the subway accident before the opening credits rolled. The song featured in this prologue, "Killing Time", was written by Lisa Matthews, the lead singer of the Baltimore-area band Love Riot. Matthews also had a brief cameo on "Subway" as one of the witnesses to Lange's fall. On August 16, the show creators scouted out the Johns Hopkins Hospital Metro Subway Station, where the episode was to be filmed. At the request of the authority, the subway was renamed the fictional Inner Harbor station during filming. Fleder himself had only one hour to scout the location with his technical crew. Art director Vincent Peranio created a dummy wall to place in the empty space between two subway cars, making it appear that the two trains were one big car. Inside the dummy wall was a space in which the actor could stand and appear cut. Stunt coordinator G.A. Aguilar also choreographed the accident that day, and Peranio simulated the accident itself by tying a dummy into the hole in the dummy wall. Peranio originally wanted a stuntman to fall against the moving train, spin and fall into the padded hole in the dummy wall, but the transit authority refused to allow it. ## Production ### Filming The episode was filmed in seven days, starting on August 26, 1997. The MTA gave permission for filming to take place in one of their subways, but only allowed shooting to take place between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. when the trains were not running. The restrictive hours, short preparation time, confining shooting space and excessive heat due to lack of ventilation created additional stresses to the crew of more than 100 people during the filming of the episode. The tight schedule and lack of rehearsal time was difficult on the actors, but D'Onofrio said that it added "a certain velocity and energy" to the shoot, which made the dialogue from the actors feel less rehearsed and more spontaneous. Yoshimura served as the on-set consulting editor during filming along with fellow producer David Simon, who wrote the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, from which the series was adapted. The cast and crew shot between seven and nine pages of the script each of the seven production days. Fleder said he was impressed by this pace because he usually shoots between one and two pages per day during his movies, and he said that the actors on Homicide: Life on the Street were better prepared and more cooperative than his usual film actors. Fleder dedicated a great deal of focus to establishing the correct chemistry between Braugher and D'Onofrio. Fleder said, "The energy between them had to be [strong] because they're carrying the episode. The audience is centered on them and if either of them falters, the whole episode kind of falls apart." The first day of shooting had to take place outside the subway station, so all outside scenes were shot first. As a result, the final scenes of the film were shot on the first day. Among those scenes were Pembleton leaving the subway in a daze following Lange's death; Yoshimura deeply regretted that this was one of the first scenes shot because he felt that the performance would have been more moving if Braugher had some previous dramatic interaction with D'Onofrio. The stunt simulating Lange's fall into the subway train was filmed on August 27, the second production day, and Yoshimura said that it was the most challenging part of the shoot. D'Onofrio and MacVittie had to arrive at the platform just as the subway train was approaching, and their scene had to be reshot several times because the train did not pass the actors on time. The crew also filmed shots of a dummy dressed as Lange being dragged by the train inside the dummy wall, but most of those scenes were not used in the final cut. The remaining five filming days focused primarily on the scenes between Braugher and D'Onofrio, which Yoshimura and Fleder felt were the most crucial element of the episode. During the filming of the climactic scene with Pembleton and Lange which ends with Lange's death, several members of the crew reacted emotionally, something Yoshimura said is extremely rare because the crew members typically look at their work as a job and do not become emotionally invested in the story that they are filming. While shooting the first subway scenes, D'Onofrio's performance was over-the-top and bombastic. Yoshimura asked him to act a little calmer during the earlier scenes and save the energy for the later scenes, because "if he did go up right away, there was nowhere else for him to go after that". D'Onofrio agreed and modified his performance accordingly. Fleder also clashed with MacVittie over his portrayal of the Biedron character. Fleder felt that the character appeared too crazy in earlier scenes, and that the actor was telegraphing the twist in which MacVittie would turn out to be a murderer. MacVittie approached Yoshimura about the criticism, but Yoshimura agreed with Fleder's interpretation. After MacVittie toned down the character's behavior, Fleder said that he was extremely pleased with the result. Many of the firefighters appearing as extras in "Subway" were Baltimore firefighters. Yoshimura said that the firefighters who appeared to be running in the episode were actors, while the real firefighters walked slowly because, based on their real-life experience, they knew that there would be no need to rush in a situation involving a fatality. Although power on the railings were turned off during shooting, the crew and producers were not aware that some residual electricity continues to run through the cars even after the tracks have been shut down. At one point during the shooting, D'Onofrio felt a charge of that electricity run through him and said, "I'm really feeling something strange here." The crew initially believed D'Onofrio to be ad-libbing a line of dialogue in character, but eventually realized he was being electrified. When the MTA explained about the residual electricity, the crew installed rubber insulation so that D'Onofrio would not touch the metal of the train and experience any electricity. Fleder was impressed that D'Onofrio continued with the shoot, and said, "Most actors I worked with would've left the set at that point." ### Photography "Subway" was shot by Alex Zakrzewski, the series' regular director of photography. The episode was staged so that Pembleton is initially keeping his distance from Lange, but gradually moves closer and closer as they begin to bond, and by the end is sitting next to him and holding his hand. Accordingly, the initial scenes included wider shots with Braugher and D'Onofrio on the outer edges of the frame, but later scenes included more close-ups of the two sitting together. Although Homicide: Life on the Street typically employs a number of back-and-forth whip pan-style cuts, Fleder asked that the style be modified for this episode. In earlier scenes, Fleder asked for wider long shots to create a sense of setting within the subway station, and as the episode progressed and the story became more intense, he then allowed more close-ups and whip pans. This led to disagreements on the set between Fleder and Zakrzewski, who felt Fleder was trying to being too disruptive and difficult. Fleder said of his behavior, "I have to admit, I'm not the most charming guy on the set. I'm just not. When I'm on the set, I'm very focused and my humor goes away and I become not so charming." After the episode was complete, Fleder said that he and Zakrzewski settled their differences and were both happy with the final result. Fleder also asked for stylistic touches on the episode which were inconsistent with the show's typical emphasis on documentary-style realism. For example, he arranged for red scrim lighting to reflect on the subway car to add an artistic visual touch, even though there was nothing in particular in the subway station that reflected such a light. Upon hearing of the technique, Yoshimura was initially concerned, saying "Oh, he's getting artsy fartsy with me." Just before Lange's death, Fleder included a close-up with Braugher looking directly into the camera, breaking the fourth wall in a way typically forbidden on the show. During an outdoor dialogue scene between Johnson and Seda while the characters were driving in a car, Fleder filmed it by placing the camera outside the car's front windshield and panning back and forth between the two actors. Unbeknownst to Fleder, all car shots on Homicide: Life on the Street are only allowed to be filmed from inside the car to keep the scene more realistic. As a result of Fleder's car scene, a memo was circulated to the cast and crew reminding them of this policy and threatening to fire anybody who allowed a scene to be shot through the windshield again. ### Editing The episode was edited by series regular Jay Rabinowitz in a Manhattan NBC facility, with consultation at various times by Fleder, Yoshimura and Tom Fontana. Rabinowitz edited the episode for several days alone, then worked with Fleder for four days, making hundreds of edits to the episode. Yoshimura worked with the editor next and was disappointed with the first cut of the episode that he saw, claiming that it needed to be "a lot more frenetic and chaotics at the end, and not so artsy". Yoshimura also told Rabinowitz that the final cut of the episode should place strong emphasis on Braugher because he felt that the story is experienced "through his eyes". During the editing process, Yoshimura originally removed a scene featuring a silhouette of Pembleton riding the escalator out of the subway station after Lange died. Yoshimura felt that the shot was too sentimental, but Levinson personally had it placed back in the episode after Fleder claimed to have "begged" for it to be included. When Fontana first watched the episode, he felt that the prologue was too confusing because it was difficult to tell what happened during the accident scene. It was edited so that rather focusing on medium shots of D'Onofrio and MacVittie, it included a wider shot to establish the presence of a subway train before the accident so viewers would not be so confused. Audio tracks were mixed with recorded sounds from real subway cars, as well as PA system announcements, to make the episode sound more authentic. In the original episode, Pembleton grabbed Biedron by the collar of his shirt while Biedron sat in the back of a squad car during one of the final scenes. The scene was modified so that Pembleton only looked at Biedron, because Yoshimura felt that the scene was just as effective without him grabbing Biedron. During the last scene of the episode, in which Lange's girlfriend jogs by the subway station and ignores the emergency vehicles, Rabinowitz was originally instructed to include a musical score. He tried many different types of music, including rock music, Irish music, classical music, jazz, and piano riffs. When none of the music worked, Fontana suggested including no music at all, and it was agreed the silence was the most effective solution. Fontana said that after watching the episode repeatedly during the editing process, he liked the final product but doubted he would watch it again for a long time because it was "too emotionally draining". ## Reception ### Reviews and ratings "Subway" was originally scheduled to air during the 1997 November sweeps season, but lower-than-expected ratings for the three-part sixth-season premiere, "Blood Ties", prompted NBC to move its broadcast date to December 5 and heavily promote it. The strategy also gave the press more time to preview it and generate reviews. Warren Littlefield said, "The feeling was let's get out of the insanity of the sweeps and say, 'This is a little different'—hopefully we'll bring more people to this episode." During this time, the episode was renamed "The Accident" in some advertising materials. When all the Nielsen ratings markets were accounted for, "Subway" was listed as having been seen by 10.3 million households. It was the third-highest ranked show in its time-slot, behind ABC's 20/20, which was seen by 17.7 million households, and CBS's Nash Bridges, which was seen by 11.9 million. NBC executives had hoped that the extensive promotion and press coverage of "Subway" would help it outperform Nash Bridges and so lift Homicide: Life on the Street above its usual third place in the rankings. When it did not, "Subway" was considered a commercial failure, and helped fuel already existing discussions within NBC on whether to cancel the show. Reviews were overwhelmingly positive for "Subway". It was identified by The Baltimore Sun as one of the ten best episodes of the series, with Sun writer Chris Kaltenbach declaring, "Dramas don't come any better than this." Kinney Littlefield of the Orange County Register said it was "perhaps the best Homicide episode ever" and praised D'Onofrio's performance. USA Today gave the episode its highest rating of four stars. Tom Shales of The Washington Post called it, "a tour de force for D'Onofrio and Braugher". Entertainment Weekly writer Bruce Fretts said, "This is as gripping an hour of television as you're ever likely to see." Television and literary critic John Leonard said that "Subway" was "an artistic experience that is as genuine and accomplished and crafted as you will get anywhere". David P. Kalat, author of Homicide: Life on the Street: The Unofficial Companion, said of the episode, "Writer James Yoshimura proves that he has not lost his touch, with yet another truly grueling screenplay." ### Awards and nominations "Subway" won a 1998 Peabody Award for excellence in television broadcasting. The episode also received two Emmy Award nominations for the 1997–98 season. James Yoshimura was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series for the episode's script, and Vincent D'Onofrio received a nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series. It lost both nominations; NYPD Blue won the best writing Emmy for the fifth season episode "Lost Israel", and John Larroquette won the guest actor award for his appearance in "Betrayal", a second-season episode of The Practice. However, Jay Rabinowitz and Wayne Hyde won an International Monitor Award for best editing in a film-oriented television series. In 2009, TV Guide ranked "Subway" \#25 on its list of the 100 Greatest Episodes. ### Cultural influences Vincent D'Onofrio's character in "Subway" partially inspired the creation of the antagonist played by Bryan Cranston in "Drive", a sixth season episode of The X-Files, which first aired on November 15, 1998. In the episode, Cranston's character is unpleasant and anti-semitic, but he is dying throughout the episode, and screenwriter Vince Gilligan intended for the audience to sympathize with him despite his unlikeable qualities. Gilligan said that this was influenced by "Subway", which he called an "amazing episode". He said of D'Onofio's character: "The brilliant thing they did in this episode, the thing that stuck with me, was this guy's an asshole, the guy really is unpleasant, and yet at the end (you) still feel his humanity." The casting of Cranston in this role directly led Gilligan to eventually cast him as the lead in his television series Breaking Bad. ## PBS documentary "Anatomy of a 'Homicide: Life on the Street'" WGBH-TV, a Boston-based Public Broadcasting Service station, produced a 75-minute television documentary about the episode "Subway" called Anatomy of a "Homicide: Life on the Street". The documentary was written, produced and directed by filmmaker Theodore Bogosian, and was originally broadcast on November 4, 1998, at 9 p.m. on PBS. The film focused predominantly on James Yoshimura, beginning with his conception of the script and ending with his reaction to the episode's television broadcast and the ratings numbers. The documentary included a brief featurette about Homicide: Life on the Street and its history of both critical acclaim and low ratings. It also focused on the balance between art and business, with Yoshimura and the other producers trying to produce an intelligent, high-quality episode while also capturing high ratings. The documentary crew put wireless microphones on several of the actors and crew and followed them through the conception, pre-production, filming, editing, screening and reception of "Subway". Many people involved with the show found the process extremely disruptive. In particular, Fleder said that he hates to be photographed and found the camera crew distracting and stressful. Fleder, who agreed to interviews for the documentary but refused to wear a microphone on the set, said of the crew, "To pull off a show like this, a seven-day shoot with this much dialogue and this many shots per day, you have to be really, really focused, and for me the thing with the documentary crew kept pulling away from the focus." Rob Owen, television editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said that the documentary provided an interesting, entertaining and detailed look behind the scenes of the show. Owen said that this was "rare, because TV doesn't usually reveal details about itself. It's nice to see PBS pulling back the curtain on its competition, and I wish it happened more often." Manuel Mendoza of The Dallas Morning News praised it, calling it "a documentary as rare to public TV as Homicide is to commercial television", but said that it "falls short of being definitive" because it cannot address all elements of the series due to its brief running time. Several commentators praised the humorous scene in the documentary in which Yoshimura goes line-by-line through his script and replaces curse words based on orders from NBC censors.
676,678	Nigel Kneale	1,160,667,296	Manx screenwriter (1922–2006)	[ "1922 births", "2006 deaths", "20th-century British screenwriters", "Alumni of RADA", "British horror writers", "British male television writers", "British science fiction writers", "British short story writers", "Kerr family", "Manx dramatists and playwrights", "Manx people", "Manx short story writers", "People educated at St Ninian's High School, Douglas", "People from Barrow-in-Furness" ]	Thomas Nigel Kneale (18 April 1922 – 29 October 2006) was a Manx screenwriter who wrote professionally for more than 50 years, was a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and was twice nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay. Predominantly a writer of thrillers that used science-fiction and horror elements, he was best known for the creation of the character Professor Bernard Quatermass. Quatermass was an heroic scientist who appeared in various television, film and radio productions written by Kneale for the BBC, Hammer Film Productions and Thames Television between 1953 and 1996. Kneale wrote original scripts and successfully adapted works by writers such as George Orwell, John Osborne, H. G. Wells and Susan Hill. He was most active in television, joining BBC Television in 1951; his final script was transmitted on ITV in 1997. Kneale wrote well-received television dramas such as The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) and The Stone Tape (1972) in addition to the Quatermass serials. He has been described as "one of the most influential writers of the 20th century", and as "having invented popular TV". ## Biography ### Early life Kneale was born Thomas Nigel Kneale in Barrow-in-Furness, England on 28 April 1922. His family came from the Isle of Man, and returned to live there in 1928, when he was six years old. He was raised in the island's capital, Douglas, where his father was the owner and editor of the local newspaper, The Herald. He was educated at St Ninian's High School, Douglas and trained to become an advocate at the Manx Bar. He also worked in a lawyer's office, but became bored with his legal training and abandoned the profession. At the beginning of the Second World War Kneale attempted to enlist in the British Army, but was deemed medically unfit for service owing to photophobia, from which he had suffered since childhood. ### 1946–1950: Acting career On 25 March 1946 Kneale made his first broadcast on BBC Radio, performing a live reading of his own short story "Tomato Cain" in a strand entitled Stories by Northern Authors on the BBC's North of England Home Service region. Later that year he left the Isle of Man and moved to London, where he studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). He made further radio broadcasts in the 1940s, including a reading of his story Zachary Crebbin's Angel on the BBC Light Programme, broadcast nationally on 19 May 1948. He also had short stories published in magazines such as Argosy and The Strand. He began using the name "Nigel Kneale" for these professional credits, but was known as "Tom" to his family and friends up until his death. After graduating from RADA, Kneale worked for a short time as a professional actor performing in small roles at the Stratford Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. He continued to write in his spare time and in 1949 a collection of his work, Tomato Cain and Other Stories, was published. The book sufficiently impressed the writer Elizabeth Bowen that she wrote a foreword for it, and in 1950 the collection won the Somerset Maugham Award. Following this success, Kneale gave up acting to write full-time. He did take small voice-over roles in some of his 1950s television productions, such as the voice heard on the factory loudspeaker system in Quatermass II (1955), for which he also narrated most of the recaps shown at the beginning of each episode. Kneale's publisher was keen for him to write a novel, but Kneale himself was more interested in writing for television. A keen cinema-goer, he believed that the audience being able to see human faces was an important factor in storytelling. ### 1950–1953: Kneale's early BBC screenplay work His first professional script writing credit came when he wrote the radio drama The Long Stairs, broadcast by the BBC on 1 March 1950 and based on an historical mining disaster on the Isle of Man. In 1951 he was recruited as one of the first staff writers to be employed by BBC Television; before he started working for the station, Kneale had never seen any television. Kneale was initially a general-purpose writer, working on adaptations of books and stage plays and even writing material for light entertainment and children's programmes. The following year, Michael Barry became the Head of Drama at BBC Television, and spent his entire first year's script budget of £250 to hire Kneale as a full-time writer for the drama department. Kneale's first credited role in adult television drama was providing "additional dialogue" for the play Arrow to the Heart, broadcast on 20 July 1952. This play was adapted and directed by the Austrian television director Rudolph Cartier, who had also joined the staff of the BBC drama department in 1952. ### 1953: The Quatermass Experiment Kneale wrote The Quatermass Experiment, which was broadcast in six half-hour episodes in July and August 1953. The serial told the story of Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Experimental Rocket Group, and the consequences of his sending the first crewed mission into space where a terrible fate befalls the crew and only one returns. The Quatermass Experiment was one of the first adult television science-fiction productions, held a large television audience gripped across its six weeks, and has been described by the Museum of Broadcast Communications as dramatising "a new range of gendered fears about Britain's postwar and post-colonial security." Kneale chose the character's surname because many Manx surnames began with "Qu"; the actual name itself was picked from a London telephone directory. The Professor's first name was chosen in honour of the astronomer Bernard Lovell. The BBC recognised the success of the serial, particularly in the context of the impending arrival of commercial television to the UK. Controller of Programmes Cecil McGivern wrote in a memo that: "Had competitive television been in existence then, we would have killed it every Saturday night while [The Quatermass Experiment] lasted. We are going to need many more 'Quatermass Experiment' programmes." Like all of Kneale's television work for the BBC in the 1950s, The Quatermass Experiment was transmitted live; only the first two episodes were telerecorded and survive in the BBC's archives. In the autumn of 1955, Hammer Film Productions released The Quatermass Xperiment, their film adaptation of the serial. Kneale was not pleased with the film, and particularly disliked the casting of Brian Donlevy as Quatermass, as he explained in a 1986 interview. "[Donlevy] was then really on the skids and didn't care what he was doing. He took very little interest in the making of the films or in playing the part. It was a case of take the money and run. Or in the case of Mr Donlevy, waddle." ### 1953–1956: Later BBC works Kneale and Cartier next collaborated on an adaptation of Wuthering Heights (broadcast 6 December 1953) and then on a version of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (12 December 1954). Nineteen Eighty-Four was a particularly notable production; many found it shocking, and questions were asked in Parliament about whether some of the scenes had been suitable for television. There was also prominent support for the play; the Duke of Edinburgh made it known that he and the Queen had watched and enjoyed the programme, and the second live performance on 16 December gained the largest television audience since her coronation the previous year. The Guardian newspaper's obituary of Kneale in 2006 claimed that the adaptation had "permanently revived Orwell's reputation," while the British Film Institute included it in their list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century in 2000. The Creature—an original script by Kneale concerning the legend of the abominable snowman—was his next collaboration with Cartier, broadcast on 30 January 1955, followed by an adaptation of Peter Ustinov's play The Moment of Truth (10 March 1955), before Kneale was commissioned to write Quatermass II. Specifically designed by the BBC to combat the threat of the new ITV network, which launched just a month before Quatermass II was shown, the serial was even more successful than the first, drawing audiences of up to nine million viewers. Kneale was inspired in writing the serial by contemporary fears over secret UK Ministry of Defence research establishments such as Porton Down, as well the fact that as a BBC staff writer he had been required to sign the Official Secrets Act. Quatermass II was Kneale's final original script for the BBC as a staff writer. He left the corporation when his contract expired at the end of 1956; "Five years in that hut was as much as any sane person could stand," he later told an interviewer. ### 1956–1958: Further Quatermass works The same year that he left the BBC, Kneale wrote his first feature film screenplay, adapting Quatermass II for Hammer Film Productions along with producer Anthony Hinds and director Val Guest. Hinds and Guest had overseen the first Quatermass film, upon which Kneale had been unable to work due to his BBC staff contract. Kneale was disappointed that Brian Donlevy also returned in the role of Quatermass. The film premiered at the end of May 1957, and was reviewed positively in The Times: "The writer of the original story, Mr Nigel Kneale, and the director, Mr Val Guest, between them keep things moving at the right speed, without digressions. The film has an air of respect for the issues touched on, and this impression is confirmed by the acting generally." 1957 also saw the release of another cinematic collaboration between Kneale and Guest, when Kneale adapted his 1955 BBC play The Creature into The Abominable Snowman; in this case, Hammer retained the star of the BBC version, Peter Cushing. In May 1957, Kneale was contracted by the BBC to write a third Quatermass serial, and this was eventually transmitted as Quatermass and the Pit across six weeks in December 1958 and January 1959. On this occasion Kneale was inspired by the racial tensions that had recently been seen in the United Kingdom, and which came to a head while the serial was in pre-production when the Notting Hill race riots occurred in August and September 1958. Drawing audiences of up to 11 million, Quatermass and the Pit has been referred to by the BBC's own website as "simply the first finest thing the BBC ever made." It was also included in the British Film Institute's "TV 100" list in 2000, where it was praised for the themes and subtexts it explored. "In a story which mined mythology and folklore ... under the guise of genre it tackled serious themes of man's hostile nature and the military's perversion of science for its own ends." Despite the success of the serial, Kneale felt that he had now taken the character of Quatermass as far as he could. "I didn't want to go on repeating because Professor Quatermass had already saved the world from ultimate destruction three times, and that seemed to me to be quite enough," he said in 1986. It was also his final new collaboration with Rudolph Cartier, although the director did later handle a new version of Kneale's 1953 adaptation of Wuthering Heights for the BBC in 1962. ### 1958–1966: Film screenplays and adaptations In 1958, Kneale's play Mrs Wickens in the Fall, transmitted by the BBC the previous year, was remade by the CBS network in the United States, retitled The Littlest Enemy. Broadcast on 18 June as part of The United States Steel Hour anthology series, the script was severely cut back in length. It was Kneale's only involvement with American television, and he was not pleased with the result. "I made up my mind I would never ever again have anything done on a television network in America," he later commented. For the next few years, Kneale concentrated mostly on film screenplays, adapting plays and novels for the cinema. Described by The Independent as "one of the few writers not to fall out with John Osborne", Kneale adapted Osborne's plays Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer in 1958 and 1960 respectively, both for director Tony Richardson. Kneale knew Richardson through having previously adapted a Chekhov short story for the BBC, which Richardson had directed. Kneale was nominated for the British Film Award (later known as a BAFTA) for Best Screenplay for both films. Film producer Harry Saltzman, who had produced the two Osborne adaptations, approached Kneale about scripting a project he was working on to adapt Ian Fleming's James Bond novels for the cinema; Kneale was not a fan of Fleming's work and turned the offer down. Kneale completed screenplays for adaptations of the novels Lord of the Flies by William Golding and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Neither of these scripts ever saw production, as the companies making them went out of business. Another screenplay that went unproduced was a Kneale original, a drama involving a wave of teenage suicides called The Big Giggle, or The Big, Big Giggle. Written in 1965 while Kneale was suffering from a mystery illness and forced to stay in bed for a long period, the concept was produced as a drama serial for the BBC, before the corporation reconsidered the nature of the storyline and the possibility of copycat suicides; Kneale later agreed with their decision not to make it for television. The production was nearly made as a film by 20th Century Fox, but John Trevelyan, Chief Executive of the British Board of Film Censors, forbade the script's production. In 1966 Kneale worked again for Hammer Film Productions when he adapted Norah Lofts's 1960 novel The Devil's Own into the horror film The Witches. Kneale had worked on the screenplay for the adaptation in 1961, the same year in which he had begun to adapt Quatermass and the Pit for Hammer. Like The Witches, the film version of Quatermass and the Pit took several years to reach the screen, eventually being released in 1967. Roy Ward Baker directed, with Andrew Keir starring as Quatermass. Kneale was much happier with this version than the previous Hammer Quatermass adaptations, and the film was described by The Independent in 2006 as "one of the best ever Hammer productions." Quatermass and the Pit was Kneale's final credited film work; 1979's The Quatermass Conclusion was only released to cinemas in overseas markets after it was made for television in the UK, and he had his name removed from the credits of Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). ### 1963–1974: Return to BBC Kneale returned to writing for television with the BBC when his play The Road was broadcast in September 1963. The play concerned the population of an 18th-century village who become haunted by visions of a future nuclear war, and was followed by several one-off dramas for the BBC over the following decade, including two entries into BBC1's The Wednesday Play anthology strand. During this period he was regarded as one of the finest writers working for the BBC by Shaun Sutton, the Head of Drama for BBC television. Kneale did his first work for the ITV network during this time, writing a one-off play called The Crunch for the ATV company in 1964. A particular critical success was The Year of the Sex Olympics, broadcast as part of BBC2's Theatre 625 series in July 1968. In the programme, a group of people creates a show-within-a-show called The Live Life Show, in which a family are filmed as they struggle to live on an isolated rural island. becomes a massive success, especially when a murderer is introduced into the set-up. The Year of the Sex Olympics has been praised for its foreshadowing of the rise of reality television programmes such as Big Brother (1999–present) and Celebrity Love Island (2005–2006). Critic Nancy Banks-Smith wrote in 2003 that: "In The Year of the Sex Olympics [Kneale] foretold the reality show and, in the scramble for greater sensation, its logical outcome ... This is satire from a TV insider, but it mutates into something far more desolate and disorientating." In 1965 Kneale had been approached by the producer of the BBC2 science-fiction anthology series Out of the Unknown to write a new one-off 75-minute Quatermass story for the programme. Nothing came of this, but he would write The Chopper six years later for the fourth and final series. It was about the vengeful spirit of a dead motorcyclist who is reluctant to leave his wrecked machine and manifests itself to a woman journalist as motorbike noise. It featured Patrick Troughton as a mechanic, although the episode is now lost. In 1972 he was commissioned by the BBC to write a new four-part Quatermass serial, based in a dystopian near future world overrun with crime, apathy, martial law and youth cults. The serial was announced as a forthcoming production by the BBC in November, and some model filming was even begun in June 1973, but eventually budgetary problems and the unavailability of Stonehenge—a central location in the scripts—led to the project's cancellation. Kneale's next script for the BBC was The Stone Tape, a scientific ghost story broadcast on Christmas Day 1972. Lez Cooke praised the production, when writing in 2003, describing it as "one of the most imaginative and intelligent examples of the horror genre to appear on British television, a single play to rank alongside the best of Play for Today." His final BBC work was an entry into a series called Bedtime Stories, adapting traditional fairy tales into adult dramas. Kneale's last script for the BBC, Jack and the Beanstalk, was transmitted on 24 March 1974. ### 1974–1982: Early ITV work Kneale's remaining television work was written for ITV. His first script for ITV in this period was the one-off play Murrain, made by the network's Midlands franchise holders Associated TeleVision (ATV) in 1975. The play, a horror piece based around witchcraft, led the following year to a series called Beasts, a six-part anthology where Kneale created six different character-based tales of horror and the macabre. It featured some well-known actors such as Martin Shaw, Pauline Quirke and Bernard Horsfall, but did not gain a full network run on ITV; different regions transmitted the episodes in different timeslots and some in different sequences. In the mid-1970s, Kneale made his only attempt at writing a stage play. Called Crow, it was based upon the memoirs of real-life Manx slaver Captain Hugh Crow. Kneale was unable to find backing to produce the play for the stage, but sold the script to ATV who put it into pre-production for television. Shortly before filming it was cancelled by ATV's managing director, Lew Grade, and Kneale was never told why. Following the cancellation of Crow, Kneale moved to work for another of the ITV companies, Thames Television, who in 1977 commissioned the production of the scripts of Kneale's previously abandoned fourth Quatermass serial, to be produced by their Euston Films subsidiary film company. The production, Quatermass, was structured to work both as a four-episode serial for transmission in the UK, and a 100-minute film version for cinema release overseas—something Kneale later regretted agreeing to. Starring John Mills as Quatermass and with a budget of over £1 million—more than fifty times the budget of Quatermass and the Pit in 1958—the serial was not as critically successful as its predecessors. "Thematically no less awesome than Mr Kneale's earlier science-fiction essays for BBC Television, his ITV debut has proved only a so-so affair", was the verdict of The Times when previewing the final episode. Tying in with the series, Kneale returned to prose fiction when he wrote his only full-length novel, Quatermass, a novelisation of the serial. Kneale's next television series was a departure from his usual style—Kinvig, his sole attempt at writing a sitcom, produced by London Weekend Television and broadcast on ITV in the autumn of 1981. Although his first out-and-out comedy, Kneale stressed that there had always been elements of humour present throughout his scripts. Some of the press reaction to Kinvig was positive: "If you like the idea of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide but found its realization tiresomely hysterical you may well prefer Kneale's relaxed wit. Cast splendid, direction deft," was The Times's preview of the first episode. The series was not a commercial success, although Kneale later remained personally pleased with it. ### 1982: Halloween III: Season of the Witch In 1982, Kneale made another one-off diversion from his usual work when he wrote his only produced Hollywood movie script, Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Kneale was approached by the director John Landis to work on the screenplay for a remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Kneale and his wife spent some time living at the Sheraton Hotel in Hollywood while Kneale worked on the project. The Black Lagoon script never went into production, but while in America Kneale met the director Joe Dante, who invited him to script the third film in the Halloween series, on which Dante was working; Kneale agreed, on the proviso that it would be a totally new concept unrelated to the first two films, which he had not seen and he did not like what he had heard about them. Kneale's treatment for the film met with the approval of John Carpenter, the producer of the Halloween series, although Kneale was required to write the script in six weeks. Kneale had a positive relationship with the director assigned to the film, Tommy Lee Wallace, but when one of the film's backers, Dino De Laurentiis, insisted upon the inclusion of more graphic violence and a rewrite of the script from Wallace, Kneale became displeased with the results and had his name removed from the film. ### 1987–1995: Later ITV work He returned to writing scripts for British television, including Gentry with Roger Daltrey for ITV in 1987, and the 1989 adaptation of Susan Hill's novel The Woman in Black for transmission on ITV on Christmas Eve. Lynne Truss, reviewing a repeat broadcast of the production on Channel 4 for The Times in 1994, wrote that: "Clip-clop is not usually a noise to get upset about. But it will be an interesting test, today, to go up behind people and whisper 'clip-clop', to find out whether they saw The Woman in Black last night. People who made the bold decision to watch this excellent drama will respond to any 'clip-clop' by gratifyingly leaping in the air and grabbing the backs of their necks." The adaptation nearly went unmade; Kneale had written the script in ten days but been advised by his agent to wait before submitting it to the producers Central Independent Television so that they would not think he had rushed it. When he did submit the script three weeks later, he discovered that Central had been about to cancel the production as they had assumed that Kneale, then 67, had not been able to complete the work due to his age. Susan Hill did not like some of the changes that Kneale had made to The Woman in Black. It has been observed that Kneale on some occasions operated a double standard with adaptations; being unhappy when others made changes to his stories, but willing to make changes to stories he was adapting into script form. Referring to The Woman in Black adaptation, the writer and critic Kim Newman noted that: "He was very offended at the notion of Susan Hill using the name of Kipps from HG Wells as the hero of The Woman in Black, and so he decided not to use it and to change the hero's name to Kidd. I'm sure if somebody thought that Quatermass was a silly name and changed it, he'd be furious!" However, Kneale's adaptations were not always unpopular with the original author. In 1991, a four-part version he wrote of Kingsley Amis's novel Stanley and the Women, met with approval from the original author, with Amis regarding it as the most successful adaptation of his work. Kneale also adapted Sharpe's Gold for ITV in 1995, as part of their series of adaptations of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels. This was an assignment that surprised his agent; "We didn't think he'd want to bother with them but he did. That was probably because he liked the producer." He returned to writing for radio for the first time since the 1950s in 1996, when he wrote the drama-documentary The Quatermass Memoirs for BBC Radio 3. Partly composed of Kneale looking back at the events that led to the writing of the original three Quatermass serials and using some archive material, there was also a dramatised strand to the series, set just before the ITV Quatermass serial and featuring Andrew Keir, star of the Hammer version of Quatermass and the Pit, as the Professor. While recording an audio commentary for that film in 1997, Kneale speculated about a possible Quatermass prequel set in 1930s Germany. According to The Independent, Kneale conceived a storyline involving the young Quatermass becoming involved in German rocketry experiments in the 1930s, and helping a young Jewish woman to escape from the country during the 1936 Berlin Olympics. ### 1995–2006: Final years Kneale was invited to write for the successful American science-fiction series The X-Files (1993–2002), but declined the offer. His final professional work was an episode of the ITV legal drama Kavanagh QC, starring John Thaw. Kneale's episode, "Ancient History", was about a Jewish woman who during the Second World War had been subjected to horrific experiments in a concentration camp. He continued to appear as an interview subject in various television documentaries, and also recorded further audio commentaries for the release of some of his productions on DVD. In 2005, he acted as a consultant when the digital television channel BBC Four produced a live remake of The Quatermass Experiment. He lived in Barnes, London, until his death on 29 October 2006 at the age of 84, following a series of small strokes. ## Legacy When he joined BBC, Kneale was impressed with the state in which they found BBC television drama. However, he was frustrated at what he saw as the slow and boring styles of television drama production then employed, which he felt wasted the potential of the medium. Together with Cartier he would help revolutionise British television drama and establish it as an entity separate from its theatre and radio equivalents. Television historian Lez Cooke wrote in 2003 that "Between them, Kneale and Cartier were responsible for introducing a completely new dimension to television drama in the early to mid-1950s." Jason Jacobs, a lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Warwick, wrote: "It was the arrival of Nigel Kneale ... and Rudolph Cartier ... that challenged the intimate drama directly ... Kneale and Cartier shared a common desire to invigorate television with a faster tempo and a broader thematic and spatial canvas, and it was no coincidence that they turned to science-fiction in order to get out of the dominant stylistic trend of television intimacy." The writer and actor Mark Gatiss indicated that Kneale was among the first rank of British television writers, but that this had been overlooked. "He is amongst the greats—he is absolutely as important as Dennis Potter, as David Mercer, as Alan Bleasdale, as Alan Bennett, but I think because of a strange snobbery about fantasy or sci-fi it's never quite been that way." The Guardian commented that "Kneale was by no means the only author to have been largely wasted by television, and to have seen his status overtaken by soap opera hacks. But his place is secure, alongside Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham and Brian Aldiss, as one of the best, most exciting and most compassionate English science fiction writers of his century." Writing about The Year of the Sex Olympics, Nancy Banks-Smith felt that Kneale was one of the few television writers whose work was particularly memorable. "At the name of Kneale, I feel, every knee should bow. How much TV do you remember from last night ... last year ... last century? Quite. Curiously, I can remember clearly the first time I saw The Year of the Sex Olympics by Nigel Kneale. It was 35 years ago." Kneale was admired by the film director John Carpenter. The horror fiction writer Stephen King has cited Kneale as an influence, and Kim Newman suggested in 2003 that King had "more or less rewritten Quatermass and the Pit in The Tommyknockers." Other writers have acclaimed Kneale as an influence on their work including comics writer Grant Morrison and television screenwriter Russell T Davies, who described the Beasts episode "Baby" as "the most frightening thing I've ever seen ... Powerful stuff." Film screenwriter and director Dan O'Bannon was also an admirer of Kneale's writing, and in 1993 wrote a potential remake of The Quatermass Experiment, of which Kneale approved, but the film was never made. Other entertainment industry figures that publicly expressed admiration for Kneale's work include The Beatles' drummer Ringo Starr, members of the rock group Pink Floyd and Monty Python's Flying Circus writer/performer Michael Palin. Kneale never saw himself as a science-fiction writer, and was often critical of the genre. He particularly disliked the BBC series Doctor Who (1963–89; 1996; 2005–present), for which he had once turned down an offer to write. He also criticised Doomwatch and Blake's 7, with the latter described as the lowest point of British television science-fiction. Doctor Who was heavily influenced by Kneale's Quatermass serials, in some cases even using specific storylines that were similar to those from Quatermass. ## Family Kneale's younger brother is artist and sculptor Bryan Kneale, who was Master and then Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy from 1982 to 1990. He painted the covers for the Quatermass script books released by Penguin Books in 1959 and 1960. He was also responsible for a painting of a lobster from which special effects designers Bernard Wilkie and Jack Kine drew their inspiration for the Martian creatures they constructed for the original television version of Quatermass and the Pit. In the early 1950s Kneale met fellow BBC screenwriter Judith Kerr, a Jewish refugee, in the BBC canteen. They married on 8 May 1954 and had two children; Matthew, who later became a successful novelist, and Tacy, an actress and later a special effects designer who worked on the Harry Potter film series. Kerr became a successful children's writer, with the Mog series of books and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which was based on her own experiences of fleeing Nazi Germany in her youth. Kneale worked with Kerr on an adaptation of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit in the 1970s, but the eventual makers of the film version disregarded their script. Similarly, in 1995 Kneale scripted a four-part adaptation of one of Kerr's sequels to the book, A Small Person Far Away, but this also went unproduced.
952,246	Canadian National Vimy Memorial	1,163,796,766	Memorial in Pas-de-Calais, in France	[ "1936 establishments in France", "Canada in World War I", "Canada–France relations", "Canadian military memorials and cemeteries", "Commonwealth War Graves Commission memorials", "Monuments and memorials in the Pas-de-Calais", "National Historic Sites of Canada in France", "Sculptures by Walter Seymour Allward", "World War I in the Pas-de-Calais", "World War I memorials in France" ]	The Canadian National Vimy Memorial is a war memorial site in France dedicated to the memory of Canadian Expeditionary Force members killed during the First World War. It also serves as the place of commemoration for Canadian soldiers of the First World War killed or presumed dead in France who have no known grave. The monument is the centrepiece of a 100-hectare (250-acre) preserved battlefield park that encompasses a portion of the ground over which the Canadian Corps made their assault during the initial Battle of Vimy Ridge offensive of the Battle of Arras. The Battle of Vimy Ridge was the first time all four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force participated in a battle as a cohesive formation, and it became a Canadian national symbol of achievement and sacrifice. France ceded to Canada perpetual use of a portion of land on Vimy Ridge on the understanding that Canada use the land to establish a battlefield park and memorial. Wartime tunnels, trenches, craters, and unexploded munitions still honeycomb the grounds of the site, which remains largely closed off for reasons of public safety. Along with preserved trench lines, several other memorials and cemeteries are contained within the park. The project took designer Walter Seymour Allward eleven years to build. King Edward VIII unveiled it on 26 July 1936 in the presence of French President Albert Lebrun and a crowd of over 50,000 people, including 6,200 attendees from Canada. Following an extensive multi-year restoration, Queen Elizabeth II re-dedicated the monument on 9 April 2007 at a ceremony commemorating the 90th anniversary of the battle. The site is maintained by Veterans Affairs Canada. The Vimy Memorial is one of only two National Historic Sites of Canada located outside the country, the other being the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial. ## Background ### Topography Vimy Ridge is a gradually rising escarpment on the western edge of the Douai Plains, eight kilometres (5.0 mi) northeast of Arras. The ridge gradually rises on its western side, dropping more quickly on the eastern side. The ridge is approximately seven kilometres (4.3 mi) in length, 700 metres (2,300 ft) wide at its narrowest point, and culminates at an elevation of 145 metres (476 ft) above sea level, or 60 metres (200 ft) above the Douai Plains, providing a natural unobstructed view for tens of kilometres in all directions. ### Early conflicts on site The ridge fell under German control in October 1914, during the Race to the Sea, as the Franco-British and German forces continually attempted to outflank each other through northeastern France. The French Tenth Army attempted to dislodge the Germans from the region during the Second Battle of Artois in May 1915 by attacking their positions at Vimy Ridge and Notre Dame de Lorette. During the attack, the French 1st Moroccan Division briefly captured the height of the ridge, where the Vimy memorial is currently located, but was unable to hold it owing to a lack of reinforcements. The French made another attempt during the Third Battle of Artois in September 1915, but were once again unsuccessful in capturing the top of the ridge. The French suffered approximately 150,000 casualties in their attempts to gain control of Vimy Ridge and surrounding territory. The British XVII Corps relieved the French Tenth Army from the sector in February 1916. On 21 May 1916, the German infantry attacked the British lines along a 1,800-metre (2,000 yd) front in an effort to force them from positions along the base of the ridge. The Germans captured several British-controlled tunnels and mine craters before halting their advance and entrenching their positions. Temporary Lieutenant Richard Basil Brandram Jones was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his ultimately unsuccessful defence of the Broadmarsh Crater during the attack. British counter-attacks on 22 May did not manage to change the situation. The Canadian Corps relieved the British IV Corps stationed along the western slopes of Vimy Ridge in October 1916. ### Battle of Vimy Ridge The Battle of Vimy Ridge was the first instance in which all four Canadian divisions participated in a battle together, as a cohesive formation. The nature and size of the planned Canadian Corps assault necessitated support and resources beyond its normal operational capabilities. Consequently, the British 5th Infantry Division and supplementary artillery, engineer and labour units reinforced the four Canadian divisions already in place. The 24th British Division of I Corps supported the Canadian Corps along its northern flank while the XVII Corps did so to the south. The ad hoc Gruppe Vimy formation, based under I Bavarian Reserve Corps commander General der Infanterie Karl Ritter von Fasbender, was the principal defending formation with three divisions responsible for manning the frontline defences opposite the Canadian Corps. The attack began at 5:30 am on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917. Light field guns laid down a barrage that advanced in predetermined increments, often 91 metres (100 yd) every three minutes, while medium and heavy howitzers established a series of standing barrages against known defensive systems further ahead. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Canadian Divisions quickly captured their first objectives. The 4th Canadian Division encountered a great deal of trouble during its advance and was unable to complete its first objective until some hours later. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Canadian Divisions captured their second objective by approximately 7:30 am. The failure of the 4th Canadian Division to capture the top of the ridge delayed further advances and forced the 3rd Canadian Division to expend resources establishing a defensive line to its north. Reserve units from the 4th Canadian Division renewed the attack on the German positions on the top of the ridge and eventually forced the German troops holding the southwestern portion of Hill 145 to withdraw. On the morning of 10 April, Canadian Corps commander Lieutenant-General Julian Byng moved up three fresh brigades to support the continued advance. The fresh units leapfrogged units already in place and captured the third objective line, including Hill 135 and the town of Thélus, by 11:00 am. By 2:00 pm both the 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions reported capturing their final objectives. By this point the "Pimple", a heavily defended knoll west of the town of Givenchy-en-Gohelle, was the only German position remaining on Vimy Ridge. On 12 April, the 10th Canadian Brigade attacked and quickly overcame the hastily entrenched German troops, with the support of artillery and the 24th British Division. By nightfall on 12 April, the Canadian Corps was in firm control of the ridge. The Canadian Corps suffered 10,602 casualties: 3,598 killed and 7,004 wounded. The German Sixth Army suffered an unknown number of casualties, and around 4,000 men became prisoners of war. Although the battle is not generally considered Canada's greatest military feat of arms, the image of national unity and achievement imbued the battle with considerable national significance for Canada. According to Pierce, "the historical reality of the battle has been reworked and reinterpreted in a conscious attempt to give purpose and meaning to an event that came to symbolize Canada's coming of age as a nation." The idea that Canada's identity and nationhood were born out of the battle is an opinion that is widely held in military and general histories of Canada. ## History ### Selection In 1920, the Government of Canada announced that the Imperial War Graves Commission had awarded Canada eight sites—five in France and three in Belgium—on which to erect memorials. Each site represented a significant Canadian engagement, and the Canadian government initially decided that each battlefield be treated equally and commemorated with identical monuments. In September 1920, the Canadian government formed the Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commission to discuss the process and conditions for holding a memorial competition for the sites in Europe. The commission held its first meeting on 26 November 1920 and during this meeting decided that the architectural design competition would be open to all Canadian architects, designers, sculptors, and artists. The jury consisted of Charles Herbert Reilly representing the Royal Institute of British Architects, Paul Philippe Cret representing the Société centrale des architectes français and Frank Darling representing the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Each jury member was a leader in the architectural field; Reilly was training students in design and development of war memorials, and Cret had been selected by the United States to design national monuments in Europe. Interested parties submitted 160 design drawings, and the jury selected 17 submissions for consideration, commissioning each finalist to produce a plaster maquette of their respective design. The jury recommended in a 10 September 1921 report to the commission that two of the designs be executed. In October 1921, the commission formally selected the submission of Toronto sculptor and designer Walter Seymour Allward as the winner of the competition; the design submitted by Frederick Chapman Clemesha was selected as runner-up. Allward's other commissions included the national memorial commemorating Canada's participation in the South African War (1899–1902). The complexity of Allward's design precluded the possibility of duplicating the design at each site. The approach of selecting one primary memorial ran counter to the recommendation of Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commission architectural advisor Percy Erskine Nobbs, who had consistently expressed his preference for a series of smaller monuments. The consensus went in Allward's favour, his design receiving both public and critical approval. The commission revised its initial plans and decided to build two distinctive memorials—those of Allward and Clemesha—and six smaller identical memorials. At the outset, members of the commission debated where to build Allward's winning design. The jury's assessment was that Allward's submission was best suited to a "low hill rather than to a continuous and lofty bluff or cliff like Vimy Ridge". The commission committee initially recommended placing the monument in Belgium on Hill 62, near the location of the Battle of Mont Sorrel, as the site provided an imposing view. This ran counter to the desires of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King who, while speaking in the House of Commons of Canada in May 1922, argued in favour of placing the memorial at Vimy Ridge. King's position received the unanimous support of the House and, in the end, the commission selected Vimy Ridge as the preferred site. The government announced its desire to acquire a more considerable tract of land along the ridge after the commission selected Vimy Ridge as the preferred location for Allward's design. In the interval between the 1st and 2nd session of the 14th Canadian Parliament, Speaker of the House of Commons of Canada Rodolphe Lemieux went to France to negotiate the acquisition of more land. On 5 December 1922, Lemieux concluded an agreement with France in which France granted Canada "freely and for all time" the use of 100 hectares (250 acres) of land on Vimy Ridge, inclusive of Hill 145, in recognition of Canada's war effort. The only condition placed on the donation was that Canada use the land to erect a monument commemorating Canadian soldiers killed during the First World War and assume the responsibility for the maintenance of the memorial and the surrounding battlefield park. ### Memorial construction Following the competition, Allward spent the remainder of 1921 and the spring of 1922 preparing for his move to Europe. After selling his home and studio, Allward finally departed for Belgium on 6 June 1922 and spent several months seeking a suitable studio in Belgium and then Paris, though he eventually set up a studio in London. Allward had initially hoped to use white marble for the memorial's facing stone, but Percy Nobbs suggested this would be a mistake because marble was unlikely to weather well in northern France and the memorial would have a "ghost like" appearance. Allward undertook a tour of almost two years to find stone of the right colour, texture, and luminosity. He found it in the ruins of Diocletian's Palace at Split, Croatia; he observed that the palace had not weathered over the years, which Allward took as evidence of the stone's durability. His choice—Seget limestone—came from an ancient Roman quarry located near Seget, Croatia. The difficulties with the quarrying process, coupled with complicated transportation logistics, delayed delivery of the limestone and thus construction of the memorial. The first shipment did not arrive at the site until 1927, and the larger blocks, intended for the human figures, did not begin to arrive until 1931. On Allward's urging the Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commission hired Oscar Faber, a Danish structural engineer, in 1924 to prepare foundation plans and provide general supervision of the foundation work. Faber had recently designed the substructure for the Menin Gate at Ypres, and he selected a design that employed cast-in-place reinforced concrete to which the facing stone would be bonded. Major Unwin Simson served as the principal Canadian engineer during the construction of the memorial and oversaw much of the daily operations at the site. Allward moved to Paris in 1925 to supervise construction and the carving of the sculptures. Construction commenced in 1925 and took eleven years to complete. The Imperial War Graves Commission concurrently employed French and British veterans to carry out the necessary roadwork and site landscaping. While awaiting the first delivery of stone, Simson noticed that the battlefield landscape features were beginning to deteriorate. Seeing an opportunity to not only preserve a portion of the battlefield but also keep his staff occupied, Simson decided to preserve a short section of trench line and make the Grange Subway more accessible. Labourers rebuilt and preserved sections of sandbagged trench wall, on both the Canadian and German sides of the Grange crater group, in concrete. The workforce also built a new concrete entrance for the Grange Subway and, after excavating a portion of the tunnel system, installed electric lighting. Allward chose a relatively new construction method for the monument: limestone bonded to a cast concrete frame. A foundation bed of 11,000 tonnes of concrete, reinforced with hundreds of tonnes of steel, served as the support bed for the memorial. The memorial base and twin pylons contained almost 6,000 tonnes of Seget limestone. Sculptors carved the 20 approximately double life-sized human figures on site from large blocks of stone. The carvers used half-size plaster models produced by Allward in his studio, now on display at the Canadian War Museum, and an instrument called a pantograph to reproduce the figures at the proper scale. The carvers conducted their work year-round inside temporary studios built around each figure. The inclusion of the names of those killed in France with no known grave was not part of the original design, and Allward was unhappy when the government asked him to include them. Allward argued that the inclusion of names was not part of the original commissioning. Through a letter to Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commission in October 1927, Allward indicated his intention to relegate the names of the missing to pavement stones around the monument. The collective dismay and uproar of the commission forced Allward to relent and incorporate the names of the missing on the memorial walls. The task of inscribing the names did not begin until the early 1930s and employed a typeface that Allward designed for the monument. ### Pilgrimage and unveiling In 1919, the year after the war ended, around 60,000 British tourists and mourners made pilgrimages to the Western Front. The transatlantic voyage was longer and more expensive from Canada; many attempts to organize large pilgrimages failed, and journeys overseas were largely made individually or in small, unofficial groups. The delegates of the 1928 national convention of the Canadian Legion passed a unanimous resolution asking that a pilgrimage be organized to the Western Front battlefields. A plan began to take form wherein the Legion aimed to coordinate the pilgrimage with the unveiling of the Vimy memorial, which at the time was expected to be completed in 1931 or 1932. Due to construction delays with the memorial, it was not until July 1934 that the Canadian Legion announced a pilgrimage to former battlefield sites in conjunction with the unveiling of the memorial. Although the exact date of the memorial unveiling was still not set, the Legion invited former service members to make tentative reservations with their headquarters in Ottawa. The response from veterans and their families was enthusiastic—1,200 inquiries by November 1934. The Legion presumptuously announced that the memorial would be unveiled on Dominion Day, 1 July 1936, even though the government still did not know when it would be completed. For event planning purposes, the Legion and the government established areas for which each was responsible. The government was responsible for selection of the official delegation and the program for the official unveiling of the memorial. The Legion was responsible for the more challenging task of organizing the pilgrimage. For the Legion this included planning meals, accommodations and transportation for what was at the time the largest single peacetime movement of people from Canada to Europe. The Legion took the position that the pilgrimage would be funded by its members without subsidies or financial aid from Canadian taxpayers, and by early 1935 they had established that the price of the 31⁄2-week trip, inclusive of all meals, accommodation, health insurance, and sea and land transportation would be per person (\$ as of 2016). Indirect assistance came in a number of forms. The government waived passport fees and made a special Vimy passport available to pilgrims at no extra cost. The government and private sector also provided paid leave for their participating employees. It was not until April 1936 that the government was prepared to publicly commit to an unveiling date, 26 July 1936. On 16 July, the five transatlantic liners, escorted by and , departed the Port of Montreal with approximately 6,200 passengers and arrived in Le Havre on 24 and 25 July. The limited accommodation made it necessary for the Legion to lodge pilgrims in nine cities throughout northern France and Belgium and employ 235 buses to move the pilgrims between various locations. On 26 July, the day of the ceremony, pilgrims spent the morning and early afternoon exploring the landscape of the memorial park before congregating at the monument. For the ceremony, sailors from HMCS Saguenay provided the guard of honour. Also present were The Royal Canadian Horse Artillery Band, French army engineers, and French-Moroccan cavalry who had fought on the site during the Second Battle of Artois. The ceremony itself was broadcast live by the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission over shortwave radio, with facilities of the British Broadcasting Corporation transmitting the ceremony to Canada. Senior Canadian, British, and European officials, including French President Albert Lebrun and Prince Arthur of Connaught, and a crowd of over 50,000 attended the event. Absent, though, was Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, it being well understood that he was generally not comfortable around veterans and felt it more appropriate for a war veteran in Cabinet to act as the King's minister in attendance. Before the ceremony began, Edward VIII, present in his capacity as King of Canada, inspected the guard of honour, was introduced to the honoured guests, and spent approximately half an hour speaking with veterans in the crowd. Two Royal Air Force and two French Air Force squadrons flew over the monument and dipped their wings in salute. The ceremony itself began with prayers from chaplains representing the Church of England, the United Church of Canada, and the Roman Catholic Church. Ernest Lapointe, Canadian Minister of Justice, spoke first, followed by Edward VIII who, in both French and English, thanked France for its generosity and assured those assembled that Canada would never forget its war missing and dead. The King then pulled the Royal Union Flag from the central figure of Canada Bereft and the military band played the Last Post. The ceremony was one of the King's few official duties before he abdicated the throne. The pilgrimage continued, and most participants toured Ypres before being taken to London to be hosted by the British Legion. One-third of the pilgrims left from London for Canada on 1 August, while the majority returned to France as guests of the government for another week of touring before going home. ### Second World War In 1939, the increased threat of conflict with Nazi Germany amplified the Canadian government's level of concern for the general safety of the memorial. Canada could do little more than protect the sculptures and the bases of the pylons with sandbags and await developments. When war did break out in September 1939, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) deployed to France and assumed responsibility for the Arras sector, which included Vimy. In late May 1940, following the British retreat to Dunkirk after the Battle of Arras, the status and condition of the memorial became unknown to Allied forces. The Germans took control of the site and held the site's caretaker, George Stubbs, in an Ilag internment camp for Allied civilians in St. Denis, France. The rumoured destruction of the Vimy Memorial, either during the fighting or at the hands of the Germans, was widely reported in Canada and the United Kingdom. The rumours led the German Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda to formally deny accusations that Germany had damaged or desecrated the memorial. To demonstrate the memorial had not been desecrated, Adolf Hitler, who reportedly admired the memorial for its peaceful nature, was photographed by the press while personally touring it and the preserved trenches on 2 June 1940. The undamaged state of the memorial was not confirmed until September 1944 when British troops of the 2nd Battalion, the Welsh Guards of the Guards Armoured Division, recaptured Vimy Ridge. ### Post-war years Immediately following the Second World War, very little attention was paid to the Battle of Vimy Ridge or the Vimy Memorial. The Winnipeg Free Press and The Legionary, the magazine of the Royal Canadian Legion, were the only publications to note the 35th anniversary of the battle in 1952. The 40th anniversary in 1957 received even less notice, with only the Halifax Herald making any mention. Interest in commemoration remained low in the early 1960s but increased in 1967 with the 50th anniversary of the battle, paired with the Canadian Centennial. A heavily attended ceremony at the memorial in April 1967 was broadcast live on television. Commemoration of the battle decreased once again throughout the 1970s and only returned in force with the 125th anniversary of Canadian Confederation and the widely covered 75th anniversary of the battle in 1992. The 1992 ceremony at the memorial was attended by Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and at least 5,000 people. Subsequent smaller-scale ceremonies were held at the memorial in 1997 and 2002. ### Restoration and rededication By the end of the century, the many repairs undertaken since the memorial's construction had left a patchwork of materials and colours, and a disconcerting pattern of damage from water intrusion at the joints. In May 2001, the Government of Canada announced the Canadian Battlefield Memorials Restoration Project, a major million restoration project to restore Canada's memorial sites in France and Belgium, in order to maintain and present them in a respectful and dignified manner. In 2005, the Vimy memorial closed for major restoration work. Veterans Affairs Canada directed the restoration of the memorial in cooperation with other Canadian departments, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, consultants and specialists in military history. Time, wear, and severe weather conditions led to many identified problems, the single most pervasive being water damage. In building a memorial made of cast concrete covered in stone, Allward had failed to take into account how these materials would shift over time. The builders and designer failed to incorporate sufficient space between the concrete and stones, which resulted in water infiltrating the structure through its walls and platforms, dissolving lime in the concrete foundation and masonry. As the water exited, it deposited the lime on exterior surfaces, obscuring many of the names inscribed thereon. Poor drainage and water flows off the monument also caused significant deterioration of the platform, terrace, and stairs. The restoration project was intended to address the root causes of damage and included repairs to the stone, walkways, walls, terraces, stairs, and platforms. In order to respect Allward's initial vision of a seamless structure, the restoration team were required to remove all foreign materials employed in patchwork repairs, replace damaged stones with material from the original quarry in Croatia, and correct all minor displacement of stones caused by the freeze-thaw activity. Underlying structural flaws were also corrected. Queen Elizabeth II, escorted by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, rededicated the restored memorial on 9 April 2007 in a ceremony commemorating the 90th anniversary of the battle. Other senior Canadian officials, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and senior French representatives, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin among them, attended the event, along with thousands of Canadian students, veterans of the Second World War and of more recent conflicts, and descendants of those who fought at Vimy. The crowd attending the rededication ceremony was the largest crowd on the site since the 1936 dedication. ### Centennial commemoration The centennial commemoration of the Battle of Vimy Ridge took place at the memorial on 9 April 2017, coincidentally during the Canadian sesquicentennial celebrations. Estimates before the event indicated that an audience of up to 30,000 would be present. The Mayor of Arras, Frédéric Leturque, thanked Canadians, along with Australians, Britons, New Zealanders and South Africans, for their role in the First World War battles in the area. Attending dignitaries for Canada included Governor General David Johnston; Prince Charles; Prince William, Duke of Cambridge; Prince Harry; and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. President François Hollande and Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve represented France. Elizabeth II issued a statement via the Governor General, remarking "[Canadians] fought courageously and with great ingenuity in winning the strategic high point of Vimy Ridge, though victory came at a heavy cost". Two postage stamps were released jointly by Canada Post and France's La Poste featuring the memorial, one designed by each country, to commemorate the centennial of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. ## Site The Canadian National Vimy Memorial site is located approximately 8 km (5.0 mi) north of Arras, France, circled by the small towns and communes of Vimy to the east, Givenchy-en-Gohelle to the north, Souchez to the northwest, Neuville-Saint-Vaast to the south and Thélus to the southeast. The site is one of the few places on the former Western Front where a visitor can see the trench lines of a First World War battlefield and the related terrain in a preserved natural state. The total area of the site is 100 hectares (250 acres), much of which is forested and off limits to visitors to ensure public safety. The site's rough terrain and buried unexploded munitions make the task of grass cutting too dangerous for human operators. Instead, sheep graze the open meadows of the site. The site was established to honour the memory of the Canadian Corps, but it also contains other memorials. These are dedicated to the French Moroccan Division, Lions Club International, and Lieutenant-Colonel Mike Watkins. There are also two Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries on site: Canadian Cemetery No. 2 and Givenchy Road Canadian Cemetery. Beyond being a popular location for battlefield tours, the site is also an important location in the burgeoning field of First World War battlefield archaeology, because of its preserved and largely undisturbed state. The site's interpretive centre helps visitors fully understand the Vimy Memorial, the preserved battlefield park, and the history of the Battle of Vimy within the context of Canada's participation in the First World War. The Canadian National Vimy Memorial and Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial sites comprise close to 80 percent of conserved First World War battlefields in existence and between them receive over one million visitors each year. ### Vimy memorial Allward constructed the memorial on the vantage point of Hill 145, the highest point on the ridge. The memorial contains many stylized features, including 20 human figures, which help the viewer in contemplating the structure as a whole. The front wall, normally mistaken for the rear, is 7.3 metres (24 ft) high and represents an impenetrable wall of defence. There is a group of figures at each end of the front wall, next to the base of the steps. The Breaking of the Sword is located at the southern corner of the front wall while Sympathy of the Canadians for the Helpless is located at the northern corner. Collectively, the two groups are The Defenders and represent the ideals for which Canadians gave their lives during the war. There is a cannon barrel draped in laurel and olive branches carved into the wall above each group, to symbolize victory and peace. In Breaking of the Sword, three young men are present, one of whom is crouching and breaking his sword. This statue represents the defeat of militarism and the general desire for peace. This grouping of figures is the most overt image to pacifism in the monument, the breaking of a sword being extremely uncommon in war memorials. The original plan for the sculpture included one figure crushing a German helmet with his foot. It was later decided to dismiss this feature because of its overtly militaristic imagery. In Sympathy of the Canadians for the Helpless, one man stands erect while three other figures, stricken by hunger or disease, are crouched and kneeling around him. The standing man represents Canada's sympathy for the weak and oppressed. The figure of a cloaked young woman stands on top and at the centre of the front wall and overlooks the Douai Plains. She has her head bowed, her eyes cast down, and her chin resting in one hand. Below her at ground level is a sarcophagus, bearing a Brodie helmet and a sword, and draped in laurel branches. The saddened figure of Canada Bereft, also known as Mother Canada, is a national personification of the young nation of Canada, mourning her dead. The statue, a reference to traditional images of the Mater Dolorosa and presented in a similar style to that of Michelangelo's Pietà, faces eastward looking out to the dawn of the new day. Unlike the other statues on the monument, stonemasons carved Canada Bereft from a single 30 tonne block of stone. The statue is the largest single piece in the monument and serves as a focal point. The area in front of the memorial was turned into a grassed space, which Allward referred to as the amphitheatre, that fanned out from the monument's front wall for a distance of 270 feet (82 m) while the battle-damaged landscape around the sides and back of the monument were left untouched. The twin pylons rise to a height 30 metres above the memorial's stone platform; one bears the maple leaf for Canada and the other the fleur-de-lis for France, and both symbolize the unity and sacrifice of the two countries. At the top of the pylons is a grouping of figures known collectively as the Chorus. The most senior figures represent Justice and Peace; Peace stands with a torch upraised, making it the highest point in the region. The pair is in a style similar to Allward's previously commissioned statues of Truth and Justice, located outside the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa. The remainder of the Chorus is located directly below the senior figures: Faith, Hope and Truth on the eastern pylon; and Honour, Charity and Knowledge on the western pylon. Around these figures are shields of Canada, Britain, and France. Large crosses adorn the outside of each pylon. The First World War battle honours of the Canadian regiments, and a dedicatory message to Canada's war dead in both French and English are located at the base of the pylons. The Spirit of Sacrifice is located at the base between the two pylons. In the display, a young dying soldier is gazing upward in a crucifixion-like pose, having thrown his torch to a comrade who holds it aloft behind him. In a lightly veiled reference to the poem In Flanders Fields by John McCrae, the torch is passed from one comrade to another in an effort to keep alive the memory of the war dead. The Mourning Parents, one male and one female figure, are reclining on either side of the western steps on the reverse side of the monument. They represent the mourning mothers and fathers of the nation and are likely patterned on the four statues by Michelangelo on the Medici Tomb in Florence. Inscribed on the outside wall of the monument are the names of the 11,285 Canadians killed in France whose final resting place is unknown. Most Commonwealth War Graves Commission memorials present names in a descending list format in a manner that permits the modification of panels as remains are found and identified. Allward instead sought to present the names as a seamless list and decided to do so by inscribing the names in continuous bands, across both vertical and horizontal seams, around the base of the monument. As a consequence, as remains were discovered it was not possible to remove commemorated names without interrupting the seamless list, and as a consequence there are individuals who have a known grave but are commemorated on the memorial. The memorial contains the names of four posthumous Victoria Cross recipients; Robert Grierson Combe, Frederick Hobson, William Johnstone Milne, and Robert Spall. ### Moroccan Division Memorial The Moroccan Division Memorial is dedicated to the memory of the French and Foreign members of the Moroccan Division, killed during the Second Battle of Artois in May 1915. The monument was raised by veterans of the division and inaugurated on 14 June 1925, having been built without planning permission. Excluding the various commemorative plaques at the bottom front facade of the memorial, campaign battles are inscribed on the left- and right-hand side corner view of the memorial. The veterans of the division later funded the April 1987 installation of a marble plaque that identified the Moroccan Division as the only division where all subordinate units had been awarded the Legion of Honour. The Moroccan Division was initially raised as the Marching Division of Morocco. The division comprised units of varying origins and although the name would indicate otherwise, it did not in fact contain any units originating from Morocco. Moroccans were part of the Marching Regiment of the Foreign Legion which was formed from the merger of the 2nd Marching Regiment of the 1st Foreign Regiment with the 2nd Marching Regiment of the 2nd Foreign Regiment, both also part of the Moroccan Division Brigades. The division contained Tirailleurs and Zouaves, of principally Tunisian and Algerian origin, and most notably Legionnaires from the 2nd Marching Regiment of the 1st Foreign Regiment and the 7th Algerian Tirailleurs Regiment. The French Legionnaires came, as attested to by a plaque installed on the memorial, from 52 different countries and included amongst them American, Polish, Russian, Italian, Greek, German, Czechoslovakian, Swedish, Armenian, various nationals of the Jewish faith (), and Swiss volunteers such as writer Blaise Cendrars. In the battle, General Victor d'Urbal, commander of the French Tenth Army, sought to dislodge the Germans from the region by attacking their positions at Vimy Ridge and Notre Dame de Lorette. When the attack began on 9 May 1915, the French XXXIII Army Corps made significant territorial gains. The Moroccan Division, which was part of the XXXIII Army Corps, quickly moved through the German defences and advanced 4 kilometres (4,400 yd) into German lines in two hours. The division managed to capture the height of the ridge, with small parties even reaching the far side of the ridge, before retreating due to a lack of reinforcements. Even after German counter-attacks, the division managed to hold a territorial gain of 2,100 metres (2,300 yd). The division did however suffer heavy casualties. Those killed in the battle and commemorated on the memorial include both of the division's brigade commanders, Colonels Gaston Cros and Louis Augustus Theodore Pein. ### Grange Subway The First World War's Western Front included an extensive system of tunnels, subways, and dugouts. The Grange Subway is a tunnel system that is approximately 800 metres (870 yd) in length and once connected the reserve lines to the front line. This permitted soldiers to advance to the front quickly, securely, and unseen. A portion of this tunnel system is open to the public through regular guided tours provided by Canadian student guides. The Arras-Vimy sector was conducive to tunnel excavation owing to the soft, porous yet extremely stable nature of the chalk underground. As a result, pronounced underground warfare had been a feature of the Vimy sector since 1915. In preparation for the Battle of Vimy Ridge, five British tunnelling companies excavated 12 subways along the Canadian Corps' front, the longest of which was 1.2 kilometres (1,300 yd) in length. The tunnellers excavated the subways at a depth of 10 metres to ensure protection from large calibre howitzer shellfire. The subways were often dug at a pace of four metres a day and were often two metres tall and one metre wide. This underground network often incorporated or included concealed light rail lines, hospitals, command posts, water reservoirs, ammunition stores, mortar and machine gun posts, and communication centres. ### Lieutenant-Colonel Mike Watkins memorial Near the Canadian side of the restored trenches is a small memorial plaque dedicated to Lieutenant-Colonel Mike Watkins MBE. Watkins was head of Explosive Ordnance Disposal at the Directorate of Land Service Ammunition, Royal Logistic Corps, and a leading British explosive ordnance disposal expert. In August 1998, he died in a roof collapse near a tunnel entrance while undertaking a detailed investigative survey of the British tunnel system on the grounds of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial site. Watkins was no stranger to the tunnel system at Vimy Ridge. Earlier the same year, he participated in the successful disarming of 3 tonnes of deteriorated ammonal explosives located under a road intersection on the site. ### Visitors' centre The site has a visitors' centre, staffed by Canadian student guides, which is open seven days a week. During the memorial restoration, the original visitors' centre near the monument was closed and replaced with a temporary one, which remains in use today. The visitors' centre is now near the preserved forward trench lines, close to many of the craters created by underground mining during the war and near the entrance of the Grange Subway. Construction of a new educational visitors' centre is expected to be completed by April 2017, in advance of the 100th anniversary of the battle. The new million visitor centre is a public-private partnership between government and the Vimy Foundation. In order to raise funds the Vimy Foundation granted naming rights in various halls of the visitor centre to sponsors, an approach which has met some level of controversy due to the site being a memorial park. ## Sociocultural influence The Canadian National Vimy Memorial site has considerable sociocultural significance for Canada. The idea that Canada's national identity and nationhood were born out of the Battle of Vimy Ridge is an opinion that is widely repeated in military and general histories of Canada. Historian Denise Thomson suggests that the construction of the Vimy memorial represents the culmination of an increasingly assertive nationalism that developed in Canada during the interwar period. Hucker suggests that the memorial transcends the Battle of Vimy Ridge and now serves as an enduring image of the whole First World War, while expressing the enormous impact of war in general, and also considers that the 2005 restoration project serves as evidence of a new generation's determination to remember Canada's contribution and sacrifice during the First World War. The Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada recognized the importance of the site by recommending its designation as one of the National Historic Sites of Canada; it was so designated in 1996, and is one of only two outside of Canada. The other is the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial, also in France. Remembrance has also taken other forms: the Vimy Foundation, having been established to preserve and promote Canada's First World War legacy as symbolized by the victory at the Battle of Vimy Ridge, and Vimy Ridge Day, to commemorate the deaths and casualties during the battle. Local Vimy resident Georges Devloo spent 13 years until his death in 2009 offering car rides to Canadian tourists to and from the memorial at no charge, as a way of paying tribute to the Canadians who fought at Vimy. The memorial is not without its critics. Alana Vincent has argued that constituent parts of the monument are in conflict, and as a result the message conveyed by the monument is not unified. Visually, Vincent argues there is a dichotomy between the triumphant pose of the figures at the top of the pylons and the mourning posture of those figures at the base. Textually, she argues the inscription text celebrating the victory at the Battle of Vimy Ridge strikes a very different tone to the list of names of the missing at the base of the monument. The memorial is regularly the subject or inspiration of other artistic projects. In 1931, Will Longstaff painted Ghosts of Vimy Ridge, depicting ghosts of men from the Canadian Corps on Vimy Ridge surrounding the memorial, though the memorial was still several years away from completion. The memorial has been the subject of stamps in both France and Canada, including a French series in 1936 and a Canadian series on the 50th anniversary of the Armistice of 11 November 1918. The Canadian Unknown Soldier was selected from a cemetery in the vicinity of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial, and the design of the Canadian Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is based upon the stone sarcophagus at the base of the Vimy memorial. The Never Forgotten National Memorial was intended to be a 24-metre (79 ft) statue inspired by the Canada Bereft statue on the memorial, before the project was cancelled in February 2016. A 2001 Canadian historical novel The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart involves the characters in the design and creation of the memorial. In 2007, the memorial was a short-listed selection for the Seven Wonders of Canada. The Royal Canadian Mint released commemorative coins featuring the memorial on several occasions, including a 5 cent sterling silver coin in 2002 and a 30 dollar sterling silver coin in 2007. The Sacrifice Medal, a Canadian military decoration created in 2008, features the image of Mother Canada on the reverse side of the medal. A permanent bas relief sculpted image of the memorial is presented in the gallery of the grand hall of the Embassy of France in Canada to symbolize the close relations between the two countries. The memorial is featured on the reverse of the Frontier Series Canadian polymer \$20 banknote, which was released by the Bank of Canada on 7 November 2012. ## See also - World War I memorials
19,957,608	George H. D. Gossip	1,163,282,179	American-British chess player	[ "1841 births", "1907 deaths", "19th-century English writers", "19th-century chess players", "American emigrants to England", "American people of English descent", "British chess writers", "Chess players from London", "Chess theoreticians", "English chess players", "English emigrants to colonial Australia", "English expatriates in Canada", "English expatriates in France", "English expatriates in Germany", "People from Barlborough", "People from the Metropolitan Borough of Doncaster", "Sportspeople from Derbyshire", "Sportspeople from Ipswich", "Sportspeople from Montreal", "Sportspeople from New York City", "Sportspeople from San Francisco", "Sportspeople from Sydney", "Sportspeople from Yorkshire", "Writers from London", "Writers from Montreal", "Writers from New York City", "Writers from San Francisco", "Writers from Sydney", "Writers from Yorkshire" ]	George Hatfeild Dingley Gossip (December 6, 1841 – May 11, 1907) was a minor American-English chess master and writer. He competed in chess tournaments between 1870 and 1895, playing against most of the world's leading players, but with only modest success. The writer G. H. Diggle calls him "the King of Wooden Spoonists" because he usually finished last in strong tournaments. Gossip was also a noted writer. His treatise The Chess-Player's Manual—A Complete Guide to Chess, a 900-page tome published in 1874 after several years of work, was harshly received by the critics, largely because he had included a number of informal skittles games that he had (atypically) won against stronger players. As a result, Gossip developed a lifelong enmity toward chess critics, whom he often attacked ferociously in his books. However, his 1879 book Theory of the Chess Openings was well received. Wilhelm Steinitz, the first World Chess Champion, wrote that the 1888 edition of The Chess-Player's Manual was one of the best available books on the game. Thanks in part to a 122-page appendix by S. Lipschütz, it became one of the standard opening works of the time. Gossip made his living primarily as a journalist, author, and translator. He wrote for publications in England, France, Australia, and the United States. At various times he resided in each of those countries, as well as in Germany and Canada. In 1898 and 1899, two publishers issued Gossip's sole book about a subject other than chess, The Jew of Chamant. Published under the pseudonym "Ivan Trepoff", it was virulently antisemitic. Chess writers have often mocked Gossip's play, calling him a "grandpatzer" and the like. However, Kenneth Whyld, one of his previous critics, suggests that history may have judged his strength unfairly. ## Early life and education Gossip was born in New York City on December 6, 1841, to George Hatfeild Gossip, an Englishman, and his wife Mary Ellen Dingley Gossip, of New York. When he was sixteen months old, his mother died; about two years later, he and his father moved to England. His aunt, Mrs. Reaston Rodes, raised him, apparently with little involvement by his father. Gossip grew up at Barlborough Hall, Derbyshire (the Rodes family seat) and at Hatfield, in Yorkshire. Both the Gossip and Rodes families are listed in Burke's Landed Gentry. He was educated at Windermere College, Westmorland, and won a scholarship to Oxford University, but was unable to attend as his father, uncle, and aunts lost a lawsuit that ruined them financially. As a result, Gossip had to support himself through his own labors. ## Non-chess adult life Gossip made his living primarily as a writer and translator, writing for newspapers and magazines on three continents. His profession is described in the 1871, 1881, and 1891 United Kingdom censuses, respectively, as a "translator of languages", an "author of work on chess", and a member of the "literary profession". He lived for over five years in Paris, contributing to French publications. From 1879 to 1880 he was "employed occasionally as translator and otherwise" in The Times of London's office in Paris. He also lived in Germany. Gossip married Alicia (the name is sometimes given as "Alice"), a music teacher from Dublin, in Jersey in 1868. As of 1871, they were living in London with their 11-month-old son George and two servants. By 1881, Gossip and his wife had moved to Ipswich, and had three more children: Helen (born c. 1872), Harold (c. 1874), and Mabel (c. 1879). After Gossip's father died in 1882, the Gossips and their four children immigrated to Australia, arriving in January 1883. While in that country, Gossip wrote articles for the Sydney Star, Sydney Globe, Sydney Evening News, Town and Country Journal, The Advertiser (Adelaide), and other publications. He contributed literary articles to Once a Month magazine (Melbourne) and the Sydney Quarterly Magazine. Gossip moved to the United States in 1888, departing in April from Sydney on the steamship Alameda. In May, the ship arrived in San Francisco, where, Gossip wrote, "I first set foot on my native soil after an absence of over forty years." He wrote articles for the San Francisco Examiner on the "Chinese Question in Australia" and the San Francisco Chronicle on "Protection and Free Trade in New South Wales". His family apparently remained in Australia, where Alicia died of cancer in October 1888. In 1894, Gossip's children Helen and Harold both married, in Victoria and Melbourne, respectively. Gossip's grandson, George Hatfield Dingley Gossip, born in Sydney in 1897, was a World War I flying ace for Australia, "shooting down six enemy aircraft while flying his Sopwith Camel along the Belgian coast". In 1889, Gossip returned to Europe. By 1891, he was living as a tenant in a London boarding house. In 1894, he moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada. While living there, Gossip contributed articles to a newspaper in Manchester, England. The June 1895 British Chess Magazine (BCM) and June 1897 American Chess Magazine reported that he was living in Buffalo, New York. Under the pseudonym "Ivan Trepoff", Gossip wrote a book, The Jew of Chamant, which was published by Hausauer (Buffalo) in 1898, and by F.T. Neely (London and New York) in 1899. The two versions are subtitled, respectively, "or, the modern Monte Cristo" and "a romance of crime". The book is intensely antisemitic. The author explains in its preface: > My object in the present work is to paint the rich Jew in his true colors, as the enemy of society; to show that the Jew who steals millions, can, in Europe, at any rate, defy the laws with impunity, and that he almost invariably escapes punishment owing to improper occult influences, and the mighty power of Israelitish gold. The chess literature is silent about the last decade of Gossip's life. He died of heart disease on May 11, 1907, at the Railway Hotel in Liphook, England. ## Chess career By 1864, Gossip was appearing in London chess circles, drawing a game against Joseph Henry Blackburne at a simultaneous exhibition in April. He played in a number of chess tournaments between 1870 and 1895, usually with unimpressive results. At London 1870, the Third British Chess Association Congress (won by John Wisker after a playoff against Amos Burn), Gossip scored two of six possible points, finishing in a tie for fifth–sixth out of seven players. He had the consolation of handing Burn his only loss. At London 1872 (won by Steinitz ahead of Johannes Zukertort and Blackburne), he scored just one out of seven, finishing seventh out of eight players. Gossip won the 1873–74 correspondence chess tournament of the Chess-Players Chronicle, after which he "was thought by some to be the strongest correspondence player known". However, playing first board for England in an 1879 correspondence chess match against the United States, he lost all four of his games to Ellen Gilbert of Hartford, Connecticut. She "caused a sensation in the chess world" by announcing mate in 21 moves in one game, and mate in 35 moves in another. Gossip responded gallantly, dedicating his book Theory of the Chess Openings to her. In 1874, Gossip lost a match for the Championship Cup of the Provinces to Rev. John Owen, retiring because of illness after one win, two draws, and two losses. He won a local tournament at the Café de la Régence in Paris in 1880. In 1882, he beat Wordsworth Donisthorpe in a match held at Simpson's Divan in London. Gossip's first significant success at over-the-board chess came at the 1883 London Vizayanagaram minor tournament. He scored 171⁄2 out of 25, tying for fifth–sixth place out of 26 players with Charles Ranken, who later co-authored the treatise Chess Openings Ancient and Modern (1889). Curt von Bardeleben won with 211⁄2 points; Isidor Gunsberg, who would narrowly lose an 1890–91 World Championship match to Steinitz, finished fourth with 19 points. In 1885 Gossip, a year after immigrating to Australia, issued a challenge to any player in the Australian colonies to play a match with him for 20 pounds a side and the title of Australian champion. Frederick Karl Esling, a leading Melbourne player, accepted the challenge. While given his experience, Gossip was considered to be a heavy favourite, Esling won the first game, and the second was adjourned in a position favorable to him. Gossip then pleaded illness and forfeited the match. Kenneth Whyld writes that the Australians probably considered Gossip a "whingeing Pom". An Australian commentator observes, "Gossip may not have been the most popular itinerant to venture to these shores in the nineteenth century, but when he announced his challenge ... he at least brought the question of an official Chess Champion of Australia before the chess playing fraternity". In 1950, when Esling was 90, the Australian Chess Federation formally declared, belatedly, that he had become the first Australian Chess Champion by winning his 1885 match against Gossip. The Second Australian Chess Championship, a tournament, was held at Adelaide in 1887. Gossip finished third with 61⁄2 out of 9, behind Henry Charlick (71⁄2 points) and Esling (7 points). After returning to America in 1888, Gossip obtained an appointment at the Columbia Chess Club. The following year, he represented England at the Sixth American Chess Congress (New York 1889), one of the greatest tournaments of the 19th century. The Congress, a double round robin that was one of the longest tournaments in history, was intended to select a challenger for the world championship title. There, Gossip had what G. H. Diggle calls "perhaps the best performance of his career". He scored 131⁄2 out of 38 (11 wins, 5 draws, 22 losses), finishing 17th–18th out of 20 players. He won games from S. Lipschütz, Max Judd, Eugene Delmar, Jackson Showalter, William Pollock (twice), Henry Bird (twice), David Graham Baird, James Moore Hanham, and John Washington Baird. Mikhail Chigorin and Max Weiss tied for first with 29 points, edging out Gunsberg (281⁄2 points). Gossip was unable to repeat even this modest level of success in his final tournaments. He finished last in five consecutive strong events: the Master Section at London 1889 (scoring 11⁄2 out of 10; Bird won on tiebreak over Gunsberg); the Meisterturnier (Master Tournament) at Breslau 1889 (scoring three out of ten; Siegbert Tarrasch won); the Master Section of Manchester 1890 (scoring four out of nineteen; Tarrasch won); the Master Tournament at London 1892 (scoring 21⁄2 out of 11; future World Champion Emanuel Lasker won); and New York 1893 (scoring 21⁄2 out of 13; Lasker won with a perfect score). Gossip's run of last-place finishes moved Diggle to dub him "the King of Wooden Spoonists". Gossip's last event was a minor tournament in Skaneateles, New York, in July–August 1895, where he scored three out of six, finishing in a tie for third–fifth of seven players. A report in the BCM in 1889 observed that Gossip suffered from great nervousness that prevented him from fully displaying his abilities at chess tournaments, where he had to stop his ears "to keep out the low hum inseparable from a large concourse of people". Bird likewise wrote that minor distractions that he would not even notice would "drive ... Gossip to despair". The BCM commentator accordingly believed that Gossip "would make a good stand in a single encounter with men who are much higher in the tournament than he is". Following his move to Montreal, Gossip in a letter to a friend dated October 20, 1894, complained, "The French Canadian Chessplayers here are the poorest, meanest humbugs I ever met – all Jesuits." He and Pollock played a match at the Montreal Chess Club in December 1894 and January 1895; each won six games, with five draws. This was an impressive result for Gossip "in view of Pollock's undoubted strength". Later in 1895, Pollock finished 19th out of 22 players, scoring 8 out of 21 (including wins over Tarrasch and Steinitz), at Hastings 1895, arguably at that time the strongest tournament in history. Diggle writes that Gossip's drawn match with Pollock vindicates the BCM'''s 1889 observation that Gossip would be more at home in a match than a tournament. Gossip was only a minor master, "a mediocre player who figured at or near the bottom of every better than average tourney in which he participated". However, during his career he played tournament games against most of the world's leading players, including World Champions Lasker and Steinitz; World Championship challengers Zukertort, Tarrasch, Chigorin, and Gunsberg; Louis Paulsen, Harry Nelson Pillsbury, and James Mason, all at some point ranked number 1 in the world by Chessmetrics; Burn, Blackburne, Bird, and Cecil de Vere (all ranked number 2); and Weiss and Wisker (both ranked number 3). ## Chess books and articles As of 1874, Gossip was the chess editor of The Hornet. In that year, after several years' work, he published his magnum opus, The Chess-Player's Manual—A Complete Guide to Chess. It was "a handsomely produced work with more than 800 of its 900 pages devoted to openings and illustrative games". The book became the subject of biting criticism, largely because Gossip had included 27 illustrative games that he had won against leading players of the day, and only 12 games that he had lost. Steinitz later wrote: > Mr Gossip had practiced the unfair ruse of carefully preserving stray skittles games which he had happened to win or draw, generally after many defeats, against masters whose public records stood far above his own, ... thus leading the public to believe that the author stood on a par with them, or was even their superior. According to Diggle, this edition of the book "failed utterly". The harsh reception accorded it embittered Gossip against chess critics for the rest of his life. In 1879, Gossip published Theory of the Chess Openings, a shorter work more in the style of Modern Chess Openings, which sold out within six months. The preface and the concluding chapter of the book bitterly attacked the critics who had savaged his earlier treatise. This time the critics, "while deploring 'the outside slices of Mr. Gossip's sandwich' ", praised the main body of the work. William Wayte in the Chess Players Chronicle called the book "fairly in possession of the field among English elementary treatises". Unfortunately for Gossip, he "was the victim of an act of gross piracy, as many copies forming no part of the edition printed by his orders were circulated in America and the 'pirates' never brought to justice." While in Australia, Gossip wrote a chess column that appeared in Once a Month magazine from February to October 1885. A new edition of The Chess-Player's Manual was published in 1888, this one with a 122-page appendix by Lipschütz. Steinitz wrote that "Mr Gossip has produced a useful work, which in some respects must be regarded even superior to that of Staunton or any other previous writers on the chess openings. ... But the most meritorious distinguishing feature of the Manual is the large collection of illustrative games by various first-class masters, and in that respect Mr Gossip's work stands second only to Signor Salvioli's Teoria e Pratica among the analytical works in any language." The following year, Steinitz cited it in The Modern Chess Instructor as one of the 12 principal authorities he had relied on in writing that treatise. An anonymous reviewer in The New York Times called the new edition of The Chess-Player's Manual "probably the most convenient, trustworthy, and satisfactory chess book accessible in the English language". The reviewer concluded that the games and problems in the volume would "afford great entertainment" to the casual enthusiast, "while for real students of chess ... it is very nearly indispensable". He also praised "Mr. Lipschütz's appendix, which brings the development of the openings almost down to date". David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld write in The Oxford Companion to Chess that Lipschütz's appendix "helped to make this one of the standard opening books of the time". World Champion Bobby Fischer had a copy of The Chess-Player's Manual in his personal library, and cited it in his famous 1961 article "A Bust to the King's Gambit". The June 1888 issue of Steinitz's International Chess Magazine contained an article by Gossip that Robert John McCrary calls "a very illuminating, important, and detailed account of the state of San Francisco chess". For the last few months of 1888 Gossip was listed as being on the "Editorial Staff" of the Columbia Chess Chronicle. Its December 29, 1888, issue contained a lengthy article by him entitled "Chess in the Present Day", which offered a broad sweep of chess history and the advances made by chess in the United States. Gossip called Paul Morphy and Steinitz "the two greatest chessplayers that have ever lived" and remarked that "no Englishman has yet attained, or probably ever will attain, to the eminence of chess champion of the world. ... The deep-thinking German, the brilliant Frenchman and the versatile American have always been too much for sober, stolid John Bull." Gossip in 1891 published a second revised edition of his Theory of the Chess Openings, which Diggle calls "a handsome volume with an appendix of sixty-one pages". Characteristically, he devoted much of the appendix to criticizing his detractors and anticipating their further attacks. Gossip also wrote the lesser-known chess books The Chess Players' Text Book (1889), The Chess-player's Vade Mecum and Pocket Guide to the Openings (1891), Modern Chess Brilliancies (1892), The Chess Player's Pocket Guide to Games at Odds (1893), The Chess Pocket Manual (1894), The Chess Player's Mentor (with Francis Joseph Lee, 1895), The Complete Chess-Guide (with Lee, 1903), Gossip's Vest-Pocket Chess Manual (date unknown; pictured at above left), and a collection of his own games, Games: G. H. D. Gossip versus Bezkrowny, Clerc, Donisthorpe, Gocher, Gunsberg, Hoffer, Owen, Sanders, Vines Played During the Last 10 Years in England & France (1882, with Gunsberg and Steinitz). ## Manner and reputation Burn's biographer Richard Forster notes that Gossip "was well-known for his exaggerated self-esteem". Philip Sergeant in his book A Century of British Chess remarks that his "play was never quite up to his own estimate of it". The New York Times portrays him at the Sixth American Chess Congress (1889) as follows: > Gossip, with his long, flowing beard, looks like one of the old-time monks. He has a good-shaped cranium, bald at the top, and is a little above the medium height. ... He believes himself to be one of the greatest chessplayers in the world, and thinks that if everything had gone on to his liking he could have beaten all the champions at the tournament. He is a deliberate player, but every now and then he takes a nip from a flask of brandy that generally stands on his table. He complained that his chair was too low, and he once attributed a defeat to that. Finally, he got a large ledger and sat upon it. He did, in fact, seem to derive some inspiration from its contents, for he played two or three excellent games afterward. Diggle observes that Gossip "developed 'a happy knack of treading on other people's corns' by rushing into print" his occasional wins in offhand games against such leading players as Bird and Zukertort. He also vehemently denounced his critics and those with whom he disagreed. For example, in 1888 the Columbia Chess Chronicle quoted a lecture he had given two days before on the Steinitz Gambit. After condemning as "utterly worthless" the analysis of that opening published in two English periodicals, Gossip declaimed: > In order, therefore, to establish an important point of theory, and at the same time to prevent American chessplayers from being misled and deceived by the superficial analysis of incompetent British chess editors, whose object in condemning the Steinitz Gambit has obviously been mainly to depreciate the originality of its illustrious inventor, whom they invariably try to drag down to their own miserable level of shallow incompetency and self-conceit, I submit the following variations which at any rate possess the undeniable merit of exposing the hollow analytical twaddle continually published in the two London journals above named. Hooper and Whyld note Gossip's "unusual talent for making enemies" and attribute the critical reception of his books to this, since in their opinion "his books were not significantly worse than the general run of the time, and they were better than, for example, those by Bird, who was popular". They remark on his travels that, "Disliked in England, he travelled to Australia, the United States, and Canada, where he also became unpopular." Some measure of his talent for stirring up controversy is provided by a letter Pollock wrote during their 1894–95 match: > I and Gossip are six each and may draw the match. He has proved a terrible crank and has had several games by forfeit, and one "cancelled". He now has a libel suit against the chess column of the Herald. ... We have just agreed, per the committee, to call the match a draw. Whereby all parties are relieved. Chess historian Edward Winter observes that "Gossip has always been a soft target for mockery". He notes that Hooper and Whyld in the first edition (1984) of The Oxford Companion to Chess "treated him essentially as light relief"; the second edition (1992) treated him more equitably, but like the first omitted any mention of his performance at New York 1889. Yakov Damsky in The Batsford Book of Chess Records (2005), addressing the question of which player "achieved the greatest negative distinction" on the international level, opines that Gossip "can probably feel safe from competition". Mike Fox and Richard James in their book The Even More Complete Chess Addict (1993) write that, "Of players who've entered chess history, perhaps the strongest claimant for the all-time grandpatzer title is George Hatfeild Dingley Gossip (1841–1907). George had a worse record in major tournaments than anyone in history (last at Breslau 1889, London 1889, Manchester 1890, London 1892, and New York 1893: a total of just four wins, 52 losses and 21 draws)." Like Hooper and Whyld, they overlook his result at New York 1889, a major tournament where he won 11 games and finished above the bottom. In a 2001 article, Whyld himself takes notice of Gossip's result at New York 1889 and suggests that "history has perhaps given him an unfair verdict". By Arpad Elo's calculation, Gossip's strength during his five-year peak was equivalent to an Elo rating of 2310. Another assessment system, Chessmetrics, calculates that Gossip's highest rating was 2470 (number 50 in the world) in April 1889. By comparison, the world's three highest-rated players at that time had Chessmetrics ratings over 2700. Chessmetrics also ranks Gossip number 17 in the world during four one-month periods between February and July 1873, when opportunities for high-level competition were much rarer. Like Diggle, Chessmetrics considers New York 1889 Gossip's best individual performance, concluding that he scored 39% against opponents with an average rating of 2595, giving him a performance rating of 2539 for that tournament. In 1904, the Deutsche Schachzeitung, on the basis of its tabulation of players' percentage scores in all major international tournaments from London 1851 to Cambridge Springs 1904, ranked Gossip the number 62 living player in the world. Diggle writes that despite his faults, Gossip was "a man of dauntless courage and infinite capacity for hard work", which enabled him to become a recognized author despite the disastrous reception that the first edition of his Chess-Player's Manual'' received. His literary style was vigorous, and shows him to be an educated and well-read man. ## Notable games ### Showalter vs. Gossip, New York 1889 The following game was played between future five-time U.S. Champion Jackson Showalter (White) and Gossip (Black) at the Sixth American Chess Congress, New York 1889. Fred Reinfeld calls the game "a glorious masterpiece". Steinitz proclaims, "One of the finest specimens of sacrificing play on record. Mr. Gossip deserves the highest praise for the ingenuity and depth of combination which he displayed in this game." Soltis writes that "there were many raised eyebrows" when the tournament committee awarded the prize for the best-played game not to Gossip for this game, but to Gunsberg for his win over Mason. After comparing the two games, Whyld writes, "The verdict seems clear. Gossip was robbed!" Diggle states, "Gossip was, of course, the last man to keep quiet about this decision, and for once he had considerable public sympathy on his side." ### Chigorin vs. Gossip, New York 1889 When facing world-class opponents, Gossip more often fell victim to their combinations. A famous example is his loss, also at New York 1889, to Mikhail Chigorin (White), who lost world championship matches to Steinitz in 1889 and 1892.
64,257,890	Janet(s)	1,152,093,167	null	[ "2018 American television episodes", "Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form-winning works", "The Good Place episodes" ]	"Janet(s)" is the tenth episode of the third season of the American fantasy-comedy television series The Good Place. The thirty-sixth episode of the series overall, it originally aired in the United States on NBC on December 6, 2018, as the show's mid-season finale. "Janet(s)" was written by Josh Siegal and Dylan Morgan and was directed by Morgan Sackett. After rediscovering the afterlife earlier in the season, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason help others on Earth alongside afterlife architect Michael and assistant Janet. In the episode, the four humans find themselves transformed into versions of Janet as they seek to escape demons from the Bad Place. Eleanor tries to address her romantic feelings for Chidi and has an identity crisis when he denies any feelings for her. Meanwhile, Michael and Janet visit Accounting, the section of the afterlife that calculates point totals for people's good and bad actions during their lives, to determine if the Bad Place is manipulating the points system. The premise of the episode originated during production of the show's second season, and the writers studied concepts of identity and the self for the episode. D'Arcy Carden, who plays multiple versions of Janet in the episode, prepared for her role by watching rehearsals of her castmates and following the actors between scenes. Filming took place in July 2018 and required significantly more visual effects than normal; several crew members wondered during production if the finished product would make sense. Seen by 2.58 million viewers in its original broadcast, "Janet(s)" received praise from critics; Carden's performance earned widespread acclaim. It was ranked as one of 2018's best television episodes by many publications. Analysis of the episode has focused on its discussion of the meaning of the self, as well as why nobody had reached the Good Place in over five centuries. The episode won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, and Siegal and Morgan were nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for their work on the episode. ## Plot When Janet (D'Arcy Carden) brings Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason into her void – an alternate dimension tied to her essence – the four humans are accidentally transformed into versions of Janet. The original Janet gives each person different clothes to identify them before she and Michael (Ted Danson) leave to visit Accounting. The humans stay in Janet's void, as they are now fugitives within the afterlife. Michael and Janet meet the head accountant, Neil (Stephen Merchant). Neil insists the Bad Place cannot be tampering with the afterlife points system, but agrees to show them the system anyway. He explains that everything someone does on Earth is assigned a positive or negative point value. If something new occurs, an accountant gives it a value based on its intentions, effects, and other factors. Every new value is verified by three billion other accountants, leaving no room for tampering. Despite this, Michael asks to see Doug Forcett's file. Neil finds the Book of Dougs and says Doug is on track for the Bad Place. Michael considers this proof of tampering, as Doug has spent his life devoted to good actions. He asks to see a file for someone on track for the Good Place; Neil reveals nobody has reached the Good Place in 521 years. In Janet's void, Eleanor-Janet talks with Chidi-Janet about their past romantic relationships. Chidi-Janet argues those experiences happened to him in different lives. He cites several philosophers to prove his point, but Eleanor-Janet becomes frustrated and thinks he is avoiding a discussion of his feelings. Meanwhile, Jason-Janet and Tahani-Janet discover signs of Janet's romantic feelings for Jason. After more failed attempts to get Chidi-Janet to talk, Eleanor-Janet wonders why she is bothering to reach out to him. Her resulting identity crisis causes her to change into random bodies, and Janet's void begins to collapse. To restore her identity, Chidi-Janet lists off Eleanor's memories and the good things she has done before ultimately kissing her. This causes the four humans to both regain their normal appearances and be ejected from Janet's void. Michael, Janet, and the humans flee from the accountants; Michael takes the Book of Dougs with him. The six escape via a pneumatic tube and arrive in a mailroom. Eleanor (Kristen Bell) realizes they are in the Good Place. ## Production ### Development and writing According to series creator Michael Schur, the idea for an episode featuring multiple Janets originated during the show's second season, over a year before the episode aired. The crew discussed locations that had not been explored yet, as the characters had visited the Bad Place already and were going to visit Earth in the second-season finale. One such location was Janet's void, which led to the idea of Carden playing all four humans. Schur and the other writers were initially concerned such an idea might be too challenging to accomplish, but realizing that other shows such as Orphan Black had pulled it off provided them with the confidence to move forward. Planning for the episode began right after the second season ended production. At one point, the idea was only going to be included in the first act, but the writing staff did not want to use the concept as a "gimmick", so they reworked the idea to have Eleanor question her sense of self while trapped inside a Janet. The writing staff also met with philosophical advisors Todd May and Pamela Hieronymi to learn about concepts of identity and the self before writing the episode. Writers Josh Siegal and Dylan Morgan sent a draft of the script to May for input; he suggested small tweaks to improve how the relevant philosophical theories were explained. Schur told Carden to begin preparing for the episode in March 2018, four months before the episode would be filmed. Carden later said she was surprised when she learned about the episode and was grateful that the writers and producers trusted her to pull it off. For the episode, Carden plays a wide range of characters, including her normal character, each of the four humans as a Janet, a "Neutral Janet" in Accounting, and one scene in which she plays Eleanor pretending to be Jason. The cast began rehearsing for the episode earlier than normal to provide references for Carden's impressions. Her co-stars recorded footage of their performances for Carden to listen to and review, including a rehearsal on set with the cast playing their usual characters. The actors' movements during these performances were also tracked for use with special effects. Additionally, Carden followed the actors around when she was not in scenes and would mimic what they were doing. The other cast members provided help in various ways as Carden was learning to portray them; for instance, William Jackson Harper sent a copy of Chidi's lines the way he liked to memorize them, while Manny Jacinto showed her a video that inspired his portrayal of Jason. Carden later explained that she struggled to perform her impression of Harper as Chidi even though she could imagine it, and she found Bell's subtle actions to be hard to emulate. ### Filming Filming took place over five and a half days in July 2018. For the episode, Janet's void was represented by an entirely white set, though director Morgan Sackett decided to add furniture to prevent the audience from becoming bored by the setting. Filming required significantly more planning and visual effects than normal; Schur later called it "the opposite of how [they] usually make television" due to the precision required. In a separate interview, Schur described it as both "an extreme bottle episode" due to the limited setting and cast, and "the opposite of a bottle episode" because of the level of detail required. Though some scenes used stand-ins in costumes and wigs, many were filmed with only poles to represent the other characters. Carden later called those scenes the hardest part of filming for her, describing it as "kind of los[ing] your mind a little bit". A particularly difficult shot was the climactic kiss due to how Carden's body had to be positioned and the alignment of the shots. To film one part of the scene, she had to kiss a pair of wax lips placed atop a pole. The height differences between Carden and Bell added to the scene's challenges. After combining her multiple roles, Carden spent about 40 minutes performing in the episode, which was only 22 minutes long. At one point, Eleanor transforms into a series of different individuals as she loses her sense of self. Morgan and Siegal credited the idea to Schur and explained that they carefully scripted what each new person said for both emotional impact and humor based upon who would say the line. Visual effects producer David Niednagel added special effects to simulate the void and the furniture breaking up as Eleanor's struggles continue. As her void becomes unstable, Janet accidentally sings an excerpt of Cher's "Believe". Carden sang a version of the song for the episode, which was then auto-tuned, but the episode ultimately used Cher's recording because it was easier to get permission to use that version. Carden, Schur, and Siegal all remarked that there were instances during filming when the crew wondered if the final product would make any sense. Merchant, co-creator of the British version of The Office, makes a guest appearance in the episode; Schur worked as a writer on The Office's American adaptation. In the episode, Merchant holds a mug reading "Existence's Best Boss", an allusion to a similar mug used by Michael Scott. The prop was printed with the slogan, but Merchant held it the wrong way during filming, so the words were reapplied using special effects during post-production. ## Analysis One of the episode's themes is the meaning of the self; Chidi even leads a lecture on the topic within the episode. Schur remarked that the premise forces Eleanor to ask herself, "Who am I? What version of me am I right now?" Philosophy professor Alison Reiheld argues that Chidi's understanding of and relationship with Eleanor, not their kiss, is what saves her. As Reiheld explains, stories provide the scaffolding for "moral self-definition"; once Chidi reminds her of her personal history, Eleanor can act in the way that "best reflects who she is and wants to be". Vox's Emily St. James notes that after centuries of other lifetimes, the four humans felt uncertain of their true selves, remarking that "who you are is a little arbitrary, if you stop to think about it." Because of this, Chidi and Eleanor stop thinking about it and simply "hope for the best." Conversely, Dane Sawyer, a professor of philosophy and religion, argues that Eleanor's identity crisis is good for her. Sawyer explains that Buddhists believe attachment to one's sense of self can cause suffering, so Eleanor confronting the idea of "no-self" could be a step towards enlightenment and nirvana. However, Sawyer adds that compassion is one of Buddhism's chief virtues, and a person who moves past one's sense of self will naturally be compassionate, so Chidi's actions were not necessarily wrong. Another major topic of discussion was the reveal that nobody had reached the Good Place in 521 years. Several critics speculated as to why this happened. Alan Sepinwall, writing for Rolling Stone, suspected that the Bad Place had gamed the system, which was too flawed to realize it was broken. St. James suggested that modern life makes it too difficult to be a truly good person due to our effects on others in the present and future. This idea would be proven correct in the next episode, "The Book of Dougs", which revealed that the complex links in modern society lead to negative points even for well-intentioned actions. Philosophy instructor Laura Matthews calls this a virtually guaranteed outcome of the point system due to its use of deontological and consequentialist ethics. The show's writers had considered who would have reached the Good Place, but according to Schur, they eventually realized it was impossible to find an "Incontrovertibly Great Person" in recent history based on their criteria. ## Reception ### Ratings In its original broadcast on December 6, 2018, "Janet(s)" was seen by 2.58 million American viewers and received a 0.8 rating among adults ages 18–49. The episode placed fourth in its time slot, behind Thursday Night Football, Young Sheldon, and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Both measurements were the lowest of the season up to that point, though ratings rose when the show returned in January 2019. After factoring in seven-day DVR viewership, the episode received 4.23 million viewers and a 1.5 rating in the 18–49 demographic. ### Reviews "Janet(s)" received highly positive reviews from critics; many considered it a major improvement over the season's earlier episodes. Dennis Perkins of The A.V. Club called it the ideal version of a mid-season finale with plenty of "incident and action". He remarked that while Janet had been sidelined for much of the third season, this episode marked a significant course correction. Vulture's Noel Murray described the idea to turn the humans into Janets as a "masterstroke" that elevated a routine plotline. He deemed it a "dividing line" within the history of the show and, like Perkins, praised it for giving Carden more to do as Janet after receiving smaller roles earlier in the season. Alec Bojalad of Den of Geek praised the episode for both the creativity of the premise and the emotional truths the humans face. Entertainment Weekly's Darren Franich deemed "Janet(s)" the best episode of season three by far and felt the show was reaching its "runaway-train phase" at the end of the season. He said the reveal about nobody reaching the Good Place in centuries was, in some ways, the show's biggest twist yet. Sepinwall remarked that the show's return to the afterlife helped to produce one of its best episodes. He found himself appreciating the Eleanor-Chidi relationship more and praised Michael's growth as he took the situation into his own hands. St. James found the episode to be "a surprisingly romantic and sweet story" and praised the setup for future episodes, particularly after the less enjoyable episodes from earlier in the season. Carden's performance in the episode, which was described as a "showcase" for her character, was widely singled out for acclaim. Brian Grubb of Uproxx called it "one of the best television comedy performances by one person" he could recall. Perkins called it "marvelous", noting the details she was able to incorporate into each impression. Bojalad applauded Carden's ability to realistically depict the conflict between Eleanor and Chidi without using the main actors and described the episode as Carden "at the absolute height of [her] powers". St. James praised the show and Carden for committing to the premise and nailing the performances, suggesting that Carden deserved an Emmy for the performance. The editors of Paste named Carden's performance as Janet as their top television performance of 2018 and singled out her role in "Janet(s)" for displaying her talent. The episode was ranked among the best of the year by numerous publications. In an unranked top-ten list, Daniel Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter remarked that it was able to advance the story and hit emotional beats while not using most of the main cast. Esquire's Justin Kirkland also placed it in his top-ten list, describing it as "a triple threat of episodes: excellent acting, excellent narrative, and impressive visual stunts." In The New York Times's list of the year's most memorable episodes, James Poniewozik credited the show's strong writing for allowing its characters to all be played by Carden while maintaining their traits. The episode was also ranked seventh for the year by Entertainment Weekly and twenty-first by both IndieWire and The Guardian. ### Awards and nominations The episode resulted in several nominations for major awards. It received the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, the show's second of four consecutive wins in the category. For their work on the episode, Siegal and Morgan were nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, ultimately losing to Phoebe Waller-Bridge for "Episode 1" from Fleabag. The episode was also nominated for an ADG Excellence in Production Design Award for Half Hour Single-Camera Series and a Golden Reel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Live Action Under 35:00. Some people, including Schur, felt that Carden's lack of an Emmy nomination following the episode was a snub. Carden was nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her role the subsequent year.
342,395	Al-Mu'tasim	1,169,973,904	8th Abbasid caliph (r. 833–842)	[ "796 births", "842 deaths", "9th-century Abbasid caliphs", "Abbasid people of the Arab–Byzantine wars", "Arab Muslims", "City founders", "Mu'tazilism", "People from Baghdad", "Sons of Harun al-Rashid" ]	Abū Isḥāq Muḥammad ibn Hārūn al-Rashīd (Arabic: أبو إسحاق محمد بن هارون الرشيد; October 796 – 5 January 842), better known by his regnal name al-Muʿtaṣim biʾllāh (المعتصم بالله, lit. 'He who seeks refuge in God'), was the eighth Abbasid caliph, ruling from 833 until his death in 842. A younger son of Caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809), he rose to prominence through his formation of a private army composed predominantly of Turkic slave-soldiers (ghilmān, sing. ghulām). This proved useful to his half-brother, Caliph al-Ma'mun, who employed al-Mu'tasim and his Turkish guard to counterbalance other powerful interest groups in the state, as well as employing them in campaigns against rebels and the Byzantine Empire. When al-Ma'mun died unexpectedly on campaign in August 833, al-Mu'tasim was thus well placed to succeed him, overriding the claims of al-Ma'mun's son al-Abbas. Al-Mu'tasim continued many of his brother's policies, such as the partnership with the Tahirids, who governed Khurasan and Baghdad on behalf of the Abbasids. With the support of the powerful chief qādī, Ahmad ibn Abi Duwad, he continued to implement the rationalist Islamic doctrine of Mu'tazilism and the persecution of its opponents through the inquisition (miḥna). Although not personally interested in literary pursuits, al-Mu'tasim also nurtured the scientific renaissance begun under al-Ma'mun. In other ways, his reign marks a departure and a watershed moment in Islamic history, with the creation of a new regime centred on the military, and particularly his Turkish guard. In 836, a new capital was established at Samarra to symbolize this new regime and remove it from the restive populace of Baghdad. The power of the caliphal government was increased by centralizing measures that reduced the power of provincial governors in favour of a small group of senior civil and military officials in Samarra, and the fiscal apparatus of the state was more and more dedicated to the maintenance of the professional army, which was dominated by Turks. The Arab and Iranian elites that had played a major role in the early period of the Abbasid state were increasingly marginalized, and an abortive conspiracy against al-Mu'tasim in favour of al-Abbas in 838 resulted in a widespread purge of their ranks. This strengthened the position of the Turks and their principal leaders, Ashinas, Wasif, Itakh, and Bugha. Another prominent member of al-Mu'tasim's inner circle, the prince of Ushrusana, al-Afshin, fell afoul of his enemies at court and was overthrown and killed in 840/1. The rise of the Turks would eventually result in the troubles of the 'Anarchy at Samarra' and lead to the collapse of Abbasid power in the mid-10th century, but the ghulām-based system inaugurated by al-Mu'tasim would be widely adopted throughout the Muslim world. Al-Mu'tasim's reign was marked by continuous warfare. The two major internal campaigns of the reign were against the long-running Khurramite uprising of Babak Khorramdin in Adharbayjan, which was suppressed by al-Afshin in 835–837, and against Mazyar, the autonomous ruler of Tabaristan, who had clashed with the Tahirid governor of Khorasan and risen up in revolt. While his generals led the fight against internal rebellions, al-Mu'tasim himself led the sole major external campaign of the period, in 838 against the Byzantine Empire. His armies defeated Emperor Theophilos and sacked the city of Amorium. The Amorium campaign was widely celebrated, and became a cornerstone of caliphal propaganda, cementing al-Mu'tasim's reputation as a warrior-caliph. ## Early life Muhammad, the future al-Mu'tasim, was born in the Khuld ("Eternity") Palace in Baghdad, but the exact date is unclear: according to the historian al-Tabari (839–923), his birth was placed by authorities either in Sha'ban AH 180 (October 796 CE), or in AH 179 (Spring 796 CE or earlier). His parents were the fifth Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809), and Marida bint Shabib (Arabic: ماريدا بنت شبيب), a slave concubine. Marida was born in Kufa, but her family hailed from Soghdia, and she is usually considered to have been of Turkic origin. The young prince's early life coincided with what, in the judgment of posterity, was the golden age of the Abbasid Caliphate. The abrupt downfall of the powerful Barmakid family, which had dominated government during the previous decades, in 803 hinted at political instability at the highest levels of the court, while provincial rebellions that were suppressed with difficulty provided warning signals about the dynasty's hold over the empire. Nevertheless, compared to the strife and division that followed in the decades after Harun's death, the Abbasid empire was living through its halcyon days. Harun still ruled directly over the bulk of the Islamic world of his time, from Central Asia and Sind in the east to the Maghreb in the west. Lively trade networks linking Tang China and the Indian Ocean with Europe and Africa passed through the caliphate, with Baghdad at their nexus, bringing immense prosperity. The revenues of the provinces kept the treasury full, allowing Harun to launch huge expeditions against the Byzantine Empire and engage in vigorous diplomacy, his envoys arriving even at the distant court of Charlemagne. This wealth also allowed considerable patronage: charitable endowments to the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina and the welcoming of religious scholars and ascetics at court secured the benevolence of the religious classes towards the dynasty, while the funds lavished on poets guaranteed its lasting fame; the splendour of the caliphal court provided the inspiration for some of the earliest stories of the Thousand and One Nights. ## Career under al-Ma'mun As an adult, Muhammad was commonly called by his kunya, Abu Ishaq. Al-Tabari describes the adult Abu Ishaq as "fair-complexioned, with a black beard the hair tips of which were red and the end of which was square and streaked with red, and with handsome eyes". Other authors stress his physical strength and his love for physical activity—an anecdote recalls how during the Amorium campaign he went ahead of the army riding on a mule and searched in person for a ford across a river—in stark contrast to his more sedentary predecessors and successors. Later authors write that he was almost illiterate, but as the historian Hugh Kennedy comments, this "would have been most improbable for an Abbasid prince", and most likely reflects his lack of interest in intellectual pursuits. ### Activity during the civil war As one of Harun's younger sons, Abu Ishaq was initially of little consequence, and did not figure in the line of succession. Soon after Harun died in 809, a vicious civil war broke out between his elder half-brothers al-Amin (r. 809–813) and al-Ma'mun (r. 813–833). Al-Amin enjoyed the backing of the traditional Abbasid elites in Baghdad (the abnāʾ al-dawla), while al-Ma'mun was supported by other sections of the abnāʾ. Al-Ma'mun emerged victorious in 813 with the surrender of Baghdad after a long siege and the death of al-Amin. Choosing to remain in his stronghold in Khurasan, on the northeastern periphery of the Islamic world, al-Ma'mun allowed his main lieutenants to rule in his stead in Iraq. This resulted in a wave of antipathy towards al-Ma'mun and his "Persian" lieutenants, both among the Abbasid elites in Baghdad and generally in the western regions of the Caliphate, culminating in the nomination of Harun al-Rashid's younger brother Ibrahim as anti-caliph at Baghdad in 817. This event made al-Ma'mun realise his inability to rule from afar; bowing to popular reaction, he dismissed or executed his closest lieutenants, and returned in person to Baghdad in 819 to begin the difficult task of rebuilding the state. Throughout the conflict and its aftermath, Abu Ishaq remained in Baghdad. Al-Tabari records that Abu Ishaq led the Hajj pilgrimage in 816, accompanied by many troops and officials, among whom was Hamdawayh ibn Ali ibn Isa ibn Mahan, who had just been appointed to the governorship of the Yemen and was on his way there. During his stay in Mecca, his troops defeated and captured a pro-Alid leader who had raided the pilgrim caravans. He also led the pilgrimage the following year, but no details are known. It appears that at least during this time, Abu Ishaq was loyal to al-Ma'mun and his viceroy in Iraq, al-Hasan ibn Sahl, but, like most members of the dynasty and the abnāʾ of Baghdad, he supported his half-uncle Ibrahim against al-Ma'mun in 817–819. ### Formation of the Turkish guard From c. 814/5, Abu Ishaq began forming his corps of Turkish troops. The first members of the corps were domestic slaves he bought in Baghdad (the distinguished general Itakh was originally a cook) whom he trained in the art of war, but they were soon complemented by Turkish slaves sent directly from the fringes of the Muslim world in Central Asia, under an agreement with the local Samanid rulers. This private force was small—it probably numbered between three and four thousand at the time of his accession to the throne—but it was highly trained and disciplined, and made Abu Ishaq a man of power in his own right, as al-Ma'mun increasingly turned to him for assistance. The long civil war shattered the social and political order of the early Abbasid state; the abnāʾ al-dawla, the main political and military pillar of the early Abbasid state, had been much reduced by the civil war. Along with the abnāʾ, the old Arab families settled in the provinces since the time of the Muslim conquests, and the members of the extended Abbasid dynasty formed the core of the traditional elites and largely supported al-Amin. During the remainder of al-Ma'mun's reign they lost their positions in the administrative and military machinery, and with them their influence and power. Furthermore, as the civil war raged in the eastern half of the caliphate and in Iraq, the western provinces slipped from Baghdad's control in a series of rebellions that saw local strongmen claiming various degrees of autonomy or even trying to secede from the caliphate altogether. Although he had overthrown the old elites, al-Ma'mun lacked a large and loyal power base and army, so he turned to "new men" who commanded their own military retinues. These included the Tahirids, led by Abdallah ibn Tahir, and his own brother Abu Ishaq. Abu Ishaq's Turkish corps was politically useful to al-Ma'mun, who tried to lessen his own dependence on the mostly eastern Iranian leaders, such as the Tahirids, who had supported him in the civil war, and who now occupied the senior positions in the new regime. In an effort to counterbalance their influence, al-Ma'mun granted formal recognition to his brother and his Turkish corps. For the same reason he placed the Arab tribal levies of the Mashriq (the region of the Levant and Iraq) in the hands of his son, al-Abbas. The nature and identity of the "Turkish slave soldiers", as they are commonly described, is a controversial subject; both the ethnic label and the slave status of its members are disputed. Although the bulk of the corps were clearly of servile origin, being either captured in war or purchased as slaves, in the Arabic historical sources they are never referred to as slaves (mamlūk or ʿabid), but rather as mawālī ("clients" or "freedmen") or ghilmān ("pages"), implying that they were manumitted, a view reinforced by the fact that they were paid cash salaries. Although members of the corps are collectively called simply "Turks", atrāk, in the sources, prominent early members were neither Turks nor slaves, but rather Iranian vassal princes from Central Asia like al-Afshin, prince of Usrushana, who were followed by their personal retinues (Persian chakar, Arabic shākiriyya). Likewise, the motives behind the formation of the Turkish guard action are unclear, as are the financial means available to Abu Ishaq for the purpose, particularly given his young age. The Turks were closely associated with Abu Ishaq, and are usually interpreted as a private military retinue, something not uncommon in the Islamic world of the time. As the historian Matthew Gordon points out, the sources provide some indications that the original recruitment of Turks may have been begun or encouraged by al-Ma'mun, as part of the latter's general policy of recruiting Central Asian princes—and their own military retinues—to his court. It is therefore possible that the guard was originally formed on Abu Ishaq's initiative, but that it quickly received caliphal sanction and support, in exchange for being placed under al-Ma'mun's service. ### Service under al-Ma'mun In 819 Abu Ishaq, accompanied by his Turkish guard and other commanders, was sent to suppress a Kharijite uprising under Mahdi ibn Alwan al-Haruri around Buzurj-Sabur, north of Baghdad. According to a most likely fanciful story provided by the 10th-century chronicler al-Tabari, Ashinas, in later years one of the chief Turkish leaders, received his name when he placed himself between a Kharijite lancer about to attack the future caliph, shouting, "Recognize me!" (in Persian "ashinas ma-ra"). In 828, al-Ma'mun appointed Abu Ishaq as governor of Egypt and Syria in place of Abdallah ibn Tahir, who departed to assume the governorship of Khurasan, while the Jazira and the frontier zone (thughūr) with the Byzantine Empire passed to al-Abbas. Ibn Tahir had just brought Egypt back under caliphal authority and pacified it after the tumult of the civil war, but the situation remained volatile. When Abu Ishaq's deputy in Egypt, Umayr ibn al-Walid, tried to raise taxes, the Nile Delta and Hawf regions revolted. In 830, Umayr tried to forcibly subdue the rebels, but was ambushed and killed along with many of his troops. With the government troops confined to the capital, Fustat, Abu Ishaq intervened in person, at the head of his 4,000 Turks. The rebels were soundly defeated and their leaders executed. In July–September 830, al-Ma'mun, encouraged by perceived Byzantine weakness and suspicious of collusion between Emperor Theophilos (r. 829–842) and the Khurramite rebels of Babak Khorramdin, launched the first large-scale invasion of Byzantine territory since the start of the Abbasid civil war, and sacked several Byzantine border fortresses. Following his return from Egypt, Abu Ishaq joined al-Ma'mun in his 831 campaign against the Byzantines. After rebuffing Theophilos' offers of peace, the Abbasid army passed through the Cilician Gates and divided into three columns, with the Caliph, his son al-Abbas, and Abu Ishaq at their head. The Abbasids seized and destroyed several minor forts as well as the town of Tyana, while al-Abbas won a minor skirmish against a Byzantine army led by Theophilos in person, before withdrawing to Syria in September. Soon after Abu Ishaq's departure from Egypt, the revolt flared up again, this time encompassing both the Arab settlers and the native Christian Copts under the leadership of Ibn Ubaydus, a descendant of one of the original Arab conquerors of the country. The rebels were confronted by the Turks, led by al-Afshin. Al-Afshin conducted a systematic campaign, winning a string of victories and engaging in large-scale executions: many male Copts were executed and their women and children sold into slavery, while the old Arab elites who had ruled the country since the Muslim conquest of Egypt in the 640s were practically annihilated. In early 832, al-Ma'mun came to Egypt, and soon after the last elements of resistance, the Copts of the coastal marshes of the Nile Delta, were subdued. Later in the same year, al-Ma'mun repeated his invasion of the Byzantine borderlands, capturing the strategically important fortress of Loulon, a success that consolidated Abbasid control of both exits of the Cilician Gates. So encouraged was al-Ma'mun by this victory that he repeatedly rejected Theophilos' ever more generous offers for peace, and publicly announced that he intended to capture Constantinople itself. Consequently, al-Abbas was dispatched in May to convert the deserted town of Tyana into a military colony and prepare the ground for the westward advance. Al-Ma'mun followed in July, but he suddenly fell ill and died on 7 August 833. ## Caliphate Al-Ma'mun had made no official provisions for his succession. His son, al-Abbas, was old enough to rule and had acquired experience of command in the border wars with the Byzantines, but had not been named heir. According to the account of al-Tabari, on his deathbed al-Ma'mun dictated a letter nominating his brother, rather than al-Abbas, as his successor, and Abu Ishaq was acclaimed as caliph on 9August, with the regnal name of al-Mu'tasim (in full al-Muʿtaṣim bi’llāh, "he who seeks refuge in God"). It is impossible to know whether this reflects actual events, or whether the letter was an invention and Abu Ishaq merely took advantage of his proximity to his dying brother, and al-Abbas's absence, to propel himself to the throne. As Abu Ishaq was the forefather of all subsequent Abbasid caliphs, later historians had little desire to question the legitimacy of his accession, but it is clear that his position was far from secure: a large part of the army favoured al-Abbas, and a delegation of soldiers even went to him and tried to proclaim him as the new Caliph. Only when al-Abbas refused them, whether out of weakness or out of a desire to avoid a civil war, and himself took the oath of allegiance to his uncle, did the soldiers acquiesce in al-Mu'tasim's succession. The precariousness of his position is further evidenced by the fact that al-Mu'tasim immediately called off the expedition, abandoned the Tyana project and returned with his army to Baghdad, which he reached on 20September. ### New elites and administration Whatever the true background of his accession, al-Mu'tasim owed his rise to the throne not only to his strong personality and leadership skills, but principally to the fact that he was the only Abbasid prince to control independent military power, in the form of his Turkish corps. Unlike his brother, who tried to use the tribal Arabs and the Turks to balance out the Iranian troops, al-Mu'tasim relied almost exclusively on his Turks; the historian Tayeb El-Hibri describes al-Mu'tasim's regime as "militaristic and centred on the Turkish corps". The rise of al-Mu'tasim to the caliphate thus heralded a radical change in the nature of Abbasid administration, and the most profound shift the Islamic world had experienced since the dynasty had come to power in the Abbasid Revolution. While the latter had been backed by a mass popular movement seeking to enact social reforms, al-Mu'tasim's revolution was essentially the project of a small ruling elite aiming to secure its own power. Already under al-Ma'mun, old-established Arab families such as the Muhallabids disappeared from the court, and minor members of the Abbasid family ceased to be appointed to governorships or senior military positions. The reforms of al-Mu'tasim completed this process, resulting in the eclipse of the previous Arab and Iranian elites, both in Baghdad and the provinces, in favour of the Turkish military, and an increasing centralization of administration around the caliphal court. A characteristic example is Egypt, where the Arab settler families still nominally formed the country's garrison (jund) and thus continued to receive a salary from the local revenues. Al-Mu'tasim discontinued the practice, removing the Arab families from the army registers (diwān) and ordering that the revenues of Egypt be sent to the central government, which would then pay a cash salary (ʿaṭāʾ) only to the Turkish troops stationed in the province. Another departure from previous practice was al-Mu'tasim's appointment of his senior lieutenants, such as Ashinas and Itakh, as nominal super-governors over several provinces. This measure was probably intended to allow his chief followers immediate access to funds with which to pay their troops, but also, according to Kennedy, "represented a further centralizing of power, for the under-governors of the provinces seldom appeared at court and played little part in the making of political decisions". Indeed, al-Mu'tasim's caliphate marks the apogee of the central government's authority, in particular as expressed in its right and power to extract taxes from the provinces, an issue that had been controversial and had faced much local opposition since the early days of the Islamic state. The one major exception to this process were the Tahirids, who remained in place as autonomous governors of their Khurasani super-province, encompassing most of the eastern Caliphate. The Tahirids provided the governor of Baghdad, and helped to keep the city, a focus of opposition under al-Ma'mun, quiescent. The post was held throughout al-Mu'tasim's reign by Abdallah ibn Tahir's cousin Ishaq ibn Ibrahim ibn Mus'ab, who, according to the Orientalist C. E. Bosworth, was "always one of al-Mu'tasim's closest advisers and confidants". Apart from the Turkish military and the Tahirids, al-Mu'tasim's administration depended on the central fiscal bureaucracy. As the main source of revenue was the rich lands of southern Iraq (the Sawad) and neighbouring areas, the administration was staffed mostly with men drawn from these regions. The new caliphal bureaucratic class that emerged under al-Mu'tasim waw thus mostly Persian or Aramean in origin, with a large proportion of newly converted Muslims and even a few Nestorian Christians, who came from landowner or merchant families. On his accession, al-Mu'tasim appointed as his chief minister or vizier his old personal secretary, al-Fadl ibn Marwan. A man trained in the traditions of the Abbasid bureaucracy, he was distinguished for his caution and frugality, and tried to shore up the finances of the state. These traits eventually caused his downfall, when he refused to authorize the Caliph's gifts to his courtiers on the grounds that the treasury could not afford it. He was dismissed in 836, and was lucky not to suffer any punishment more severe than being sent into exile to the village of al-Sinn. His replacement, Muhammad ibn al-Zayyat, was of a completely different character: a rich merchant, he is described by Kennedy as "a competent financial expert but a callous and brutal man who made many enemies", even among his fellow members of the administration. Nevertheless, and even though his political authority never extended beyond the fiscal domain, he managed to maintain his office to the end of the reign, and under al-Mu'tasim's successor, al-Wathiq (r. 842–847), as well. ### Rise of the Turks Al-Mu'tasim's reliance on his Turkish ghilmān grew over time, especially in the aftermath of an abortive plot against him discovered in 838, during the Amorium campaign. Headed by Ujayf ibn Anbasa, a long-serving Khurasani who had followed al-Ma'mun since the civil war against al-Amin, the conspiracy rallied the traditional Abbasid elites, dissatisfied with al-Mu'tasim's policies and especially his favouritism towards the Turks. Discontent with the latter grew due to their servile origin, which offended the Abbasid aristocracy. The plotters aimed to kill the Caliph and raise al-Ma'mun's son al-Abbas in his stead. According to al-Tabari, al-Abbas, although privy to these designs, rejected Ujayf's urgent suggestions to kill al-Mu'tasim during the initial stages of the campaign for fear of appearing to undermine the jihad. In the event, Ashinas grew suspicious of al-Farhgani and Ibn Hisham, and the plot was soon uncovered. Al-Abbas was imprisoned, and the Turkish leaders Ashinas, Itakh, and Bugha the Elder undertook to discover and arrest the other conspirators. The affair was the signal for a large-scale purge of the army that Kennedy describes as "of almost Stalinesque ruthlessness". Al-Abbas was forced to die of thirst, while his male offspring were arrested, and likely executed, by Itakh. The other leaders of the conspiracy were likewise executed in ingeniously cruel ways, which were widely publicized as a deterrent to others. According to the Kitab al-'Uyun, about seventy commanders and soldiers were executed, including some Turks. As the historian Matthew Gordon points out, these events are probably connected to the disappearance of the abnāʾ from the historical record. Correspondingly they must have increased the standing of the Turks and their chief commanders, particularly Ashinas: in 839, his daughter, Utranja, married the son of al-Afshin, and in 840, al-Mu'tasim appointed him as his deputy during his absence from Samarra. When he returned, al-Mu'tasim publicly placed him on a throne and awarded him a ceremonial crown. In the same year, Ashinas was appointed to a super-governorate over the provinces of Egypt, Syria and the Jazira. Ashinas did not govern these directly, but appointed deputies as governors, while he remained in Samarra. When Ashinas participated in the Hajj of 841, he received honours on every stop of the route. In 840, it was the turn of al-Afshin to fall victim to the Caliph's suspicions. Despite his distinguished service as a general, he was very much the "odd man out" in the Samarran elite; the relations of the Iranian prince with the low-born Turkish generals were marked by mutual antipathy. Furthermore, he alienated the Tahirids, who might under other circumstances have been his natural allies, by interfering in Tabaristan, where he allegedly encouraged the local autonomous ruler, Mazyar, to reject Tahirid control (see below). Al-Tabari reports other allegations against al-Afshin: that he was plotting to poison al-Mu'tasim; or that he was planning to escape to his native Ushrusana with vast sums of money. According to Kennedy, the very variety of allegations against al-Afshin is grounds for skepticism about their truthfulness, and it is likely that he was framed by his enemies at court. Whatever the truth, these allegations discredited al-Afshin in the eyes of al-Mu'tasim. He was dismissed from his position in the caliphal bodyguard (al-ḥaras), and a show trial was held at the palace, where he was confronted with several witnesses, including Mazyar. Al-Afshin was accused, among other things, of being a false Muslim, and of being accorded divine status by his subjects in Ushrusana. Despite putting up an able and eloquent defence, al-Afshin was found guilty and thrown into prison. He died soon after, either of starvation or of poison. His body was publicly gibbeted in front of the palace gates, burned, and thrown in the Tigris. Once more, the affair enhanced the standing of the Turkish leadership, and particularly Wasif, who now received al-Afshin's revenues and possessions. Nevertheless, it seems that al-Mu'tasim was not entirely satisfied with the men he had raised to power. An anecdote dating from his last years, relayed by Ishaq ibn Ibrahim ibn Mus'ab, recalls how the Caliph, in an intimate exchange with Ishaq, lamented that he had made poor choices in this regard: while his brother al-Ma'mun had nurtured four excellent servants from the Tahirids, he had raised al-Afshin, who was dead; Ashinas, "a feeble heart and a coward"; Itakh, "who is totally insignificant"; and Wasif, "an unprofitable servant". Ishaq himself then suggested that this was because, while al-Ma'mun had used men with local connections and influence, al-Mu'tasim had used men with no roots in the Muslim community, to which the Caliph sadly assented. ### Foundation of Samarra The Turkish army was at first quartered in Baghdad, but quickly came into conflict with the remnants of the old Abbasid establishment in the city and the city's populace. The latter resented their loss of influence and career opportunities to the foreign troops, who were furthermore often undisciplined and violent, spoke no Arabic, and were either recent converts to Islam or still pagans. Violent episodes between the populace and the Turks thus became common. This was a major factor in al-Mu'tasim's decision in 836 to found a new capital at Samarra, some 80 miles (130 km) north of Baghdad, but there were other considerations in play. Founding a new capital was a public statement of the establishment of a new regime. According to Tayeb El-Hibri it allowed the court to exist "at a distance from the populace of Baghdad and protected by a new guard of foreign troops, and amid a new royal culture revolving around sprawling palatial grounds, public spectacle and a seemingly ceaseless quest for leisurely indulgence", an arrangement compared by Oleg Grabar to the relationship between Paris and Versailles after Louis XIV. By creating a new city in a previously uninhabited area, al-Mu'tasim could reward his followers with land and commercial opportunities without cost to himself and free from any constraints, unlike Baghdad with its established interest groups and high property prices. In fact, the sale of land seems to have produced considerable profit for the treasury—in the words of Kennedy, "a sort of gigantic property speculation in which both government and its followers could expect to benefit". Space and life in the new capital were strictly regimented: residential areas were separated from the markets, and the military was given its own cantonments, separated from the ordinary populace and each the home of a specific ethnic contingent of the army (such as the Turks or the Maghariba regiment). The city was dominated by its mosques (most famous among which is the Great Mosque of Samarra built by Caliph al-Mutawakkil in 848–852) and palaces, built in grand style by both the caliphs and their senior commanders, who were given extensive properties to develop. Unlike Baghdad, the new capital was an entirely artificial creation. Poorly sited in terms of water supply and river communications, its existence was determined solely by the presence of the caliphal court, and when the capital returned to Baghdad, sixty years later, Samarra was rapidly abandoned. Due to this, the ruins of the Abbasid capital are still extant, and the city can be mapped with great accuracy by modern archaeologists. ### Science and learning As a military man, al-Mu'tasim's outlook was utilitarian, and his intellectual pursuits could not be compared with those of al-Ma'mun or his successor al-Wathiq, but he continued his brother's policy of promoting writers and scholars. Baghdad remained a major centre of learning throughout his reign. Among the notable scholars active during his reign were the astronomers Habash al-Hasib al-Marwazi and Ahmad al-Farghani, the polymath al-Jahiz, and the distinguished Arab mathematician and philosopher al-Kindi, who dedicated his work On First Philosophy to his patron al-Mu'tasim. The Nestorian physician Salmawayh ibn Bunan, a patron of the fellow Nestorian physician and translator Hunayn ibn Ishaq, became court physician to al-Mu'tasim, while another prominent Nestorian physician, Salmawayh's rival Ibn Masawayh, received apes for dissection from the caliph. The physician Ali al-Tabari was listed as being present in al-Mu'tasim's court, along with Ibn Masawayh. ### Mu'tazilism and the miḥna Ideologically, al-Mu'tasim followed the footsteps of al-Ma'mun, continuing his predecessor's support for Mu'tazilism, a theological doctrine that attempted to tread a middle way between secular monarchy and the theocratic approach espoused by the Alids and the various sects of Shi'ism. Mu'tazilis espoused the view that the Quran was created and hence fell within the authority of a God-guided imām to interpret according to the changing circumstances. While revering Ali, they avoided taking a position on the righteousness of the opposing sides in the conflict between Ali and his opponents. Mu'tazilism was officially adopted by al-Ma'mun in 827, and in 833, shortly before his death, al-Ma'mun made its doctrines compulsory, with the establishment of an inquisition, the miḥna. During his brother's reign, al-Mu'tasim played an active role in the enforcement of the miḥna in the western provinces; this continued after his accession. The chief advocate of Mu'tazilism, the head qādī Ahmad ibn Abi Duwad, was perhaps the dominant influence at the caliphal court throughout al-Mu'tasim's reign. Thus Mu'tazilism became closely identified with the new regime of al-Mu'tasim. Adherence to Mu'tazilism was transformed into an intensely political issue, since to question it was to oppose the authority of the Caliph as the God-sanctioned imām. While Mu'tazilism found broad support, it was also passionately opposed by traditionalists, who held that the Quran's authority was absolute and unalterable as the literal word of God. Opposition to Mu'tazilism also provided a vehicle for criticism by those who disliked the new regime and its elites. In the event, the active repression of the traditionalists was unsuccessful, and even proved counterproductive: the beating and imprisonment of one of the most resolute opponents of Mu'tazilism, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, in 834, only helped to spread his fame. By the time al-Mutawakkil abandoned Mu'tazilism and returned to traditional orthodoxy in 848, the strict and conservative Hanbali school had emerged as the leading school of jurisprudence (fiqh) in Sunni Islam. ### Domestic campaigns Although al-Mu'tasim's reign was a time of peace in the Caliphate's heartland territories, al-Mu'tasim himself was an energetic campaigner, and according to Kennedy "acquired the reputation of being one of the warrior-caliphs of Islam". With the exception of the Amorium campaign, most of the military expeditions of al-Mu'tasim's reign were domestic, directed against rebels in areas that, although nominally part of the Caliphate, had remained outside effective Muslim rule and where native peoples and princes retained de facto autonomy. The three great campaigns of the reign—Amorium, the expedition against the Khurramite rebellion, and that against Mazyar, ruler of Tabaristan—were in part also conscious propaganda exercises, in which al-Mu'tasim could solidify his regime's legitimacy in the eyes of the populace by leading wars against infidels. An Alid revolt led by Muhammad ibn Qasim broke out in Khurasan in early 834, but was swiftly defeated and Muhammad brought as a prisoner to the Caliph's court. He managed to escape during the night of 8/9October 834, taking advantage of the Eid al-Fitr festivities, and was never heard of again. In June/July of the same year, Ujayf ibn 'Anbasa was sent to subdue the Zutt. These were people who had been brought from India by the Sassanid emperors and settled in the Mesopotamian Marshes. The Zutt had been in rebellion against caliphal authority since c. 820, and had frequently raided the environs of Basra and Wasit. After a seven-month campaign, Ujayf was successful in encircling the Zutt and forcing them to surrender. He made a triumphal entry into Baghdad in January 835 with numerous captives. Many of the Zutt were then sent to Ayn Zarba on the Byzantine frontier, to fight against the Byzantines. The first major campaign of the new reign was directed against the Khurramites in Adharbayjan and Arran. The Khurramite revolt had been active since 816/7, aided by the inaccessible mountains of the province and the absence of large Arab Muslim population centres, except for a few cities in the lowlands. Al-Ma'mun had left the local Muslims largely to their own devices. A succession of military commanders attempted to subdue the rebellion on their own initiative, and thus gain control of the country's newly discovered mineral resources, only to be defeated by the Khurramites under the capable leadership of Babak. Immediately after his accession, al-Mu'tasim sent the Tahirid ṣāḥib al-shurṭa of Baghdad and Samarra, Ishaq ibn Ibrahim ibn Mus'ab, to deal with an expansion of the Khurramite rebellion from Jibal into Hamadan. Ishaq swiftly achieved success, and by December 833 had suppressed the rebellion, forcing many Khurramites to seek refuge in the Byzantine Empire. In 835 al-Mu'tasim took action against Babak, assigning his trusted and capable lieutenant, al-Afshin, to command the campaign. After three years of cautious and methodical campaigning, al-Afshin was able to capture Babak at his capital of Budhdh on 26August 837, extinguishing the rebellion. Babak was brought captive to Samarra, where, on3 January 838, he was paraded before the people seated on an elephant, and then publicly executed. Shortly after, Minkajur al-Ushrusani, whom al-Afshin had appointed as governor of Adharbayjan after the defeat of the Khurramites, rose in revolt, either because he had been involved in financial irregularities, or because he had been a co-conspirator of al-Afshin's. Bugha the Elder marched against him, forcing him to capitulate and receive a safe-passage to Samarra in 840. The second major domestic campaign of the reign began in 838, against Mazyar, the autonomous Qarinid ruler of Tabaristan. Tabaristan had been subjected to Abbasid authority in 760, but Muslim presence was limited to the coastal lowlands of the Caspian Sea and their cities. The mountainous areas remained under native rulers—chief among whom were the Bavandids in the eastern and the Qarinids in the central and western mountain ranges—who retained their autonomy in exchange for paying a tribute to the Caliphate. With the support of al-Ma'mun, Mazyar had established himself as the de facto ruler of all Tabaristan, even capturing the Muslim city of Amul and imprisoning the local Abbasid governor. Al-Mu'tasim confirmed him in his post on his accession, but trouble soon began when Mazyar refused to accept his subordination to the Tahirid viceroy of the east, Abdallah ibn Tahir, instead insisting on paying the taxes of his region directly to al-Mu'tasim's agent. According to al-Tabari, the Qarinid's intransigence had been secretly encouraged by al-Afshin, who hoped to discredit the Tahirids and assume their vast governorship in the east himself. Tension mounted as the Tahirids encouraged the local Muslims to resist Mazyar, forcing the latter to adopt an increasingly confrontational stance against the Muslim settlers and turn for support on the native Iranian, and mostly Zoroastrian, peasantry, whom he encouraged to attack the Muslim landowners. Open conflict erupted in 838, when his troops seized the cities of Amul and Sari, took the Muslim settlers prisoner, and executed many of them. In return, the Tahirids under al-Hasan ibn al-Husayn ibn Mus'ab and Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Mus'ab invaded Tabaristan. Mazyar was betrayed by his brother Quhyar, who also revealed to the Tahirids the correspondence between Mazyar and al-Afshin. Quhyar then succeeded his brother as a Tahirid appointee, while Mazyar was taken captive to Samarra. Like Babak, he was paraded before the populace, and then flogged to death, on 6September 840. While the autonomy of the local dynasties was maintained in the aftermath of the revolt, the event marked the onset of the country's rapid Islamization, including among the native dynasties. Near the end of al-Mu'tasim's life there were a series of uprisings in the Syrian provinces, including the revolt by Abu Harb, known as al-Mubarqa or "the Veiled One", which brought to the fore the lingering pro-Umayyad sentiment of several Syrian Arabs. ### Confrontation with Byzantium Taking advantage of the Abbasids' preoccupation with the suppression of the Khurramite rebellion, the Byzantine emperor Theophilos had launched attacks on the Muslim frontier zone in the early 830s, and scored several successes. His forces were bolstered by some 14,000 Khurramites who fled into the Empire, became baptized and enrolled in the Byzantine army under the command of their leader Nasr, better known by his Christian name Theophobos. In 837, Theophilos, urged by the increasingly hard-pressed Babak, launched a major campaign into the Muslim frontier lands. He led a large army, reportedly numbering over 70,000 men, in an almost unopposed invasion of the region around the upper Euphrates. The Byzantines took the towns of Zibatra (Sozopetra) and Arsamosata, ravaged and plundered the countryside, extracted ransom from Malatya and other cities in exchange for not attacking them, and defeated several smaller Arab forces. As refugees began arriving at Samarra, the caliphal court was outraged by the brutality and brazenness of the raids; not only had the Byzantines acted in open collusion with the Khurramites, but during the sack of Zibatra all male prisoners were executed and the rest of the population sold into slavery, and some captive women were raped by Theophilos' Khurramites. The Caliph took personal charge of preparations for a retaliatory expedition, as the campaigns against Byzantium were customarily the only ones in which caliphs participated in person. Al-Mu'tasim assembled a huge force—80,000 men with 30,000 servants and camp followers according to Michael the Syrian, or even larger according to other writers—at Tarsus. He declared his target to be Amorium, the birthplace of the reigning Byzantine dynasty. The Caliph reportedly had the name painted on the shields and banners of his army. The campaign began in June, with a smaller force under al-Afshin attacking through the Pass of Hadath in the east, while the Caliph with the main army crossed the Cilician Gates from 19 to 21June. Theophilos, who had been caught unaware by the two-pronged Abbasid attack, tried to confront al-Afshin's smaller force first, but suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Dazimon on 22July, barely escaping with his life. Unable to offer any effective resistance to the Abbasid advance, the Emperor returned to Constantinople. A week later, al-Afshin and the main caliphal army joined forces before Ancyra, which had been left defenceless and was plundered. From Ancyra, the Abbasid army turned to Amorium, to which they laid siege on 1August. Al-Afshin, Itakh, and Ashinas all took turns assaulting the city with their troops, but the siege was fiercely contested, even after the Abbasids, informed by a defector, effected a breach in a weak spot of the wall. After two weeks, taking advantage of a short truce for negotiations requested by one of the Byzantine commanders of the breach, the Abbasid army successfully stormed the city. It was thoroughly plundered and its walls razed, while the populace, numbering into the tens of thousands, was carried off to be sold into slavery. According to al-Tabari, al-Mu'tasim was now considering extending his campaign to attack Constantinople, when the conspiracy headed by his nephew, al-Abbas, was uncovered. Al-Mu'tasim was forced to cut short his campaign and return quickly to his realm, without bothering with Theophilos and his forces, stationed in nearby Dorylaion. Taking the direct route from Amorium to the Cilician Gates, both the Caliph's army and its prisoners suffered during the march through the arid countryside of central Anatolia. Some captives were so exhausted that they could not move and were executed, while others found in the turmoil the opportunity to escape. In retaliation, al-Mu'tasim, after separating the most prominent among them, executed the rest, some 6,000. The sack of Amorium brought al-Mu'tasim much acclaim as a warrior-caliph and ghāzī (warrior for the faith), and was celebrated by contemporaries, most notably in a famous ode by the court poet Abu Tammam. The Abbasids did not follow up on their success. Warfare continued between the two empires with raids and counter-raids along the border, but after a few Byzantine successes a truce was agreed in 841. At the time of his death in 842, al-Mu'tasim was preparing yet another large-scale invasion, but the great fleet he had prepared to assault Constantinople was destroyed in a storm off Cape Chelidonia a few months later. Following al-Mu'tasim's death, warfare gradually died down, and the Battle of Mauropotamos in 844 was the last major Arab–Byzantine engagement for a decade. ## Death and legacy Al-Tabari states that al-Mu'tasim fell ill on 21October 841. His regular physician, Salmawayh ibn Bunan, whom the Caliph had trusted implicitly, had died the previous year. His new physician, Yahya ibn Masawayh, did not follow the normal treatment of cupping and purging. According to Hunayn ibn Ishaq this worsened the caliph's illness and brought about his death on 5January 842, after a reign of eight years, eight months and two days according to the Islamic calendar. He was buried in the Jawsaq al-Khaqani palace in Samarra. The succession of his son, al-Wathiq, was unopposed. Al-Wathiq's reign, through unremarkable, was essentially a continuation of al-Mu'tasim's own, as the government continued to be led by the men al-Mu'tasim had raised to power: the Turks Itakh, Wasif, and Ashinas; the vizier Ibn al-Zayyat; and the chief qādī Ahmad ibn Abi Duwad. Al-Tabari describes al-Mu'tasim as having a relatively easygoing nature, being kind, agreeable and charitable. According to C. E. Bosworth the sources reveal little about al-Mu'tasim's character, other than his lack of sophistication compared with his half-brother. Nevertheless, Bosworth concludes, he was a proficient military commander who secured the caliphate both politically and militarily. Al-Mu'tasim's reign represents a watershed moment in the history of the Abbasid state, and had long-lasting repercussions in Islamic history. Al-Mu'tasim's military reforms marked "the moment when the Arabs lost control of the empire they created", according to Kennedy, while according to David Ayalon, the institution of military slavery introduced by al-Mu'tasim became "one of the most important and most enduring socio-political institutions that Islam has known". With his Turkish guard, al-Mu'tasim set a pattern that would be widely imitated: not only did the military acquire a predominant position in the state, but it also increasingly became the preserve of minority groups from the peoples living on the margins of the Islamic world. Thus it formed an exclusive ruling caste, separated from the Arab-Iranian mainstream of society by ethnic origin, language, and sometimes even religion. This dichotomy would become, according to Hugh Kennedy, a "distinctive feature" of many Islamic polities, and would reach its apogee in the Mamluk dynasties that ruled Egypt and Syria in the late Middle Ages. More immediately, although al-Mu'tasim's new professional army proved militarily highly effective, it also posed a potential danger to the stability of the Abbasid regime, as the army's separation from mainstream society meant that the soldiers were entirely reliant on the ʿaṭāʾ for survival. Consequently, any failure to provide their pay, or policies that threatened their position, were likely to cause a violent reaction. This became evident less than a generation later, during the "Anarchy at Samarra" (861–870), where the Turks played the main role. The need to cover military spending would henceforth be a fixture of caliphal government. This was at a time when government income began to decline rapidly—partly through the rise of autonomous dynasties in the provinces and partly through the decline in productivity of the lowlands of Iraq that had traditionally provided the bulk of tax revenue. Less than a century after al-Mu'tasim's death, this process would lead to the bankruptcy of the Abbasid government and the eclipse of the caliphs' political power with the rise of the Khazar officer Ibn Ra'iq to the position of amīr al-umarāʾ. ## Family One of al-Mu'tasim's concubines was Qaratis, a Greek, and the mother of his eldest son, the future caliph al-Wathiq. She died on 16 August 842 in Kufa, and was buried in the palace of Abbasid prince, Dawud ibn Isa. Another concubine was Shuja. She was from Khwarazm, and was related to Musa ibn Bugha the Elder. She was the mother of the future caliph al-Mutawakkil. She died in June–July 861. Another concubine was Qurrat al-Ayn. A cultured and refined lady, she was a favourite of al-Mu'tasim. Children - Abu Jaʿfar Harun ibn Muhammad al-Mu'tasim, better known by his laqab al-Wathiq. He was the eldest son of al-Mu'tasim. - Abu al-Fadl Ja'far ibn Muhammad al-Mu'tasim, better known by his laqab al-Mutawakkil. - Muhammad ibn al-Mu'tasim, also known as Muhammad ibn Muhammad. - Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Mu'tasim - Ali ibn Muhammad al-Mu'tasim, one of the youngest son. - Abdallah ibn Muhammad al-Mu'tasim, one of the youngest son. ## al-Mu'tasim in literature Al-Mu'tasim is featured in the medieval Arabic and Turkish epic Delhemma, which features heavily fictionalized versions of events from the Arab–Byzantine wars. In it, al-Mu'tasim helps the heroes pursue the traitor and apostate Uqba across several countries "from Spain to Yemen", before having him crucified before Constantinople. On its return, the Muslim army is ambushed in a defile by the Byzantines, and only 400 men, including the Caliph and most of the heroes, manage to escape. In retaliation, al-Mu'tasim's successor al-Wathiq launches a campaign against Constantinople, where he installs a Muslim governor. The name al-Mu'tasim is used for a fictional character in the story The Approach to al-Mu'tasim, written in 1936 by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, which appears in his anthology Ficciones. The al-Mu'tasim referenced there is not the Abbasid caliph, though Borges does state, regarding the original, non-fictional al-Mu'tasim from whom the name is taken: "the name of that eighth Abbasid caliph who was victorious in eight battles, fathered eight sons and eight daughters, left eight thousand slaves, and ruled for a period of eight years, eight moons, and eight days". While not strictly accurate, Borges' quote paraphrases al-Tabari, who notes that he was "born in the eighth month, was the eighth caliph, in the eighth generation from al-Abbas, his lifespan was eight and forty years, that he died leaving eight sons and eight daughters, and that he reigned for eight years and eight months", and reflects the widespread reference to al-Mu'tasim in Arabic sources as al-Muthamman ("the man of eight").
2,554,949	Song of Innocence	1,114,304,078	null	[ "1968 debut albums", "Adaptations of works by William Blake", "Albums conducted by Don Randi", "Albums produced by David Axelrod (musician)", "Albums recorded at Capitol Studios", "Art pop albums", "Baroque pop albums", "Capitol Records albums", "Concept albums", "David Axelrod (musician) albums", "Instrumental albums", "Jazz fusion albums by American artists", "Now-Again Records albums" ]	Song of Innocence is the debut album by American composer and producer David Axelrod. It was released in October 1968 by Capitol Records. In an effort to capitalize on the experimental climate of popular music at the time, Axelrod composed the album as a suite-like tone poem interpreting Songs of Innocence, a 1789 illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. Recording took place at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles with an orchestra and studio musicians from the Wrecking Crew collective, including keyboardist and conductor Don Randi, guitarist Al Casey, bassist Carol Kaye, and drummer Earl Palmer. An instrumental jazz fusion record, Song of Innocence incorporates elements of classical, rock, funk, pop, and theatre music. Axelrod arranged the music for bass, drums, and string instruments, composing in a rock idiom with tempos centered on such rhythms played by Palmer. He used contrast in his orchestral compositions, interspersing their euphoric psychedelic R&B structures with dramatic, harrowing arrangements to reflect the supernatural themes found in Blake's poems. The resulting music's reverent, psychedelic overtones have been interpreted as evoking the poet's themes of innocence and spirituality. While innovative for its application of rock and jazz techniques, Song of Innocence was not commercially successful and confounded contemporary critics, who viewed it as an ambitious but foolish curiosity piece. In the 1990s, critics reassessed the album as a classic, while leading disc jockeys in hip hop and electronica rediscovered and sampled its songs. "Holy Thursday", the record's best-known track, was frequently sampled by hip hop producers. The renewed interest in Axelrod's work prompted Stateside Records to reissue Song of Innocence in 2000. ## Background In the 1960s, Axelrod worked as a producer and A&R executive for Capitol Records in Los Angeles. During this time, he began to conceive his own musical ideas, involving a fusion of baroque classical sounds, R&B rhythms, and spiritual themes. Challenged by what he described as a "new breed of record buyer ... more sophisticated in his thinking", he was one of several Los Angeles-based musical eccentrics during the late 1960s who wanted to expand on the mid-1960s studio experiments of Brian Wilson and George Martin. His first attempt at this creative vision was composing a religious-themed, psychedelic opera for the Electric Prunes, a local garage rock group. When the band found it too challenging to finish the recording, Axelrod enlisted studio musicians from the Wrecking Crew to complete the album, released as Mass in F Minor in 1968. The recording attracted both controversy and national fame for the producer. After the success of Mass in F Minor, Axelrod was asked by Capitol to record a similar album. He wanted to further capitalize on the experimental climate of popular music and chose to adapt works by English poet William Blake on an album. Blake musical settings were at the height of their popularity among musicians and composers. Numerous serious music composers had set his poems to music since the 1870s, and the practice was eventually adapted in other musical fields during the 20th century, including popular music, musical theatre, and the 1960s folk idiom. Axelrod, a self-professed "Blake freak", had been fascinated by Blake's painting and poetry since his late teens and frequently read the poems as an adult. He conceived Song of Innocence after he had bought an edition of Blake's complete poetry while working in Capitol's art department and considered the concept for a few years before Mass in F Minor. Axelrod was not sociable with colleagues, such as record executives who could have helped him professionally, and felt that he could identify with Blake; he considered the poet "very bad at making new friends". ## Recording Axelrod composed Song of Innocence in one week and began recording in mid-1968. He recorded the album at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles with his close-knit group of veteran studio musicians from the Wrecking Crew, including keyboardist and conductor Don Randi, guitarist Al Casey, bassist Carol Kaye, and drummer Earl Palmer. He had worked with them before when producing sessions for Capitol recording artists. Axelrod did not play any instruments on Song of Innocence; he instead wrote arrangements for his orchestra and utilized 33 players to perform his notated charts. He had learned how to read and orchestrate complex music charts from jazz musicians during the 1950s. Randi conducted the orchestra and played both piano and organ on the record. Axelrod preferred listening to a session from a recording booth like his contemporary Igor Stravinsky. "That way the sounds don't seem to go all over the place", he later said. "Music seems so small in a studio." Axelrod originally wanted some of the album's compositions to feature a large-scale choir but was uncertain if he could find the appropriate ensemble, so he recorded an entirely instrumental album and included one Blake setting for each section of the score. ## Composition and performance A jazz fusion album, Song of Innocence combines jazz elements with impressionistic musical figures and hard rock guitar solos. Its music also incorporates funk, rock, theatre, and pop styles. Music journalists categorized the record as jazz-rock, baroque pop, and psychedelic R&B. John Murph of JazzTimes magazine said the music could be better characterized as art pop than jazz. Axelrod, who had produced bebop albums before working for Capitol, asserted that jazz played a crucial role in the music: "For years, all I did was jazz. When I first got in the record business, I was so into jazz that I had never heard Elvis Presley. I still probably listen to jazz more than anything else." Axelrod composed the album as a tone poem suite based on Blake's illustrated 1789 collection of poems Songs of Innocence. His compositions borrowed titles from Blake's poems, which dealt with themes such as visions, religious iniquity, rite of passage, and life experience after a person's birth and innocence. Mary Campbell of The Baltimore Sun said the classical and Christian church music elements made the record sound "reverent, as if describing a biblical story". Les Inrockuptibles described it as a "psyche-liturgical" work dedicated to Blake. According to AllMusic's Thom Jurek, psychedelia was implicit in the record's musical form and feeling, which impelled Axelrod to "celebrate the wildness and folly of youth with celebration and verve". The album's music was written in the rock idiom and arranged for bass, drums, and strings. As a composer, Axelrod abandoned the conventional unison approach to orchestral writing in favor of more contrasts while centering his tempos around rock-based drum patterns played mostly in common time by Palmer. He utilized his instrumental ensemble as a rock orchestra, playing melodramatic strings and pronounced, echo-laden breakbeats. The music was also embellished with electric piano, intricate basslines, Echoplex effects, and elements of suspense Axelrod used to reflect the supernatural themes found in Blake's poems. According to David N. Howard, the album's "euphorically" upbeat psychedelic R&B form was interspersed by "dramatically sparse" and "harrowing" arrangements. Axelrod and his musicians used key musical phrases that are expanded upon throughout Song of Innocence. He was interested in György Ligeti's 1961 piece Atmosphères and Lukas Foss' idea of starting a piece with a sustained chord, having musicians improvise over 100 bars, and ending with another chord as they finish. "Urizen" opened with long sustained chords, sound effects, reverbed guitar stabs, and a supple bassline. On "Holy Thursday", the rhythm section played a slow, jazzed-out groove and bluesy bop piano lines, as a big band vamp was played by a large-scale string section. In response to their swing style, the brass section and guitarists played dramatic, high-pitched overtones built around a complex melody. The middle of the album featured more traditional jazz passages and the presence of a psychedelic harpsichord. "The Smile" was recorded with a rhythmic drum beat, offbeat bass, and a progressive string part. For the songs near the end, the musicians steadily transitioned to heady psychedelia featuring gritty guitars and disorienting organ licks. On "The Mental Traveler", Axelrod said he tried to experiment with atonality but "chickened out". ## Release and reception Song of Innocence was released in October 1968 by Capitol Records and attracted considerable interest from critics. Writing for Gramophone in 1969, Nigel Hunter found the songs to be "of absorbing power and depth", but complained of the electric guitar parts. Alasdair Clayre, in the same magazine, questioned whether the "occasional guitar gobbling" reflected Axelrod's genuine ideas or "an obligatory concession to contemporary sound", but he ultimately regarded Song of Innocence as a compelling record. In his opinion, the producer's impressions of Blake "reveal a depth of imagination and skill warranting attention beyond the confines of pop music", proving he could compose innovative pieces for a large orchestra, which Clayre felt comprised the best of California's studio musicians on the album. Billboard magazine called it "an aesthetic mix of music and philosophy ... chock full of mysticism, creativity, and change", believing that Axelrod's idyllic music would be interesting enough to impact the record charts. Others were more critical, finding the music foolish. Stereo Review magazine's Paul Kresh appraised the album negatively, calling it pretentious, inadequate, and dependent on movie music tricks and outdated techniques such as forced climaxes and gaudy orchestration. He said it falls severely short of the concept Axelrod aspired to and that "only the most uneducated will be taken in by the mountains of misterioso claptrap that surround these squeaking musical mice". Nat Freedland from Entertainment World accused Axelrod of "indulging himself here to little avail". Song of Innocence received radio exposure on both AM and FM stations with songs such as the title track and "Holy Thursday", which became the album's best-known recording. The album was not a commercial success, however, and only sold 75,000 copies by October 1969. ## Legacy and influence Song of Innocence was one of many concept albums recorded as rock music was developing in various directions during the late 1960s, following in the wake of the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was innovative for its original application of both rock and jazz techniques. According to music journalist Zaid Mudhaffer, the term "jazz fusion" was coined in a review of the record when it was released. Axelrod followed the album in 1969 with the similarly Blake-inspired Songs of Experience, which adapted Gunther Schuller's third stream concept to baroque orchestrations and rock, pop, and R&B rhythms and melodies. Both albums established Axelrod as an unpredictable, challenging conceptual artist. His instrumental interpretations of Blake were the first in jazz, followed in 1971 by Rafał Augustyn's Niewinność and Adrian Mitchell's musical Tyger: A Celebration of William Blake with composer Mike Westbrook; Westbrook later composed more Blake-inspired works, including The Westbrook Blake: "Bright as Fire" (1980). During the late 1990s, Axelrod's records were reassessed and considered innovative by critics, including Song of Innocence, which was regarded as a classic. Mojo cited it as "the heart of Axelrod's legacy", while John Mulvey from NME called it "sky-kissingly high and divine", finding Axelrod versatile enough to "soar above his own pretensions", Writing for AllMusic, John Bush said the album "sounded like nothing else from its era", while Thom Jurek argued that it continued to sound new upon each listen due to a lack of "cynicism and hipper-than-thou posturing" in the music. In a four-and-a-half star retrospective review, Jurek said it was innovative in 1968 and still "withstands the test of time better than the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album that allegedly inspired it". Giving it a five-out-of-five score, Tiny Mix Tapes said it sounded engagingly magnificent and diverse, citing it as one of the most dynamic musical fusions and "one of the most unique and thought provoking musical efforts of the last several decades". Axelrod's music was also rediscovered and sampled by leading disc jockeys in the 1990s including hip hop producers. When sampling in hip hop peaked during the early and mid-1990s, they searched for archived records with atmospheric beats and strings to sample. Los Angeles-based disc jockey B+ recalled finding a copy of Song of Innocence at a Goodwill in Culver City and said it appealed to him because of its dissonant quality, musical dynamics, and string sound: "This big sound. It was like somehow [Axelrod] was summoning the future, that you can project this environment, this moment into the future." Electronica pioneers such as DJ Cam and DJ Shadow also sampled Song of Innocence. The latter producer sampled the record's choral themes and piano motifs on his influential debut album Endtroducing..... (1996). "The Smile" was sampled by Pete Rock on his 1998 song "Strange Fruit" and by DJ Premier on Royce da 5'9"'s 2009 song "Shake This". "Holy Thursday" was frequently sampled by producers, including The Beatnuts on their 1994 song "Hit Me with That", UNKLE on their 1998 song "Rabbit in Your Headlights", and Swizz Beatz on Lil Wayne's 2008 song "Dr. Carter". The renewed interest in Axelrod's work prompted Stateside Records to reissue Song of Innocence in 2000. Reviewing the re-release, Now wrote that after sounding odd during the 1960s, the songs had become "a sampler's dream come true". David Keenan attributed Axelrod's sampling legacy to "the original badass drummer" Palmer. In his appraisal for The Wire, he facetiously critiqued that the songs "may reek of stale joss sticks and patchouli-scented self-actualisation, but in their very datedness they somehow sound very modern." Pitchfork journalist Sean Fennessey later said Axelrod's first two records were "essential if only as a tour guide through early 90s hip-hop", having "literally been a rap producer's delight for years". In a 2013 list for Complex, DJ and production duo Kon and Amir named "Holy Thursday" the greatest hip hop sample of all time. In 2017, Pitchfork ranked the album 144th on a list of "The 200 Best Albums of the 1960s", and in an accompanying essay, Louis Pattison acknowledged how hip hop crate diggers "recognized the holy, beautiful vision" of Axelrod's rhythmic compositions. In 2018, Song of Innocence was given another re-release, this time by Now-Again Records. It featured a new remaster by Randi, H. B. Barnum, and Axelrod's widow, Terri, along with sleeve notes written by Eothen Alapatt, Now-Again's CEO. According to Alapatt's notes, Axelrod once told him that Miles Davis played the album before conceiving his own fusion of jazz and rock for Bitches Brew (1970). ## Track listing All songs were written, arranged, and produced by David Axelrod. ## Personnel Credits were adapted from the album's liner notes. ## Release history ## See also - Songs of Innocence and Experience (Allen Ginsberg album) - William Blake in popular culture
7,259,561	Tylopilus felleus	1,092,450,962	Species of fungus	[ "Fungi described in 1788", "Fungi of Asia", "Fungi of Central America", "Fungi of Europe", "Fungi of North America", "Inedible fungi", "Tylopilus" ]	Tylopilus felleus, commonly known as the bitter bolete or the bitter tylopilus, is a fungus of the bolete family. Its distribution includes east Asia, Europe and eastern North America, extending south into Mexico and Central America. A mycorrhizal species, it grows in deciduous and coniferous woodland, often fruiting under beech and oak. Its fruit bodies have convex to flat caps that are some shade of brown, buff or tan and typically measure up to 15 cm (6 in) in diameter. The pore surface is initially white before turning pinkish with age. Like most boletes it lacks a ring and it may be distinguished from Boletus edulis and other similar species by its unusual pink pores and the prominent dark-brown net-like pattern on its stalk. French mycologist Pierre Bulliard described this species as Boletus felleus in 1788 before it was transferred into the new genus Tylopilus. It is the type species of Tylopilus and the only member of the genus found in Europe. Tylopilus felleus has been the subject of research into bioactive compounds that have been tested for antitumour and antibiotic properties. Although not poisonous it is generally considered inedible owing to its overwhelming bitterness. ## Taxonomy The species was first described in the scientific literature as le bolet chicotin (Boletus felleus) by French mycologist Pierre Bulliard in 1788. As the large genus Boletus was carved up into smaller genera, Petter Karsten transferred it in 1881 to Tylopilus, a genus diagnosed by its pink spores and adnate tubes. Tylopilus felleus is the type species of Tylopilus and the only member of the genus found in Europe. Synonyms include Boletus alutarius, described by Elias Magnus Fries in 1815 and later by Friedrich Wilhelm Gottlieb Rostkovius in 1844, and Paul Christoph Hennings's subsequent transfer of Fries's taxon into Tylopilus, T. alutarius. Lucien Quélet placed the taxon in Dictyopus in 1886 and then Rhodoporus in 1888, but neither of these genera are recognised today, the former having been merged into Boletus and the latter into Tylopilus. Genetic analysis published in 2013 shows that T. felleus and many (but not all) other members of Tylopilus form a Tylopilus clade within a larger group informally called anaxoboletus in the Boletineae. Other clades in the group include the porcini and Strobilomyces clades as well as three other groups composed of members of various genera including Xerocomus, Xerocomellus and Boletus badius and relatives. A variety described from the Great Lakes region, var. uliginosus, was recognised by Alexander H. Smith and Harry D. Thiers in 1971 on the basis of its microscopic features, a distinction supported by Professor C.B. Wolfe of Pennsylvania State University. However Index Fungorum does not consider this an independent taxon. Similarly, Boletus felleus var. minor, published originally by William Chambers Coker and A.H. Beers in 1943 (later transferred to Tylopilus by Albert Pilát and Aurel Dermek in 1974), has been folded into synonymy with T. felleus. Charles Horton Peck described Boletus felleus var. obesus in 1889, but no record of a type specimen exists. Although some records exist of T. felleus in Australia, their spores are of consistently smaller dimensions and this taxon has been classified as a separate species, T. brevisporus. Tylopilus felleus derives its genus name from the Greek tylos "bump" and pilos "hat" and its specific name from the Latin fel meaning "bile", referring to its bitter taste, similar to bile. The mushroom is commonly known as the "bitter bolete" or the "bitter tylopilus". ## Description The cap of this species grows up to 15 cm (6 in) in diameter, though some North American specimens reach 30 cm (12 in) across. Grey-yellow to pale- or walnut-brown, it is slightly downy at first and later becomes smooth with a matte lustre. It is initially convex before flattening out with maturity. The cap skin does not peel away from the flesh. The pores underneath are white at first and become pinkish with maturity. They are adnate to the stalk and bulge downwards as the mushroom ages. The pores bruise carmine or brownish, often developing rusty-brown spots with age, and number about one or two per millimetre. The tubes are long relative to the size of the cap, measuring 2–3 cm (0.8–1.2 in) deep in the middle part of the cap. The stalk is initially bulbous before stretching and thinning in the upper part; the lower part of the stalk remains swollen, sometimes shrinking at the base where it attaches to the substrate. It measures 7–10 cm (2.8–3.9 in)—rarely to 20 cm (7.9 in)—tall, and 2–3 cm (0.8–1.2 in) wide, and can bulge out to 6 cm (2.4 in) across at the base. It is lighter in colour than the cap, and covered with a coarse brown network of markings, which have been likened to fishnet stockings in appearance. Described as "very appetising" in appearance, the flesh is white or creamy, and pink beneath the cap cuticle; the flesh can also develop pinkish tones where it has been cut. It has a slight smell, which has been described as pleasant, as well as faintly unpleasant. The flesh is softer than that of other boletes, and tends to become more spongy as the mushroom matures. Insects rarely infest this species. The colour of the spore print is brownish, with pink, reddish, or rosy tints. Spores are somewhat fuse-shaped, smooth, and measure 11–17 by 3–5 μm. The basidia (spore-bearing cells) are club-shaped, four-spored, and measure 18–25.6 by 7.0–10.2 μm. Cystidia on the walls of the tubes (pleurocystidia) are fuse-shaped with a central swelling, thin-walled, and have granular contents. They possess sharp to tapered tips, and have overall dimensions of 36–44 by 8.0–11.0 μm. On the pore edges, the cheilocystidia are similar in shape to the pleurocystidia, measuring 24.8–44.0 by 7.3–11.0 μm. The hymenium of Smith and Thiers's variety uliginosus, when mounted in Melzer's reagent, shows reddish globules of pigment measuring 2–8 μm that appear in the hyphae and throughout the hymenium, and a large (8–12 μm) globule in the pleurocystidia. Several chemical tests have been documented that can help confirm the identify of this species. On the cap flesh, application of formaldehyde turns the tissue pinkish, iron salts result in a colour change to greyish-green, aniline causes a lavender to reddish-brown colour, and phenol a purplish pink to reddish brown. On the cap cuticle, nitric acid causes an orange-salmon colour, sulphuric acid creates orange-red, ammonia usually makes brown, and a potassium hydroxide solution usually makes orange. ## Similar species Italian cook and author Antonio Carluccio reports this is one of the most common fungi brought to him to identify, having been mistaken for an edible species. Young specimens can be confused with many edible boletes, though as the pores become more pink the species becomes easier to identify. Some guidebooks advocate tasting the flesh, the smallest piece of which will be very bitter. The dark-on-light reticulation in the stalk is distinctive and is the opposite colouration to that on the stalk of the prized Boletus edulis. T. felleus is found in the same habitat as B. badius, though the latter's yellow tubes and blue-bruising flesh easily distinguish these very dissimilar species. B. subtomentosus may have a similar-coloured cap but its yellow pores and slender stalk aid identification. Tylopilus rubrobrunneus, found in hardwood forests of eastern North America, is similar in appearance to T. felleus but has a purplish to purple-brown cap. It is also inedible owing to its bitter taste. Another North American species, T. variobrunneus, has a cap that is reddish-brown to chestnut-brown, with olive tones in youth. It has shorter spores than T. felleus, typically measuring 9–13 by 3–4.5 μm. In the field it can be distinguished from the latter species by its mild to slightly bitter taste. T. rhoadsiae, found in the southeastern United States, has a lighter-coloured cap which is smaller, up to 9 cm (3.5 in) in diameter. The edible T. indecisus and T. ferrugineus can be confused with T. felleus but have less reticulated stalks. The dimensions of the spores of the Australian species T. brevisporus range from 9.2 to 10.5 by 3.5 to 3.9 μm. T. neofelleus, limited in distribution to deciduous forests of China, New Guinea, Japan and Taiwan, can be distinguished from T. felleus macroscopically by its vinaceous-brown cap and pinkish-brown to vinaceous stalk and microscopically by its smaller spores (measuring 11–14 by 4–5 μm) and longer pleurocystidia (49–107 by 14–24 μm). ## Ecology, distribution and habitat Like all Tylopilus species, T. felleus is mycorrhizal. It is found in deciduous and coniferous woodland, often under beech and oak in well-drained acid soils, which can be sandy, gravelly or peaty. If encountered on calcareous (chalky) soil, it will be in moist areas that have become waterlogged and have ample leaf litter. Fruit bodies grow singly or in small groups, and occasionally in small clusters with two or three joined at the base of the stem. Fruit bodies have also been growing in the cavities of old trees, on old conifer stumps, or on buried rotten wood. The fungus obtains most of its nitrogen requirements from amino acids derived from the breakdown of proteins, although a lesser amount is obtained from the amino sugar glucosamine (a breakdown product of chitin, a major component of fungal cell walls). The mycorrhizal plant partner benefits from the fungus's ability to use these forms of nitrogen, which are often abundant in the forest floor. Fruit bodies appear over summer and autumn, anytime from June to October or even November, in many of the northern temperate zones. Large numbers may appear in some years and none in others, generally proportional to the amount of rainfall. Variety uliginosus, known from Michigan, grows among lichens and mosses under pines. In North America it is known from eastern Canada, south to Florida and west to Minnesota in the United States and into Mexico and Central America. Its European distribution is widespread; it is relatively common in many regions but rare or almost absent in others. In Asia it has been recorded from the vicinity of Dashkin in the Astore District of northern Pakistan and as far east as China, where it has been recorded from Hebei, Jiangsu, Fujian, Guangdong and Sichuan provinces, and Korea. The strong taste of the fruit body may have some role in insects avoiding it. The small fly species Megaselia pygmaeoides feeds on and infests the fruit bodies of T. felleus in North America though it seems to prefer other boletes in Europe. Fruit bodies can be parasitized by the mould Sepedonium ampullosporum. Infection results in necrosis of the mushroom tissue and a yellow colour caused by the formation of large amounts of pigmented aleurioconidia (single-celled conidia produced by extrusion from the conidiophores). The bacterium Paenibacillus tylopili has been isolated from the mycorrhizosphere of T. felleus; this is the region around its subterranean hyphae where nutrients released from the fungus affect the activity of the microbial population in the soil. The bacterium excretes enzymes that allow it to break down the biomolecule chitin. Fruit bodies of T. felleus have a high capacity to accumulate radioactive caesium (<sup>137</sup>Cs) from contaminated soil, a characteristic attributed to the deep soil penetration achieved by the mycelium. In contrast the species has a limited capacity to accumulate the radioactive isotope <sup>210</sup>Po. ## Edibility As its common name suggests, it is extremely bitter, though not toxic as such. This bitterness is worsened by cooking. One specimen can foul the taste of a whole meal prepared with mushrooms. Despite this it is sold in markets (tianguis) in Mexico. A local recipe from France, Romania and East Germany calls for stewing it in skimmed milk, after which it can be eaten or powdered and used for flavouring. The mushroom is not bitter for those who lack genetic sensitivity to bitter taste, a trait endowed by the gene TAS2R38 (taste receptor 2 member 38). The compound responsible for the bitter taste has not been identified. ## Research The mycelium of Tylopilus felleus can be grown in axenic culture, on agar containing growth medium. The fungus can form fruit bodies if the temperature is suitable and the light conditions simulate a 12-hour day. The mushrooms are usually deformed, often lacking stalks so that the cap grows on the surface direct and the caps are usually 0.5–1.0 cm (0.2–0.4 in) in diameter. There are few Boletaceae species known to fruit in culture since ectomycorrhizal fungi tend to not fruit when separated from their host plant. Compounds from T. felleus have been extracted and researched for potential medical uses. Tylopilan is a beta-glucan that was isolated from the fruit bodies in 1988 and shown in laboratory tests to have cytotoxic properties and to stimulate non-specific immunological response. In particular it enhances phagocytosis, the process by which macrophages and granulocytes engulf and digest foreign bacteria. In experiments on mice with tumour cells it appeared to have antitumour effects when administered in combination with a preparation of Cutibacterium acnes in a 1994 Polish study. Researchers in 2004 reported that extracts of the fruit body inhibit the enzyme pancreatic lipase; it was the second most inhibitory of 100 mushrooms they tested. A compound present in the mushroom, N-γ-glutamyl boletine, has mild antibacterial activity. ## See also - Boletus rubripes – the red-stemmed bitter bolete - List of North American boletes
12,234,888	Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark	1,111,724,464	1796 travel narrative by Mary Wollstonecraft	[ "1796 non-fiction books", "Literary autobiographies", "Travel books", "Works by Mary Wollstonecraft" ]	Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) is a personal travel narrative by the eighteenth-century British feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. The twenty-five letters cover a wide range of topics, from sociological reflections on Scandinavia and its peoples to philosophical questions regarding identity. Published by Wollstonecraft's career-long publisher, Joseph Johnson, it was the last work issued during her lifetime. Wollstonecraft undertook her tour of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in order to retrieve a stolen treasure ship for her lover, Gilbert Imlay. Believing that the journey would restore their strained relationship, she eagerly set off. However, over the course of the three months she spent in Scandinavia, she realized that Imlay had no intention of renewing the relationship. The letters, which constitute the text, drawn from her journal and from missives she sent to Imlay, reflect her anger and melancholy over his repeated betrayals. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is therefore both a travel narrative and an autobiographical memoir. Using the rhetoric of the sublime, Wollstonecraft explores the relationship between self and society in the text. She values subjective experience, particularly in relation to nature; champions the liberation and education of women; and illustrates the detrimental effects of commerce on society. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was Wollstonecraft's most popular book in the 1790s—it sold well and was reviewed favorably by most critics. Wollstonecraft's future husband, philosopher William Godwin, wrote: "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book." It influenced Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who drew on its themes and its aesthetic. While the book initially inspired readers to travel to Scandinavia, it failed to retain its popularity after the publication of Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798, which revealed Wollstonecraft's unorthodox private life. ## Biographical background In 1790, at the age of thirty-one, Wollstonecraft made a dramatic entrance onto the public stage with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a work that helped propel the British pamphlet war over the French revolution. Two years later she published what has become her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Anxious to see the revolution firsthand, she moved to France for about two years, but returned in 1795 after revolutionary violence increased and the lover she met there, American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, abandoned her and their illegitimate daughter, Fanny Imlay. Shortly after her return to Britain, Wollstonecraft attempted suicide in May; Imlay, however, managed to save her. One month after her attempted suicide, Wollstonecraft agreed to undertake the long and treacherous journey to Scandinavia in order to resolve Imlay's business difficulties. Not only was her journey to Scandinavia fraught with peril (she was a woman travelling alone during a time of war), it was also laced with sorrow and anger. While Wollstonecraft initially believed that the trip might resurrect their relationship, she eventually recognized that it was doomed, particularly after Imlay failed to meet her in Hamburg. Wollstonecraft's despair increased as her journey progressed. On her return to Britain in September, Wollstonecraft tried to commit suicide a second time: she attempted to drown herself in the River Thames but was rescued by passersby. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, which draws its material from her journal and the letters she sent Imlay during the three-month tour, was published in January 1796 by Wollstonecraft's close friend and career-long publisher, Joseph Johnson. Written after her two suicide attempts, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark frequently returns to the topic of death; it recreates Wollstonecraft's mental state while she was in Scandinavia and has been described as a suicide note addressed to Imlay, although he is never referred to by name in the published text. It is the last work by Wollstonecraft published within her lifetime: she died in childbirth just one year later. ### Scandinavian journey and Imlay's business interests Although Wollstonecraft appears as only a tourist in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, during her travels she was actually conducting delicate business negotiations on behalf of Imlay. For almost two hundred years, it was unclear why she had travelled to Scandinavia, but in the 1980s historian Per Nyström uncovered documents in local Swedish and Norwegian archives that shed light on the purpose of her trip. He revealed that Wollstonecraft was searching for a ship and cargo that had been stolen from Imlay. Imlay had authorized her to conduct his business dealings, referring to her in legal documents as "Mrs. Mary Imlay, my best friend and wife", although the two were not married. The intricate details of Imlay's business dealings are laid out clearly by Nyström. On 18 June 1794, Peder Ellefsen, who belonged to a rich and influential Norwegian family, bought a ship called the Liberty from agents of Imlay in Le Havre, France. It would later become clear that Ellefsen never owned the ship but rather engaged in a pro-forma sale on behalf of Imlay. He renamed the ship the Maria and Margaretha (presumably after Mary and her maid Marguerite) and had the Danish Consulate in Le Havre certify it so that the ship could pass through the British blockade of France (Imlay was a blockade runner). Carrying silver and gold Bourbon plate, the ship sailed from France under a Danish flag and arrived at Copenhagen on 20 August 1794. Although Ellefsen supposedly ordered the ship to continue on to Gothenburg, it never reached its destination. Imlay engaged in several fruitless attempts to locate the ship and its valuable cargo and then dispatched Wollstonecraft to negotiate an agreement with Ellefsen, who had subsequently been arrested for stealing the ship and its contents. Wollstonecraft's success or failure in the negotiations is unknown as is the ultimate fate of the ship and its treasure. To engage in these negotiations, Wollstonecraft travelled first to Gothenburg, where she remained for two weeks. Leaving Fanny and her nurse Marguerite behind, she embarked for Strömstad, Sweden, where she took a short detour to visit the fortress of Fredriksten, and then proceeded to Larvik, Norway. From there she travelled to Tønsberg, Norway, where she spent three weeks. She also visited Helgeroa, Risør, and Kristiania (now Oslo) and returned by way of Strömstad and Gothenburg, where she picked up Fanny and Marguerite again. She returned to England by way of Copenhagen and Hamburg, finally landing at Dover in September 1795, three months after she had left her home country. ## Structure, genre, and style Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark consists of twenty-five letters that address an extensive range of contentious political topics, such as prison reform, land rights, and divorce laws, as well as less controversial subjects, such as gardening, salt works, and sublime vistas. Wollstonecraft's political commentary extends the ideas she had presented in An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794); her discussion of prison reform, for example, is informed by her own experiences in revolutionary France and those of her friends, many of whom were jailed. While at first glance Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark appears to be a travel narrative, it is actually a "generic hybrid". The nature of this hybridity, however, is not altogether agreed upon by scholars. Some emphasize Wollstonecraft's fusion of the travelogue with the autobiography or memoir (a word used by Wollstonecraft in the book's advertisement), while others see it as a travelogue cum epistolary novel. The text, which reveals Wollstonecraft's thought processes, flows seamlessly from autobiographical reflections to musings on nature to political theories. However, it is unified by two threads: the first is Wollstonecraft's argument regarding the nature and progress of society; the second is her increasing melancholy. Although Wollstonecraft aims to write as a philosopher, the image of the suffering woman dominates the book. ### Travel narrative: "the art of thinking" One-half of the "generic hybridity" of Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is the epistolary travel narrative. Wollstonecraft's conception of this genre was shaped by eighteenth-century empirical and moral travel narratives, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society (1764), Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), Samuel Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), James Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), and Arthur Young's travel books. After reviewing twenty-four travel books for Joseph Johnson's periodical, the Analytical Review, Wollstonecraft was well-versed in the genre. This extensive reading solidified her ideas of what constituted a good travel book; in one review, she maintained that travel writers should have "some decided point in view, a grand object of pursuit to concentrate their thoughts, and connect their reflections" and that their books should not be "detached observations, which no running interest, or prevailing bent in the mind of the writer rounds into a whole". Her reviews praised detailed and engaging descriptions of people and places, musings on history, and an insatiable curiosity in the traveller. "The art of travel is only a branch of the art of thinking", Wollstonecraft wrote. Her journey and her comments on it are, therefore, not only sentimental but also philosophical. She uses the two modes to continue the critique of the roles afforded women and the progress of civilization that she had outlined in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. After overturning the conventions of political and historical writing, Wollstonecraft brought what scholar Gary Kelly calls "Revolutionary feminism" to yet another genre that had typically been considered the purview of male writers, transforming the travel narrative's "blend of objective facts and individual impressions ... into a rationale for autobiographical revelation". As one editor of the Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark writes, the book is "nothing less than a revolution in literary genres"; its sublimity, expressed through scenes of intense feeling, made "a new wildness and richness of emotional rhetoric" desirable in travel literature. One scholar has called Wollstonecraft the "complete passionate traveler". Her desire to delve into and fully experience each moment in time was fostered by the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, particularly his Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782). Several of Rousseau's themes appear in the Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, such as "the search for the source of human happiness, the stoic rejection of material goods, the ecstatic embrace of nature, and the essential role of sentiment in understanding". However, while Rousseau ultimately rejects society, Wollstonecraft celebrates both domesticity and industrial progress. ### Letter In one of the most influential interpretations of Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Mary Favret has argued that Wollstonecraft's letters must not only be viewed as personal correspondence but also as business correspondence, a genre that would have been ideologically ambiguous for her. According to Favret, Wollstonecraft attempts to reclaim the impersonal genre of the business letter and imbue it with personal meaning. One way she does this is through extensive use of "imaginative" writing that forces the reader to become a participant in the events narrated. Favret points out that Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is quite different from the despondent and plaintive love letters she actually sent to Imlay; the travel narrative much more closely resembles the personal journal in which she recorded her thoughts regarding the people she encountered and the places she visited. While her letters to Imlay contain long passages focused almost exclusively on herself, the Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark offers social commentary and sympathizes with the victims of disaster and injustice. To Imlay, Wollstonecraft represents herself as laid low by doubts, but to the world she depicts herself as overcoming all of these fears. She ruminates on them and transforms them into the basis of a letter akin to the open political letter popular during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, using her personal experience as the foundation for a discussion of national political reform. ### Autobiography Heavily influenced by Rousseau's frank and revealing Confessions (1782), Wollstonecraft lays bare her soul in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, detailing not only her physical but also her psychological journey. Her personal disclosures, like those of other female autobiographers, are presented as "unpremeditated self-revelations" and often appear to be "circuitous". However, as Wollstonecraft scholar Mitzi Myers has made clear, Wollstonecraft manages to use this style of writing to articulate a stable and comprehensible self for the reader. Increasingly confident in her ability as a writer, she controls the narrative and its effect on readers to a degree not matched in her other works. She transforms the individual sorrows of her trip, such as the dissolution of her relationship with Imlay, into the stuff of gripping literature. ### Sublimity Wollstonecraft relies extensively on the language of the sublime in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. She draws on and redefines Edmund Burke's central terms in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke privileges the sublime (which he associates with masculinity, terror, awe, and strength) over the beautiful (which he associates with femininity, passivity, delicacy, and weakness), while Wollstonecraft ties the sublime to sterility and the beautiful to fertility. For her, the beautiful is connected to the maternal; this aesthetic shift is evident, for example, in the many passages focusing on the affectionate tie between Wollstonecraft and little Fanny, her daughter. She thus claims the feminine category of the "beautiful" for the most virtuous and useful of women: mothers. Wollstonecraft also revises the conventional negative associations between the sublime and death; thoughts of death, prompted by a waterfall, for example, lead her to contemplate rebirth and immortality as well: > Reaching the cascade, or rather cataract, the roaring of which had a long time announced its vicinity, my soul was hurried by the falls into a new train of reflections. The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares – grasping at immortality – it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me – I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come. Like her other manipulations of the language of the sublime, this passage is also heavily inflected by gender. As one scholar puts it, "because Wollstonecraft is a woman, and is therefore bound by the legal and social restrictions placed on her sex in the eighteenth century, she can only envisage autonomy of any form after death". ## Themes ### Reason, feeling, and imagination Often categorized as a rationalist philosopher, Wollstonecraft demonstrates her commitment to and appreciation of feeling in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. She argues that subjective experiences, such as the transcendent emotions prompted by the sublime and the beautiful, possess a value equal to the objective truths discovered through reason. In Wollstonecraft's earlier works, reason was paramount, because it allowed access to universal truths. In Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, however, reason serves as a tool for reflection, mediating between the sensual experiences of the world and an abstract notion of truth (not necessarily universal truth). Maturation is not only the acquisition of reason—the view Wollstonecraft had adopted in Original Stories from Real Life (1788)—but also an understanding of when and how to trust one's emotions. Wollstonecraft's theories regarding reason, emotion, and the imagination are closely tied together. Some scholars contend that Wollstonecraft uses the imagination to liberate the self, especially the feminine self; it allows her to envision roles for women outside the traditional bounds of eighteenth-century thought and offers her a way to articulate those new ideas. In contrast, others view Wollstonecraft's emphasis on the power of the imagination as detrimental, imprisoning her in an "individualized, bourgeois desire" which can never truly embrace sociality. Favret has argued that Wollstonecraft uses the imagination to reconcile "masculine understanding" and "female sensibility". Readers must imaginatively "work" while reading: their efforts will save them from descending into sentimentality as well as from being lured into commercial speculation. Even more importantly, readers become invested in the story of the narrator. Wollstonecraft's language demands that they participate in the "plot": > 'they' rescue the writer from the villain; 'they' accompany her on her flight from sorrow ... With the readers' cooperation, the writer reverses the standard epistolary plot: here the heroine liberates herself by rejecting her correspondent and by embracing the 'world' outside of the domestic circle. In giving the imagination the power to reshape society (a power suggested through numerous allusions to Shakespeare's The Tempest), Wollstonecraft reveals that she has become a Romantic. ### Individual and society Throughout Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft ponders the relationship between society and the individual. While her earlier works largely focus on society's failings and responsibilities, in this work she turns inward, explicitly arguing for the value of personal experience. In the advertisement for the work, also published as a preface, she explains her role as the "hero" of the text: > In writing these desultory letters, I found I could not avoid being continually the first person – 'the little hero of each tale.' I tried to correct this fault, if it be one, for they were designed for publication; but in proportion as I arranged my thoughts, my letter, I found, became stiff and affected: I, therefore, determined to let my remarks and reflections flow unrestrained, as I perceived that I could not give a just description of what I saw, but by relating the effect different objects had produced on my mind and feelings, whilst the impression was still fresh. Throughout the book, Wollstonecraft ties her own psychic journey and maturation to the progress of civilizations. Nations, like individuals, she maintains have, as Wollstonecraft scholar Mary Poovey describes it, "a collective 'understanding' that evolves organically, 'ripening' gradually to fruition". However, Wollstonecraft still views civilization's tragedies as worthier of concern than individual or fictional tragedies, suggesting that, for her, sympathy is at the core of social relations: > I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind; — I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of adhesion, made me feel that I was still a part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself—not, perhaps, for the reflection has been carried very far, by snapping the thread of an existence which loses its charms in proportion as the cruel experience of life stops or poisons the current of the heart. ### Nature Wollstonecraft dedicates significant portions of Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to descriptions of nature and her emotional responses to it. One of her most effective tactics is to associate a set of thoughts and feelings with a specific natural formation, such as the waterfall passage quoted above. Nature, Wollstonecraft assumes, is "a common reference point" between readers and herself, therefore her letters should generate a sense of social sympathy with them. Many of the letters contain these "miniature Romantic excursus" which illustrate Wollstonecraft's ideas regarding the connections between nature, God, and the self. The natural world becomes "the necessary ground of speculation and the crucial field of experience". ### Gender: "Hapless woman! what a fate is thine!" All of Wollstonecraft's writings, including the Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, address the concerns of women in eighteenth-century society. As in previous works, she discusses concrete issues such as childcare and relationships with servants, but unlike her more polemical books such as Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) or the Rights of Woman, this text emphasizes her emotional reactions to nature and maternity. Yet she does not depart from her interest in promoting women's education and rights. In Letter 19, the most explicitly feminist letter, Wollstonecraft anticipates readers' criticisms: "still harping on the same subject, you will exclaim – How can I avoid it, when most of the struggles of an eventful life have been occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex: we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel." Wollstonecraft comes to the realization that she has always been forced to experience the world as a woman—it is the defining feature of her sense of self. Throughout Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft comments on the precarious position women occupy in society. She defends and sympathizes with Queen Caroline of Denmark, for example, who had been accused of "licentiousness" for her extra-marital affair during her marriage to the insane Christian VII. (Wollstonecraft herself had had unorthodox love affairs and an illegitimate child.) Wollstonecraft describes this royal, who was also a progressive social reformer, as a woman of courage who tried to revolutionize her country before it was prepared. Such examples fuel Wollstonecraft's increasing despair and melancholy. At one point, she laments the fate of her daughter: > You know that as a female I am particularly attached to her – I feel more than a mother's fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex. I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart. With trembling hand I shall cultivate sensibility, and cherish delicacy of sentiment, lest, whilst I lend fresh blushes to the rose, I sharpen the thorns that will wound the breast I would fain guard – I dread to unfold her mind, lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit – Hapless woman! what a fate is thine! Wollstonecraft's anger and frustration over the secondary status afforded women compels her to define herself in antithesis to conventional images of femininity. In the first letter she proudly announces "at supper my host told me bluntly that I was a woman of observation, for I asked him men's questions" (emphasis Wollstonecraft's). Wollstonecraft casts the female imagination as the productive counterpoint to destructive masculine commerce, a feat she achieves primarily through her use of the genre of the letter. While the Rights of Woman argued that women should be "useful" and "productive", importing the language of the market into the home, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark adopts the values of the domestic space for the larger social and political world. ### Commercialism Although Wollstonecraft spends much of Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark musing on nature and its connection to the self, a great deal of the text is actually about the debasing effects of commerce on culture. She argues, for example, that the damage done to Hamburg and France by mercenaries and an increasingly commercial culture is far greater than the damage caused by the violence of the French Revolution, writing that "the sword has been merciful, compared with the depredations made on human life by contractors, and by the swarm of locusts who have battened on the pestilence they spread abroad". Wollstonecraft believed that commerce "embruted" the mind and fostered a selfish disposition in its practitioners. Commerce should be, she thought, "regulated by ideas of justice and fairness and directed toward the ideals of independence and benevolence". Wollstonecraft had become disenchanted with Imlay not only because of his dismissive attitude towards her but also because of his greed. Throughout Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, she attaches criticisms of commerce to the anonymous lover who has betrayed her: > A man ceases to love humanity, and then individuals, as he advances in the chase after wealth; as one clashes with his interest, the other with his pleasures: to business, as it is termed, every thing must give way; nay, is sacrificed; and all the endearing charities of citizen, husband, father, brother, become empty names. Throughout the text, she contrasts the constructive, creative imagination with destructive commerce. By associating commercialism with the anonymous lover in the text, Wollstonecraft was also directly censuring Imlay, who she believed cared more for his business speculations than for her and their child. ### Revolution and progress Wollstonecraft spends several large sections of Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark speculating about the possibilities of social and political revolution and outlining a trajectory for the progress of civilization. In comparing Norway with Britain and France, for example, she argues that the Norwegians are more progressive because they have a free press, embrace religious toleration, distribute their land fairly, and have a politically active populace. However, her description of Norway's "golden age" becomes less rhapsodic after she discovers that the country has no universities or scientists. In many ways Norwegian society embodied the British radical ideal of "a small-producer society, its wealth sufficiently dispersed to ensure rough equality", similar to what Wollstonecraft had outlined in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). After careful consideration of how to improve the social and political problems in the places she visited, Wollstonecraft came to the conclusion that social progress must occur at a measured and "natural" rate. She argues that each country has to find its own way to improve, that democratic revolution cannot be foisted upon a people. She believed that the lower classes and the yeomen were the most promising "potential source of revolutionary social transformation". Implicit in her assessment, however, was a bourgeois condescension; she viewed the lower classes as a group separate from herself, at one point describing their behavior as "picturesque". ## Reception and legacy Wollstonecraft was prompted to publish Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark because she was heavily in debt. The successful sales of this, her most popular book in the 1790s, came at an opportune moment. Well-received by reviewers, the work was translated into German, Dutch, Swedish, and Portuguese; published in America; and reissued in a second edition in 1802. Amelia Alderson praised the work, separating the philosopher from the woman: "As soon as I read your Letters from Norway, the cold awe which the philosopher had excited was lost in the tender sympathy call'd forth by the woman." William Godwin, Wollstonecraft's future husband, wrote in his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that reading Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark caused him to fall in love with Wollstonecraft: > If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration. Affliction had tempered her heart to a softness almost more than human; and the gentleness of her spirit seems precisely to accord with all the romance of unbounded attachment. Connecting the work to Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), he celebrates its sensibility and "eroticizes the condition of feminine sorrow"; for Godwin, the work was an epistolary romance, not a work of political commentary. After Wollstonecraft's death in 1797, Godwin published her original letters to Imlay (destroying the originals in the process). He deleted all references to contemporary political events and her business negotiations, emphasizing the romantic connection between the two sets of letters. Favret contends that Godwin wanted the public to see Wollstonecraft's affair as a sentimental romance akin to that between Charlotte and Werther in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). For a woman, a one-year-old child, and a maid to travel to Scandinavia without the protection of a man was unprecedented in the eighteenth century. The book resulting from the trip also seemed highly unusual to readers at the time: details of Wollstonecraft's travels to a rarely visited area of the world, what one editor of the Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark describes as "a boreal wilderness", intrigued and even shocked contemporary readers. The unorthodox theology of the book also alienated some readers. The Monthly Magazine and American Review wrote: > [She] discarded all faith in christianity. [sic] ... From this period she adored [God] ... not as one whose interposing power is ever silently at work on the grand theatre of human affairs, causing eventual good to spring from present evil, and permitting nothing but for wise and benevolent purposes; but merely as the first great cause and vital spring of existence. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark retreated from Wollstonecraft's earlier focus on God as judge to God as mere creator, shocking some conservative readers who were not prepared to accept anything akin to deism. Worried more about Wollstonecraft's promotion of sensibility, fellow feminist and author Mary Hays criticized the book's mawkishness. A professor of moral philosophy, Thomas Brown, published a poetic response to the book, The Wanderer in Norway (1816). Rather than rejoicing in the freedom that Wollstonecraft argued the connection between nature and emotion offered, however, Brown represented her work as a failure and Wollstonecraft as a tragic victim. He read the book as a cautionary tale, whereas Wollstonecraft had intended it as a description of the possibilities of social and personal reform. As Favret argues, almost all of the responses to Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark placed the narrator/Mary in the position of a sentimental heroine, while the text itself, with its fusion of sensibility and politics, actually does much to challenge that image. After the publication of Godwin's Memoirs, which revealed and endorsed Wollstonecraft's love affairs and illegitimate child, her works were scorned by the majority of the public. Nevertheless, "the book was to arouse a passion for travel among cultivated people in Europe". Intrepid nineteenth-century British female travel writers such as Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley still read it and were inspired by Wollstonecraft's pioneering efforts. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was republished at the end of the nineteenth century and Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, took a copy on his trip to Samoa in 1890. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was a powerful influence on Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary Shelley. In 1817, Shelley would publish History of a Six Weeks' Tour, a narrative of her travels through Europe and to Lake Geneva which was modeled after her mother's work. ### Romanticism The Romantic poets were more profoundly affected by Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark than anyone, except perhaps Godwin. The poet Robert Southey, for example, wrote to his publisher: "Have you met with Mary Wollstonecraft's [travel book]? She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight." The book's combination of progressive social views with the advocacy of individual subjective experience influenced writers such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wollstonecraft's "incarnational theory of the creative imagination" paved the way for Wordsworth's thorough treatment of the imagination and its relation to the self in Book V of The Prelude (1805; 1850). Her book also had a significant influence on Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797–99) and Percy Shelley's Alastor (1815); their depictions of "quest[s] for a settled home" strongly resemble Wollstonecraft's. The most striking homage to Wollstonecraft's work, however, is in Coleridge's famous poem "Kubla Khan" (1797; 1816). Not only does much of his style descend from the book, but at one point he alludes to Wollstonecraft as he is describing a cold wasteland: > > A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! ## See also - Timeline of Mary Wollstonecraft ## Modern editions - Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. 7 vols. London: William Pickering, 1989. . - Wollstonecraft, Mary and Godwin, William. A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of 'The Rights of Woman'''. Ed. Richard Holmes. London: Penguin Books, 1987. . - Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark''. Ed. Carol H. Poston. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976.
8,230,132	Fantastic Adventures	1,115,515,639	American pulp fantasy and science fiction magazine	[ "Bimonthly magazines published in the United States", "Defunct science fiction magazines published in the United States", "Fantastic Adventures", "Fantasy fiction magazines", "Magazines disestablished in 1953", "Magazines established in 1939", "Magazines published in Chicago", "Monthly magazines published in the United States", "Pulp magazines", "Science fiction magazines established in the 1930s" ]	Fantastic Adventures was an American pulp fantasy and science fiction magazine, published from 1939 to 1953 by Ziff-Davis. It was initially edited by Raymond A. Palmer, who was also the editor of Amazing Stories, Ziff-Davis's other science fiction title. The first nine issues were in bedsheet format, but in June 1940 the magazine switched to a standard pulp size. It was almost cancelled at the end of 1940, but the October 1940 issue enjoyed unexpectedly good sales, helped by a strong cover by J. Allen St. John for Robert Moore Williams' Jongor of Lost Land. By May 1941 the magazine was on a regular monthly schedule. Historians of science fiction consider that Palmer was unable to maintain a consistently high standard of fiction, but Fantastic Adventures soon developed a reputation for light-hearted and whimsical stories. Much of the material was written by a small group of writers under both their own names and house names. The cover art, like those of many other pulps of the era, focused on beautiful women in melodramatic action scenes. One regular cover artist was H.W. McCauley, whose glamorous "MacGirl" covers were popular with the readers, though the emphasis on depictions of attractive and often partly clothed women did draw some objections. In 1949 Palmer left Ziff-Davis and was replaced by Howard Browne, who was knowledgeable and enthusiastic about fantasy fiction. Browne briefly managed to improve the quality of the fiction in Fantastic Adventures, and the period around 1951 has been described as the magazine's heyday. Browne lost interest when his plan to take Amazing Stories upmarket collapsed, and the magazine fell back into predictability. In 1952, Ziff-Davis launched another fantasy magazine, titled Fantastic, in a digest format; it was successful, and within a few months the decision was taken to end Fantastic Adventures in favor of Fantastic. The March 1953 issue of Fantastic Adventures was the last. ## Publication history Although science fiction (sf) had been published before the 1920s, it did not begin to coalesce into a separately marketed genre until the appearance in 1926 of Amazing Stories, a pulp magazine published by Hugo Gernsback. By the end of the 1930s the field was undergoing its first boom. Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929; it was sold to Teck Publications, and then in 1938 it was acquired by Ziff-Davis. The following year Ziff-Davis launched Fantastic Adventures as a companion to Amazing; the first issue was dated May 1939, and the editor of Amazing, Ray Palmer, took on responsibility for the new magazine as well. Fantastic Adventures was initially published in bedsheet format, the same size as the early sf magazines such as Amazing, perhaps in order to attract fans who were nostalgic for the larger format. It started as a bimonthly, but in January 1940 began a monthly schedule. Sales were weaker than for Amazing, however, and with the June issue the schedule reverted to bimonthly. The size was also reduced to a standard pulp format, since that was cheaper to produce. Sales did not improve, and Ziff-Davis planned to make the October issue the last one. That issue carried Robert Moore Williams' Jongor of Lost Land, and had a cover by J. Allen St. John; the combination proved to be so popular that October sales were twice the August figures. This convinced Ziff-Davis that the magazine was viable, and it was restarted in January 1941—as a bimonthly at first, but switching to monthly again in May of that year. Howard Browne took over as editor of both Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures in 1950. Browne preferred fantasy to science fiction, and enjoyed editing Fantastic Adventures, but when his plans for taking Amazing upmarket were derailed by the Korean War, he lost interest in both magazines for a while. He let William Hamling take responsibility for both titles, and the quality declined. At the end of 1950, Ziff-Davis moved its offices from Chicago to New York; Browne relocated to New York, but Hamling decided to stay in Chicago, so Browne became more involved once again, and sf historians such as Brian Stableford and Mike Ashley consider the result to have been a definite improvement in quality. Browne's interest in fantasy led him to start a new digest-sized magazine, Fantastic, in the summer of 1952; it was an immediate success, and led Ziff-Davis to convert Amazing Stories to digest format as well. The move from the pulp format to digests was well under way in the early 1950s, and with Fantastic's success there was little reason to keep Fantastic Adventures going. It was merged with Fantastic; the last issue was dated March 1953, and the May–June issue of Fantastic added a mention of Fantastic Adventures to the masthead, though this disappeared with the following issue. ## Contents and reception ### Palmer Palmer's goal for Fantastic Adventures was to create a magazine that published fantasy fiction but was the literary equal of the quality magazines—the "slicks", such as The Saturday Evening Post. Although mixing science fiction with fantasy was not popular with sf fans of the era, Palmer consciously promoted the magazine as containing the best of both worlds; the slogan on the cover read "The Best in Science Fiction", but Palmer also wrote blurbs in Amazing Stories for Fantastic Adventures in which he extolled the value to a reader of getting both genres in a single magazine. Fantastic Adventures' competition included Unknown, which had been launched just a couple of months earlier, in March 1939, and Weird Tales, which was first published in 1923; but instead of attempting to emulate either one, Fantastic Adventures focused on adventure stories in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Palmer probably acquired some fantasy-oriented material that had been submitted to Amazing Stories, which gave him an immediate stream of submissions to work with. However, according to Ashley the first issue was quite weak: The cover story was "The Invisible Robinhood" by Eando Binder, and other contributors included Harl Vincent, Ross Rocklynne and A. Hyatt Verrill. Features included a quiz, an author profile, and a comic strip, titled "Ray Holmes, Scientific Detective"; the reader was supposed to solve the mystery based on the clues given in the strip. It was a failure and disappeared after the first issue. The back cover, "The Man from Mars", by Frank R. Paul, was more successful, and illustrated back covers became a regular feature of the magazine. The next issue contained "The Scientists' Revolt", by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a name guaranteed to help sales. Ashley comments that the story was unimpressive; it had been written as a palace intrigue set in contemporary Europe, but Burroughs had been unable to find a buyer. Palmer eventually acquired it, and rewrote it, setting it in the future. Despite the weakness of the lead story, the second issue was a marked improvement over the first, with well-received stories by Nelson S. Bond and John Russell Fearn (as "Thornton Ayre"). Burroughs returned to Fantastic Adventures in 1941, with a series of novelettes in his Carson of Venus series; there were four in all between March 1941 and March 1942, each with cover art by J. Allen St. John, and the result was a significant boost to Fantastic Adventures' circulation. A majority of the stories in Fantastic Adventures came from a small group of writers who often wrote under house names. The main members of the group were William P. McGivern, David Wright O'Brien, Don Wilcox, Chester S. Geier, Rog Phillips, Leroy Yerxa, Robert Moore Williams, Robert Bloch and Berkeley Livingston. Most of this material was of little lasting value, in Ashley's opinion, but Palmer was often able to get good stories from outside this group: August Derleth sold several stories to Palmer, for example. Ray Bradbury also sold a story to Fantastic Adventures—"Tomorrow and Tomorrow", which appeared in 1947, was his only appearance in the magazine, but Ashley regards it as "among the best stories [Fantastic Adventures] published in the 1940s". An early contributor was Nelson S. Bond, whose story "The Judging of the Priestess" appeared in the April 1940 issue. This was the second in a highly regarded series of three stories about a priestess in the future, after civilization has collapsed; the first and third in the series appeared in Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories respectively. Bond also wrote a humorous short story called "The Amazing Invention of Wilberforce Weems", which appeared in the September 1939 issue and described the consequences of a potion that allowed the instant absorption of knowledge from any book. Palmer encouraged his stable of writers to follow up with more whimsical ideas, and the resulting offbeat stories gave Fantastic Adventures a reputation for light-hearted and entertaining fantasy. These stories often had absurd names; early examples include "The Quandary of Quantus Quaggle", "Sidney, the Screwloose Robot" (both by McGivern), and "The Weird Doom of Floyd Scrilch", by Robert Bloch—one of his series of stories about Lefty Feep, almost all of which appeared in Fantastic Adventures between 1942 and 1945. Robert Moore Williams contributed two sequels to his successful Jongor of Lost Land: The Return of Jongor appeared in 1944, and Jongor Fights Back in 1951. Palmer enjoyed hoaxes, such as printing a photograph of a writer when in fact the name in question was a pseudonym. In the February 1944 issue of Fantastic Adventures, he printed a letter in which the writer claimed to be a time-traveling scientist born in 1970, whose time machine was inspired by a story in the magazine. Palmer pretended to take the letter seriously, and printed an appeal to readers to find the scientist. Palmer's most successful hoax was the "Shaver Mystery", a series of stories in which the author, Richard Shaver, explained all the wrecks and accidents on Earth as the result of interference by ancient machinery hidden underground. The series was enormously popular; all the Shaver Mystery stories were published in Fantastic Adventures' companion magazine, Amazing Stories (which led Ashley to describe Fantastic Adventures as a "haven" from the Shaver stories) but Shaver did also publish some competent fantasies in Fantastic Adventures. The increased circulation enabled both Amazing and Fantastic Adventures to return to monthly publication in the late 1940s. ### Browne When Browne took over at the start of 1950, William Hamling was doing most of the editorial work. Browne did not fully take control of the magazine until the end of the year, when Hamling and Palmer both left Ziff-Davis; the quality of the fiction promptly improved at that point, and the first year or two of Browne's tenure are regarded as the high point of Fantastic Adventures' run. Theodore Sturgeon's novel The Dreaming Jewels appeared in February 1950, and Lester del Rey, William Tenn and Walter M. Miller all published notable material. In April 1950, Mack Reynolds' first story, "Isolationist", appeared in Fantastic Adventures. Reynolds became more strongly associated with Astounding Science Fiction than with the Ziff-Davis magazines, but some of the radical political themes of his later work are evident in "Isolationist". The story describes helpful alien visitors abandoning Earth to atomic war because of the hostility of the first Earthman they encounter. John Jakes also debuted in Fantastic Adventures that year, with "The Dreaming Trees", in November 1950. Overall the quality was low, but according to sf historian Brian Stableford, "sf writers given carte blanche to write pure fantasy for [Fantastic Adventures] did often produce readable fiction with a distinctive whimsical and ironic flavour". Critic John Clute's assessment was that it was inconsistent, "but there were some terrific tales in it. Not enough, but some." Notable stories from the post-war era include Theodore Sturgeon's "Largo" and Raymond F. Jones' "The Children's Room". The artwork was generally of higher quality than the stories; Ashley describes Fantastic Adventures as "one of the best-illustrated magazines around". Regular artists included Virgil Finlay, Henry Sharp, Rod Ruth, and Malcolm Smith. In Palmer's words, "It has been our experience that covers sell magazines—simply because they attract attention." For the first year the cover art, while dramatic, was more likely to show an action scene with a male hero than a damsel in distress, but in August 1940 H.W. McCauley's cover showed a glamorous woman in a sparkling dress. Similar covers followed with increasing frequency, with readers and editors giving the various heroines the name of "MacGirl". Science fiction historian Paul Carter, commenting on the change from action scenes to alluring women on the covers, suggests that "surely the war had something to do with this". Science fiction art often included spaceships as phallic symbols; author and critic Brian Aldiss remarked on a Fantastic Adventures cover, from March 1949, that included a submarine as a phallic symbol instead. Readers' letters often objected to the attractive women and the implied sexual content, but the stories themselves were quite tame. ## Bibliographic details The editorial succession at Fantastic Adventures is usually given as follows: - Ray Palmer: May 1939 – December 1949 - Howard Browne: January 1950 – April 1953 However, the editorial responsibility did not always reside with the named editor on the masthead. The editor-in-chief was senior to the managing editor, but at some points in the magazine's history it was the managing editor who was primarily responsible for the magazine. The following table shows who held which title, at which point: Fantastic Adventures was initially bedsheet-sized and had a page count of 96, which increased to 144 when the publication was reduced to pulp-size in June 1940. It was initially priced at 20 cents. With the April 1942 issue the price increased to 25 cents, where it remained for the rest of the magazine's run, and the page count went up again to 240. From June 1943 to July 1945 there were 208 pages, and the count dropped to 176 with the October 1945 issue; then to 160 in July 1948, and only two issues later, in September 1948, the page count went down to 156. It dropped again to 144 with the June 1949 issue, but rose to 160 from September 1949 to August 1950. The September 1950 issue had 148 pages, and all the remaining issues had 130 pages. The magazine began as a bimonthly, but switched to a monthly schedule in January 1940, though this only lasted six issues. June 1940 was followed by August and October 1940 and January and March 1941. The May 1941 issue inaugurated another monthly period that lasted until August 1943, when the schedule switched back to bimonthly until the June 1944 issue. Fantastic then went on a quarterly schedule, beginning with the October 1944 issue; in October 1945 it became bimonthly again, though there was a gap between February and May 1946. From September 1947 to the end of the run the magazine was monthly. The volume numeration was regular, with a new volume starting at the beginning of each calendar year; the result was a variable number of issues in each volume, from a low of four in 1944 to a full twelve when the magazine was monthly, as it was for the last few years of its life. The last issue was volume 15 number 3. There were two British reprint editions. The first consisted of two numbered and undated issues, which appeared in May and June 1947 from Ziff-Davis in London. This was pulp-sized and 32 pages long; it contained stories from the wartime U.S. edition. The second series was published by Thorpe & Porter, in Leicester, and consisted of 24 undated issues, all but the first two of which were numbered. These began at 160 pages, and decreased, first to 128 and then to 96 pages. They were released between June 1950 and February 1954, and were abridged versions of U.S. editions dated from March 1950 to January 1953, as follows: The contents were initially identical to the U.S. editions, but starting with issue \#13 at least one story was dropped. Starting in 1941, unsold issues of Fantastic Adventures were rebound, three together, with a new cover, titled Fantastic Adventures Quarterly. There were eight of these quarterly issues between Winter 1941 and Fall 1943; they were priced at 25 cents and given a volume numbering from volume 1 number 1 to volume 2 number 4. Another similar series was started in Summer 1948, for 50 cents; there were eleven of these, running from volume 6 number 1 to volume 9 number 1, finishing with the Spring 1951 issue and omitting Spring 1949. In 1965, Sol Cohen acquired both Amazing Stories and Fantastic from Ziff-Davis, along with reprint rights to all the stories that had appeared in the Ziff-Davis science fiction magazines, including Fantastic Adventures. Cohen published multiple reprint titles, and frequently reprinted stories from Fantastic Adventures. In particular, the following issues took their contents mostly or completely from Fantastic Adventures: - Fantastic Adventures Yearbook. One issue in the summer of 1970, no number, dated only with the year. Reprinted six stories from Fantastic Adventures that had originally appeared between 1949 and 1952. - Thrilling Science Fiction. Issues 16 and 20 (Summer 1970 and Summer 1971). - Science Fiction Adventures. January 1974 issue. - Science Fantasy. All four issues, from 1970 to 1971. - The Strangest Stories Every Told. One issue, Summer 1970. - Weird Mystery. There were four issues of this magazine between Fall 1970 and Summer 1971; the contents were drawn largely from Fantastic Adventures.
347,337	Theodora Kroeber	1,168,218,302	American anthropologist (1897–1979)	[ "1897 births", "1979 deaths", "20th-century American anthropologists", "20th-century American non-fiction writers", "20th-century American women writers", "American people of Polish descent", "American women anthropologists", "American women non-fiction writers", "Kroeber family", "People from Telluride, Colorado", "University of California, Berkeley alumni", "Writers from Berkeley, California", "Writers from Denver" ]	Theodora Kroeber (/ˈkroʊbər/ KROH-bər; ; March 24, 1897 – July 4, 1979) was an American writer and anthropologist, best known for her accounts of several Native Californian cultures. Born in Denver, Colorado, Kroeber grew up in the mining town of Telluride, and worked briefly as a nurse. She attended the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), for her undergraduate studies, graduating with a major in psychology in 1919, and received a master's degree from the same institution in 1920. Married in 1920 and widowed in 1923, she began doctoral studies in anthropology at UC Berkeley. She met anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber during her studies, and married him in 1926. One of her two children with Kroeber was the writer Ursula K. Le Guin. The Kroebers traveled together to many of Alfred's field sites, including an archaeological dig in Peru, where Theodora worked cataloging specimens. On their return, Alfred encouraged Theodora to continue her graduate work, but she declined, feeling she had too many responsibilities. Kroeber began writing professionally late in her life, after her children had grown up. She published The Inland Whale, a collection of translated Native Californian narratives in 1959. Two years later she published Ishi in Two Worlds, an account of Ishi, the last member of the Yahi people of Northern California, whom Alfred Kroeber had befriended and studied between 1911 and 1916. This volume sold widely and received high praise from contemporary reviewers. Retrospective reviews were more mixed, noting Kroeber's unflinching portrayal of Californian colonization but criticizing her perspective on Ishi's treatment. Nine years after Alfred's death in 1960, Theodora Kroeber married artist John Quinn. Kroeber published several other works in her later years, including a collaboration with her daughter Ursula and a biography of Alfred Kroeber. She served as a regent of the University of California for a year before her death in 1979. She has been described as having influenced her husband's anthropological work, and as having inspired interest in indigenous culture through Ishi in Two Worlds. A 1989 biography stated that her "great strength was as an interpreter of one culture to another". ## Early life, education, and first marriage Theodora Covel Kracaw was born on March 24, 1897, in Denver, Colorado, and lived there for her first four years. She grew up in the mining town of Telluride, where her parents, Phebe Jane (née Johnston) and Charles Emmett Kracaw, owned a general store. Charles's family were recent Polish migrants and Phebe had grown up in Wyoming. Theodora was the youngest of three Kracaw children; she had two brothers, five and ten years older than she was. All the children attended schools in Telluride. Theodora's brothers became physicians. Theodora, who described herself as a shy and introverted person, said her childhood was happy. Her family name "Kracaw" led to her being nicknamed "Krakie" by her friends. Kracaw graduated in 1915 as the valedictorian of her class at Telluride High School. After graduation, she worked as a volunteer nurse at Hadley Hospital in Colorado. In the same year, the family left Colorado and moved to Orland, California, since the lower altitude there was expected to benefit her father's health, although it failed to do so. Kracaw enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), in 1915. She considered majoring in economics or English literature before deciding on psychology. She made lifelong friends during her undergraduate years, including Jean Macfarlane, whose interest in psychology drove Kracaw to select that discipline for her major. She graduated cum laude in 1919 with a BA in psychology and began graduate study at UC Berkeley. Her master's thesis studied ten families in San Francisco whose children were involved with a juvenile court. She volunteered as a probation officer and was required to meet and report on the families she was studying. She later wrote that she struggled to be objective in writing about these families. Kracaw received her master's degree in clinical psychology in 1920. In the summer of 1920, Kracaw married Clifton Spencer Brown, who was at UC Berkeley for graduate studies in law. Brown was contending with the effects of pneumonia he had contracted in France during World War I. They had two children, Clifton II and Theodore. The couple were visiting in Santa Fe when their home was lost in the 1923 Berkeley fire. Clifton left to return to Berkeley, but died en route in Denver in October 1923. Theodora and the children made their way back to Berkeley and the home of Brown's widowed mother, who encouraged her to return to graduate school. While in Santa Fe, she had developed an interest in Native American art and culture, and she decided to study anthropology at UC Berkeley. ## Anthropological career and second marriage Theodora re-entered university in 1924. Having chosen to study anthropology, she consulted Alfred Kroeber, a leading American anthropologist of his generation and the head of the UC Berkeley anthropology department. Although she had previously taken classes from Alfred's assistant Thomas Waterman, this was the first time Theodora met Alfred. At the time, anthropology was a new field and although women were admitted to help bolster class sizes to legitimize course offerings, they were resented. Male colleagues worried that women would be competition for the limited employment posts or research grants and lower the prestige of the profession. Thus, it became typical for women to be recruited, but their training and employment opportunities thereafter were restricted. During a seminar class Theodora took with Alfred, she and Julian Steward were assigned to evaluate Native American sport activities. She also took a course on symbolism with Robert Lowie. Theodora and Alfred married on March 26, 1926. Steward, then also a graduate student at UC Berkeley, wrote that the marriage surprised their colleagues. Alfred, 21 years older than Theodora, had also been previously married; his wife had died of tuberculosis in 1913. Alfred adopted Theodora's two sons, giving them his last name. The couple had two more children together: Karl and Ursula. Karl, Clifton, and Theodore later became professors, of English, history, and psychology, respectively, and Ursula became a well-known author under her married name Ursula K. Le Guin. In June 1926, the Kroebers left their children with Theodora's mother and went on an eight-month field trip to an archaeological dig in Peru's Nazca valley. It was Theodora's first visit to an archaeological site; she also had not previously lived on a campsite. While there, she worked on recognizing and cataloging specimens. Also in 1926, she published her first academic work, a paper examining ethnological data analysis, in the journal The American Anthropologist. She accompanied Alfred on another trip to Peru in 1942 and other trips studying the Yurok and Mohave peoples, including to the Klamath River. She drew on these experiences in her 1968 book Almost Ancestors. On their return from Peru, Alfred encouraged Theodora to continue working on her doctorate, but she declined, as she felt she had too many responsibilities. When they were not traveling, the Kroebers spent most of the year in a large redwood house, facing San Francisco Bay, to which Alfred was particularly attached. They both lived in the same house until their deaths. The redwood house has been described as the cornerstone of the Kroebers' lengthy marriage. They spent the summers in an old farmhouse they had bought in the Napa valley on a 40-acre ranch named "Kishamish". Alfred's friends among the Native Americans were frequent visitors to this house. During the academic year, Theodora kept in contact with Alfred's academic acquaintances when the couple entertained them at their house in Berkeley. ## Writing career Kroeber began writing seriously once again after her husband had retired and her children were all grown, at approximately the same time that Ursula also began writing professionally. Between 1955 and 1956, a year the Kroebers spent at Stanford University, Theodora wrote a novel about Telluride. This work was never published, but helped her establish a habit of writing a little bit every day. In 1959, the year she turned 62, she published The Inland Whale, a retelling of California Native American legends that she had selected in the belief that they exhibited a certain originality. The book collected nine pieces that shared a theme of heroines: a section of authorial commentary was also included. One of these was a Yurok legend narrated to her by the Yurok Robert Spott, who had been among the visitors to Kishamish. The book was well-received, with critics identifying it as a notable work of comparative literature. One reviewer said Kroeber had made the legends accessible to a general audience by "translating freely in her own sensitive, almost lyrical style". ### Ishi Kroeber spent 1960 and 1961 exploring the literature about Ishi, the last known member of the Yahi people, who had been found starving in Oroville, California, in 1911. Ishi had been brought to UC Berkeley, where he was studied and befriended by Alfred Kroeber and his associates. Ishi never shared his Yahi name; Alfred suggested to reporters that he be called "Ishi", which meant "man" in the language of the Yana people, of which the Yahi were a subgroup. Ishi had died of tuberculosis in 1916. Theodora undertook to write an account of his life, believing that Alfred could not bring himself to do so. Ishi in Two Worlds was published in 1961, a year after Alfred's death. Kroeber found the book's challenging subject material to be difficult to write, as it recounted the extermination of the Yahi people as part of the California genocide and Ishi's many years spent largely in solitude. She released a version of the story for children in 1964 titled Ishi: Last of His Tribe. She found this version even harder to write, as she struggled to present death to an audience largely shielded from it. This version was illustrated by Ruth Robbins: a review noted it was not another anthropological study, but discussed in simple language the cultural clashes which resulted from the Western expansion of the United States. Ishi in Two Worlds became an immediate success and established Kroeber's reputation for anthropological writing. Described as a "modern classic", it was translated into nine languages and remained in print as of 2015. It sold half a million copies by 1976 and a million copies by 2001. The book generally received high praise upon publication: one reviewer said Kroeber had a talent for "making us part of a life we never took part in". A 1979 commentary described it as the most widely read book about a Native American subject, calling it a "beautifully written story" that was "evocative of Yahi culture". The story was adapted as a television film as Ishi: The Last of His Tribe in 1978, and as The Last of His Tribe in 1992. Retrospective assessments of the book are more mixed. Thomas E. Simmons, a justice of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, wrote in 2019 that the book's perspective on Ishi was "empathetic yet deeply flawed", saying that it glossed over or did not take issue with the manner in which Ishi was presented as an exhibit. Writing in 1997, scholar Richard Pascal said the book, "to its credit", did not evade the "horrors inflicted upon the Yahi by the invading whites", an opinion echoed by historian James Clifford in 2013. Pascal nonetheless argued that the narrative's goal was one of assimilation, and said it was "colonizing 'Ishi' in the name of American culture", and Clifford criticized the implicit assumption that coming into the care of Alfred Kroeber was the best outcome for Ishi. Kroeber's style continued to receive praise. Writing in 2010, historian Douglas Sackman compared Ishi in Two Worlds to To Kill a Mockingbird, and stated that it spoke to the experiences of Native Americans in its exploration of "the dark side of American expansion and the legacy of genocidal policies" in the same way that Harper Lee's book, published the previous year, examined racial prejudice and the legacy of slavery in the experience of African Americans. Clifford wrote that the account of Ishi's life in San Francisco was written with "skill and compassion", and added that "[w]ith a generous appreciation of human complexity and an eye for the telling detail, [Kroeber] created a masterpiece". Ishi in Two Worlds "wrapped up Ishi's story in a humane, angry, lovely, bittersweet package", which remained the most detailed and complete account of Ishi's life. ### Later writing Theodora published two papers in 1969, "Shropshire Revisited" and "Life Against Death in English Poetry: A Method of Stylistic Definition", which she had written previously with Alfred. These both examined literary style in English poetry. Grace Buzaljko, editor for the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology and subsequently author of a short biography of Theodora, described both Kroebers as "superb stylists", Theodora having an inclination towards the "personal and intense", which also made her anthropological writing accessible and enjoyable for a wide audience. Theodora edited Alfred's An Anthropologist Looks at History (1963), wrote the forewords to two collections of Alfred's writings which were unpublished until after his death, Yurok Myths (1976) and Karok Myths (1980), and collaborated with her daughter on Tillai and Tylissos, a poetry collection released in 1979. She also wrote a biography of her husband titled Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration, published in 1970 by the University of California Press. It was widely praised by reviewers: Anthropologist George W. Stocking Jr. wrote that her "gift for [evocative] and moving descriptive writing" was frequently evident, and Buzaljko called it a "sensitive biography with her inimitable phraseology and setting of mood". David G. Mandelbaum, a cultural anthropologist and former colleague of Alfred, stated that this biography was just as important a work from an anthropologist's perspective as Ishi in Two Worlds. Reviews also discussed the biography's illumination of Kroeber's academic development and called it a work of value to anthropologists; others found it wanting as a scholarly biography. Kroeber published several other works in the years that followed, including a short story and two novels along with her anthropological writings. After completing Ishi: Last of His Tribe, she collaborated with Robert Heizer, an anthropologist at UC Berkeley, to publish two pictorial accounts of Native Americans in California: Almost Ancestors, released in 1968, and Drawn from Life, released in 1976. These books collected images from several sources with text written by Kroeber, and were described by the American Anthropologist as examining social change among California's Indian peoples in a literary style that was Kroeber's own. Kroeber notes that the images included therein were poor, but defended their publication, writing "Why offer so flawed and partial a record? It is all the record there is... We believe you will see through the pictures, imperfect as they are, to the living human beings who sat for them." Anthropologist Lowell Bean expressed disappointment in the quality of the illustrations, and wrote that the essays were "oversimplified", but nonetheless found value in the illustrations, and commended the authors for "painstaking efforts". ## Later life On December 14, 1969, Kroeber married John Quinn, who was working at the time for the Sierra Club. Quinn had been one of the editors for Almost Ancestors. Quinn, an artist and psychotherapist, was several decades younger than Kroeber. She reflected on the impact of age gaps within marriage in a 1976 essay, using her own experience of having been much younger than her second husband and older than her third husband. After their marriage, the couple moved into Theodora's home on Arch Street in Berkeley. They also designed and built a home known as Quinnwood in Anchor Bay, California, where they lived part-time until 1978. Quinn encouraged her to complete her biography of Alfred, which she was having trouble with when she had met Quinn. Ten years later, when Kroeber's health was declining, Quinn encouraged her to write a short autobiography, which was printed privately after her death. Kroeber described her political views as those of an "old thirties liberal". She was a lifelong supporter of the Democratic Party and a participant in peace rallies in her final years. In 1977 she was offered a position on the University of California Board of Regents by California Governor Jerry Brown. She held the position for a year before she resigned, stating that the position was exhausting her. Her last act in that position was to send a memorandum to the rest of the board, challenging the University's involvement in research into nuclear weapons, and stating that the board had an "unblushing commitment... to the development of science and the practice of war, of human and earth destruction". On July 4, 1979, she died of cancer in her Berkeley home. ## Legacy Berkeley anthropologist Albert Elsasser, writing an obituary of Kroeber in the American Anthropologist, described her as a pioneer of statistical analyses of cultural relationships in Polynesia, which she had analyzed in her 1926 paper. Her husband Alfred Kroeber later expanded upon those methods in his work on indigenous peoples in California. Elsasser wrote that Kroeber did not have an inclination for "any discipline that stressed dry prose or statistics", and notes that it was not clear whether she wished to pursue a career in academia. Kroeber said she had no ambition "in the public sense of ambition", and expressed no dissatisfaction at having left her graduate work. According to Elsasser, Kroeber had instead an appreciation for the "aesthetic implications of [Alfred Kroeber's] work with Indians", and he writes that manner of interacting with people likely had an influence on her husband's work. UC Berkeley conducted an oral history with Kroeber in 1982. Kroeber's writing was nonetheless widely influential. Critics wrote of The Inland Whale that Kroeber had broken ground in getting oral traditions recognized for their literary worth. A 1980 obituary stated that Ishi in Two Worlds had probably been read by more people than had ever read Alfred Kroeber's works. Sackman wrote that the book inspired greater interest in both Native American and environmental causes, and a 2002 commentary argued that had it not been for Kroeber's book, Ishi's story would never have come to wider attention. It has also been described as influencing the writing of her daughter Ursula, whose fiction frequently examines cultural contact. Buzaljko's 1989 biography of Kroeber stated that her "great strength was as an interpreter of one culture to another", going on to say that through her writing she demonstrated the connections between the history of California's indigenous people and modern society. ## Selected works - The Inland Whale. 1959. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. - Ishi in Two Worlds: a biography of the last wild Indian in North America. 1961. Berkley Books. - Ishi, Last of His Tribe. Illus. Ruth Robbins. 1964. Parnassus Press, Berkeley, California. - Almost Ancestors: The First Californians. Kroeber and Robert F. Heizer. 1968. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco. - Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration. 1970. University of California Press, Berkeley. - Drawn from Life: California Indians in Pen and Brush. Compiled by Kroeber, Robert F. Heizer and Albert B. Elsasser. 1976. Ballena Press, Socorro, New Mexico. - Ishi, the Last Yahi: A Documentary History. Kroeber and Robert F. Heizer. 1979. University of California Press, Berkeley.
59,553,403	Old Exe Bridge	1,166,915,670	Ruined medieval bridge in Devon, England	[ "1190 establishments in England", "Arch bridges in the United Kingdom", "Bridges completed in the 13th century", "Bridges in Devon", "Bridges with buildings", "Buildings and structures in Exeter", "Former toll bridges in England", "Grade II listed bridges", "Grade II listed buildings in Devon", "Scheduled monuments in Devon" ]	The Old Exe Bridge is a ruined medieval arch bridge in Exeter in south-western England. Construction of the bridge began in 1190, and was completed by 1214. The bridge is the oldest surviving bridge of its size in England and the oldest bridge in Britain with a chapel still on it. It replaced several rudimentary crossings which had been in use sporadically since Roman times. The project was the idea of Nicholas and Walter Gervase, father and son and influential local merchants, who travelled the country to raise funds. No known records survive of the bridge's builders. The result was a bridge at least 590 feet (180 metres) long, which probably had 17 or 18 arches, carrying the road diagonally from the west gate of the city wall across the River Exe and its wide, marshy flood plain. St Edmund's Church, the bridge chapel, was built into the bridge at the time of its construction, and St Thomas's Church was built on the riverbank at about the same time. The Exe Bridge is unusual among British medieval bridges for having had secular buildings on it as well as the chapel. Timber-framed shops, with houses above, were in place from at least the early 14th century, and later in the bridge's life, all but the most central section carried buildings. As the river silted up, land was reclaimed, allowing a wall to be built from the side of St Edmund's which protected a row of houses and shops which became known as Frog Street. Walter Gervase also commissioned a chantry chapel, built opposite the church, which came into use after 1257 and continued until the Reformation in the mid-16th century. The medieval bridge collapsed and had to be partially rebuilt several times throughout its life; the first recorded rebuilding was in 1286. By 1447 the bridge was severely dilapidated, and the mayor of Exeter appealed for funds to repair it. By the 16th century, it was again in need of repairs. Nonetheless, the bridge was in use for almost 600 years, until a replacement was built in 1778 and the arches across the river were demolished. That bridge was itself replaced in 1905, and again in 1969 by a pair of bridges. During construction of the twin bridges, eight and a half arches of the medieval bridge were uncovered and restored, some of which had been buried for nearly 200 years, and the surrounds were landscaped into a public park. Several more arches are buried under modern buildings. The bridge's remains are a scheduled monument and grade II listed building. ## Background Exeter was founded as Isca Dumnoniorum by the Romans in the first century CE. It became an important administrative centre for the south west of England, but travel further west (to the remainder of Devon and the whole of Cornwall) required crossing the River Exe. At Exeter, the Exe was naturally broad and shallow, making this the lowest reliable crossing point before the river's tidal estuary. There are records of a crossing from Roman times, most likely in the form of a timber bridge. No trace of any Roman bridge survives; it is likely that, once replaced, the bridge deck was simply left to degrade and any masonry supports would have been washed away by floodwaters. Bridge building was sparse in England through the Early Middle Ages (the period following the decline of the Roman Empire until after the Norman conquest of England in the late 11th century). Work on the Pont d'Avignon in the south of France began in the 1170s. London Bridge, over the River Thames on the opposite side of England, was begun around the same time, and was completed in 1209. Several similar bridges were constructed across England in this era, of which Exeter's, London's, and the Dee Bridge in Chester were among the largest examples. Only one other bridge of a similar age survives in Devon, at Clyst St Mary, just east of Exeter; another exists at Yeolmbridge, historically in Devon but now in Cornwall. Until the 12th century, the Exe was crossed by a ford, which was notoriously treacherous and was supplemented by a ferry for foot passengers. According to John Hooker, chamberlain of Exeter, who wrote a history of the city in the 16th century (around 400 years after the bridge was built), a rudimentary timber bridge existed at the site but this was also treacherous, particularly in the winter when the river was in flood. Hooker describes how pedestrians were washed off the bridge on several occasions and swept to their deaths. ## History ### Construction A stone bridge was promoted by Nicholas and Walter Gervase, father and son and prominent local residents. The Gervases were well-off merchants. Walter was subsequently elected mayor of Exeter several times and had his parents buried in the chapel on the Exe Bridge upon their deaths (the exact dates of which are unknown); he died in 1252. The exact dates of the bridge's construction are not known, but construction began around 1190. Stone bridges often took two decades or more to complete in the Middle Ages, and the Exe Bridge was not complete until around 1210. Walter travelled the country soliciting donations. According to Hooker, the Gervases raised £10,000 through public donations for the construction of a stone bridge and the purchase of land which would provide an income for the bridge's upkeep. No records survive of the people responsible for the design and construction of the bridge. There is a record of a bridge chaplain in 1196, which W. G. Hoskins, professor of English local history, believed to mean that the bridge was at least partially built by then. It was certainly complete by 1214, when a record exists of St Edmund's Church, which was built on the bridge. The bridge was at least 590 feet (180 metres) long (some studies have suggested it was longer, up to 750 feet (230 metres)) and consisted of possibly 17 or 18 arches; some accounts suggest there could have been as few as 12 arches, though the number appears to have varied over time with repairs. It crossed the Exe diagonally, starting from close to the West Gate of the city walls, and continued across the marshy banks which were prone to flooding. The foundations were created using piles of timber, reinforced with iron and lead and driven in tightly enough to form a solid base. In the shallower water closer to the banks, rubble and gravel were simply tipped onto the river bed. After part of the bridge was demolished in the 18th century, some of the piles were removed and found to be jet black and extremely solid, having been underwater for some 500 years. ### Medieval history The size of the bridge's piers and the reclamation of land on the Exeter side reduced the width of the river by more than half, which increased the force of the water acting on the bridge, causing damage. The bridge is known to have been repaired several times throughout its life. The earliest repairs are impossible to date, but a partial collapse was recorded during a storm in 1286, and again in 1384, when several people were killed. It was rebuilt on both occasions. Later repairs can be dated by the stone used—they were made with Heavitree breccia, a local stone not quarried until the mid 14th century (approximately 150 years after the bridge was built). By 1447, the bridge was recorded as being severely dilapidated—Richard Izacke, the chamberlain of Exeter in the mid 17th century, wrote that it "was now in great decay, the stone work thereof being much foundred, and the higher part being all of timber was consumed and worn away". Shortly after this report, the mayor, John Shillingford, appealed for funds to rebuild it. He approached John Kemp, the Archbishop of York, with whom he was acquainted and who was an executor of the estate of the recently deceased Henry Beaufort, the famously wealthy Bishop of Winchester. Kemp promised a contribution but the process was frustrated by Shillingford's sudden death in 1458. In 1539, one of the central arches collapsed and was repaired using stone from St Nicholas' Priory but there was still no refurbishment of the whole structure. ### Later history Repairs and maintenance of the bridge were provided for from the proceeds of land bought by the Gervases at the time the bridge was built, and the funds were administered by bridge wardens. The wardens were responsible for the upkeep of the bridge until 1769, when the responsibility was passed to the Exeter turnpike trust by Act of Parliament. The trust was dissolved in 1884 and responsibility for the bridge and its estate passed to Exeter City Council. The bridge wardens kept detailed records on rolls of parchment, of which most rolls from 1343 to 1711 survive, forming the most complete set of records for a bridge in Britain except those for London Bridge. The bridge estate grew to a considerable size. The records show that it leased 15 shops on the bridge, and over 50 other properties elsewhere in Exeter, including mills and agricultural land, all providing an income for maintenance and repairs. The wardens and their successors in the turnpike trust also collected tolls from carts using the bridge from outside the city (citizens of Exeter were exempt from the tolls). By the late 18th century, congestion around the bridge became a cause for concern. An Act of Parliament in 1773 empowered the trustees to repair or rebuild the bridge but events overtook the planned repairs when, in December 1775, a fire broke out in the Fortune of War, a pub built on the bridge. The fire consumed the pub and a neighbouring house. The pub provided cheap accommodation to local vagrants and it was believed that upwards of 30 people may have been inside at the time of the fire; at least nine bodies were recovered after the fire was extinguished. Plans for widening the medieval bridge were considered but dismissed. The spans across the river were demolished following the completion of a new, three-arch masonry bridge by Joseph Dixon in 1778. Construction of the replacement bridge began in 1770 and suffered a major setback in 1775 when floodwaters washed away much of the part-built structure and damaged its foundations. This bridge was built on a different alignment, just upstream from the medieval bridge and crossing on a shorter, horizontal line. By then, the marshland over which several of the medieval arches were built had been reclaimed and the river was restricted to a width of 150 feet (46 metres). The medieval arches on the Exeter bank were left intact and eventually buried or incorporated into buildings. The 19th-century bridge was itself demolished and replaced with a three-hinged steel arch bridge in 1905, built by Sir John Wolfe Barry, who was also responsible for London's Tower Bridge. Barry's bridge lasted about 65 years before it was demolished in favour of a pair of reinforced concrete bridges, which opened in 1969 and 1972. Parts of the medieval bridge were exposed when a German bomb exploded nearby during the Exeter Blitz in the Second World War. More arches were revealed during the construction of the modern bridges. The 20th-century engineers were careful to site the new bridges and their approach roads away from the line of the medieval bridge. At this time, part of Frog Street (a road on the river bank) was abandoned. During the work, an old brewery and several adjoining buildings along the street were demolished to make way for a new road scheme connecting with the twin bridges. One timber-framed house became known as "the House That Moved" after it was saved from demolition and wheeled to a new position. The demolition uncovered five of the medieval arches and, after further excavation, another three and a half arches were exposed, estimated to be around half the original length of the bridge. Exeter City Council commissioned local stonemasons to restore the stonework, then landscaped the area around the arches into a public park to display the uncovered arches, which were in remarkably good condition, having been buried for around 200 years. The bases of several of the demolished arches survive on the riverbed, and about 25 metres (82 feet) of bridge is buried under Edmund Street and the modern bank of the Exe. What remains is the oldest surviving bridge of its size in England and the oldest with a chapel still on the bridge in Britain. As such, the bridge is a scheduled monument and a grade II listed building, providing it legal protection from modification or demolition. ## Architecture About half of the bridge's original length survives unburied—eight and a half arches over about 285 feet (87 metres). Another three and a half arches, spanning 82 feet (25 metres) remain buried. The visible arches vary in span from 3.7 metres (12 feet) to 5.7 metres (19 feet). Two of them form the crypt of the bridge chapel, St Edmund's Church. It spanned the river diagonally in a north-westerly direction from what is now Exeter city centre to St Thomas (now a suburb of Exeter but originally outside the city), terminating outside St Thomas's Church, which was built at around the same time. The bridge was 16 feet (5 metres) wide on average. The roadway on the bridge was about 12 feet (4 metres) wide between the parapets at its peak, wide enough for two carts to pass side by side—unusually wide for a medieval bridge. The parapets are lost but some of the medieval paving survives, along with other, later, paving. The surviving arches are up to 20 feet (6 metres) high. The piers are rounded in the downstream direction but feature cutwaters (streamlined brickwork intended to reduce the impact of the water on the piers) facing upstream. Above the cutwaters were originally triangular recesses forming refuges for pedestrians to allow carts to pass. Local trap stone was used for the faces of the arches, behind which is gravel and rubble contained within a box of wooden stakes which were driven into the ground and the riverbed. Other stones found include sandstone and limestone from East Devon, and Heavitree breccia for later repairs. Dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) has established that the oldest of these stakes came from trees felled between 1190 and 1210. The arches are a mix of Norman-style semi-circles and the pointed Gothic style. All are supported by ribbed vaults. The pointed arches became fashionable at about the same time as work started on the bridge and there was some suggestion that the variation was the result of repairs, but archaeological studies in the 20th century proved that the bridge was built with both types of arch. The pointed arches have five ribs, each about 1 foot 6 inches (46 centimetres) wide and spaced between 3 feet (91 centimetres) and 3 feet 6 inches (107 centimetres) apart; the rounded arches have three ribs, ranging from 3 feet (91 centimetres) to 3 feet 6 inches (107 centimetres) wide and 2 feet 6 inches (76 centimetres) to 3 feet (91 centimetres) apart. ### Churches Bridge chapels were common in the Middle Ages, when religion was a significant part of daily life. The chapel provided travellers a place to pray or to give thanks for a safe journey, and the alms collected were often used towards the maintenance of the bridge. A church was built on the Exe Bridge, across two of the bridge arches, and dedicated to St Edmund the Martyr. The church was built with the bridge, and its structure is an integral part of it; it had an entrance on the bridge and possibly a second entrance underneath. The first record of a bridge chaplain is from 1196, suggesting that the church may have already been built by that date. A record of the completed church exists from 1214, when it was mentioned in a list of churches in Exeter, along with St Thomas's Church. It had a rectangular plan, 54 feet (16 metres) long by 16 feet 6 inches (5 metres) wide. Its south wall rested on the north side (right-hand side when crossing from the Exeter side) of the bridge and its side walls rested on the cutwaters while the north wall was supported by piers rising from the riverbed which had their own cutwaters. The bridge arch below the aisle was blocked in the 17th century, showing that by that time the river did not flow under the church. A seal of the bridge was made for use by the bridge wardens, probably shortly after its opening, showing the outline of St Edmund's Church (or possibly the chantry chapel) with houses on either side. The oldest known document with the seal on was addressed to the mayor of Exeter in either 1256 or 1264. The church was extended several times during the bridge's lifetime. By the end of the 14th century, accumulated silt on the Exeter side allowed a portion of land to be reclaimed, leaving the west wall of the church above dry land. Thus, the north wall was partially demolished to allow an aisle to be added, adding 7 feet (2 metres) to the width of the church. Work on a bell tower began in 1449 after Edmund Lacey, the Bishop of Exeter, offered indulgences in exchange for financial contributions. Indulgences, in which senior clergymen offered reduced time in purgatory in exchange for acts of charity, were a common method of funding bridges in the Middle Ages. Further extensions followed in the 16th century, by which time the area of land reclaimed from the river had grown, and several of the bridge arches were on dry land. It is likely that there was little or no water flowing under the arches supporting the church by this point, except during winter floods. The church was struck by lightning in 1800 and largely rebuilt in 1834, then severely damaged in a fire in 1882 and repaired the following year, though retaining much of the ancient stonework. Another fire in 1969 left the church in a ruinous state, and it was partially demolished in 1975, when most of the later additions were removed but the medieval stonework was preserved. Although ruined, the tower survives at its original height—the only intact part of the church. On the opposite side of the bridge was a smaller chantry chapel (a chapel employing a priest to pray for a given period of time after a person's death, to aid that person's passage to heaven), built for Walter Gervase and dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Upon his death in 1257, Gervase left an endowment of 50 shillings a year for a priest to hold three services a week to pray for him, his father, and his family. The chapel continued in use until at least 1537 but was destroyed in 1546 during the dissolution of the monasteries. Only stone fragments from the foundations survive. According to Hooker, Gervase and his wife were buried in another chapel, attached to St Edmund's Church, in which there was a "handsome monument" to Gervase's memory. This chapel was alienated from the church during the Reformation and converted into a private house; the monument was removed and defaced. Only the foundations of the chapel remained by the 19th century. At the western end of the bridge (on dry land) was St Thomas's Church, built at a similar time to the bridge. The exact date of construction is unknown, but it was dedicated to St Thomas Becket, who was canonised in 1173, and the first known record of it dates from 1191. It became the parish church for Cowick (most of the area is now known as St Thomas) in 1261. The church was swept away in a major flood at the beginning of the 15th century and rebuilt further away from the river. The new building, on Cowick Street, was consecrated in 1412. It underwent significant rebuilding in the 17th and 19th centuries after it was set alight during the English Civil War. The church is a grade I listed building. ### Secular buildings Bridge chapels were common on medieval bridges but secular buildings were not. Around 135 major stone bridges were built in Britain in the medieval era. Most, though not all, had some form of bridge chapel either on the bridge itself or on the approach, but only 12 are documented as having secular buildings on the bridge, of which the only surviving example with buildings intact is High Bridge in Lincoln. The Exe Bridge had timber-framed houses on it from early in its life—the earliest record is of two shops, with houses above, from 1319. At the height of development, all but the six arches in the middle of the river supported buildings. They were built with their front walls resting on the parapets of the bridge and the rest of the building supported by wooden posts in the riverbed, until they were demolished in 1881. In the later 13th century, silty deposits had built up on the Exeter side of the bridge, allowing the land to be reclaimed for two buildings which backed onto the river and fronted onto what became Frog Street. Archaeological evidence suggests that one of the two was possibly a tannery. The houses were demolished in the post-medieval era but the foundations survived. Several buildings were constructed next to the bridge on the Exeter side, protected from the river by a wall which extended from the west side of the church. ## See also - List of bridges in the United Kingdom
36,034,784	Douglas MacArthur's escape from the Philippines	1,166,263,008	World War II escape	[ "1942 in the Philippines", "Douglas MacArthur", "March 1942 events", "Military history of the Philippines during World War II", "PT boats", "Voyages" ]	On 11 March 1942, during World War II, General Douglas MacArthur and members of his family and staff left the Philippine island of Corregidor and his forces, which were surrounded by the Japanese. They traveled in PT boats through stormy seas patrolled by Japanese warships and reached Mindanao two days later. From there, MacArthur and his party flew to Australia in a pair of Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses, ultimately arriving in Melbourne by train on 21 March. In Australia, he declared, "I came through and I shall return". MacArthur was a well-known and experienced officer with a distinguished record in World War I, who had retired from the United States Army in 1937 and had become a defense advisor to the Philippine government. He was recalled to active duty with the United States Army in July 1941, a few months before the outbreak of the Pacific War between the United States and the Empire of Japan, to become commander of United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), uniting the Philippine and United States Armies under one command. By March 1942, the Japanese invasion of the Philippines had compelled MacArthur to withdraw his forces on Luzon to Bataan, while his headquarters and his family moved to Corregidor. The doomed defense of Bataan captured the imagination of the American public. At a time when the news from all fronts was uniformly bad, MacArthur became a symbol of Allied resistance to the Japanese. Fearing that Corregidor would soon fall, and MacArthur would be taken prisoner, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to go to Australia. A submarine was made available, but MacArthur elected to break through the Japanese blockade in PT boats under the command of Lieutenant (junior grade) John D. Bulkeley. The staff MacArthur brought with him became known as the "Bataan Gang". They would become the nucleus of his General Headquarters (GHQ) Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA). ## Background Douglas MacArthur was a well-known and experienced officer. The son of Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur Jr., who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his services in the American Civil War, MacArthur graduated at the top of the United States Military Academy class of 1903. He was an aide-de-camp to his father from 1905 to 1906, and to President Theodore Roosevelt from 1906 to 1907. During World War I he commanded the 84th Brigade of the 42nd (Rainbow) Division in the fighting on the Western Front. After the war he served as Superintendent of the United States Military Academy, and as Chief of Staff of the United States Army. He retired from the United States Army in 1937, and became a field marshal in the Philippine Army. MacArthur's job was to advise the Philippine government on defense matters, and prepare the Philippine defense forces when the Philippines became fully independent, which was to be in 1946. The Philippine Army, almost entirely manned and officered by Filipinos with only a small number of American advisors, was raised by conscription, with two classes of 20,000 men being trained each year, starting in 1937. In addition, there was a regular U.S. Army garrison of about 10,000, half of whom were Filipinos serving in the U.S. Army known as Philippine Scouts. In July 1941, when MacArthur was recalled from retirement at the age of 61 to become commander of United States Army Forces in the Far East, he united the Philippine and United States armies under one command. In getting the Philippine Army ready for war, MacArthur faced an enormous task. On a visit to the United States in 1937, MacArthur lobbied the Navy Department for the development of PT boats – small, fast boats armed with torpedoes – for which he believed that the geography of the Philippines, with its shallow waters and many coves, was ideally suited. The nascent Philippine Navy acquired three, known as "Q" boats, after President Manuel L. Quezon. In August 1941, the U.S. Navy created Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, under the command of Lieutenant (junior grade) John D. Bulkeley. It was a half-strength squadron, with only six PT boats instead of the normal twelve, numbered 31 to 35 and 41. It arrived at Manila in September 1941. It was understood that a fleet consisting of more than PT boats would be required for a successful defense of the Philippines. As early as 1907, U.S. naval and military planners had concluded that it would be impractical to repel an invasion of the Philippines. The best that could be hoped for was that the garrison could hold out on the Bataan peninsula until help arrived. In the 1920s it was estimated that they could do so for about 60 days. By the 1930s, the planners had become decidedly pessimistic in view of the increased capability of aircraft, and by 1936 they were agreed that the Philippines should be written off. But in July 1941, this decision was abruptly reversed, and it became the policy of the U.S. government to defend and hold the Philippines. This was based, at least in part, in the belief that Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers could deter or defeat an invading force. Soon after the Japanese invasion of the Philippines had started in December 1941, MacArthur, in accordance with the pre-war plan, declared Manila an open city, and ordered his forces on Luzon to withdraw to Bataan. The Philippine government, the high commissioner's office and MacArthur's USAFFE headquarters moved to Corregidor Island. Although the dependants of U.S. military personnel had been sent back to the United States, MacArthur was, until his recall from retirement, a Philippine government employee, so his family had remained in the country. MacArthur's wife, Jean MacArthur, and young son, Arthur MacArthur IV, went with him to Corregidor. Arthur celebrated his fourth birthday on Corregidor, on 21 February 1942. When an aide asked about Arthur's possible fate, MacArthur replied: "He is a soldier's son." Most of the United States Asiatic Fleet retired to the south of the Philippines. A small force was left behind under the command of Rear Admiral Francis W. Rockwell consisting of the submarine tender USS Canopus, the submarine rescue ship Pigeon, gunboats Oahu, Luzon and Mindanao, minesweepers Finch, Tanager and Quail, five tugboats, three small patrol boats, and the PT boats of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three. The loss of Manila and the U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay meant that fuel and spare parts became scarce. The PT boats relied on Canopus and the floating dry dock USS Dewey for assistance with maintenance. Despite this, Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three continued to patrol. On 17 December, PT-32, PT-34 and PT-35 rescued 296 survivors from SS Corregidor, which had been carrying refugees to Australia when it struck a mine and sank in Manila Bay. A week later, PT-33 ran aground while patrolling south of Manila Bay, and was set on fire to prevent her being salvaged by the Japanese. PT-31 met a similar fate a month later, after its engines failed and it drifted onto a reef. The PT boats attacked enemy barges off Luzon on the night of 23 January 1942, a small Japanese warship on 1 February, and a small vessel, probably a fishing trawler, on 17 February. ## Decision to evacuate In a message to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., on 11 February, MacArthur announced that he and his family intended to "share the fate of the garrison". This meant surrender at best; MacArthur knew that death from artillery fire or an air raid was also likely. Three days later, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, George C. Marshall, urged MacArthur to send his family away, but MacArthur ignored this part of the message. Singapore, once considered impregnable, fell on 15 February, and in Washington, the possibility that Corregidor would also fall and MacArthur would be taken prisoner was considered. MacArthur was America's most experienced general, but would be of little use in a prisoner of war camp. Moreover, he had become a living symbol of Allied resistance to the Japanese. The brave but doomed defense of Bataan had captured the imagination of the American public, who saw MacArthur as the only Allied general who knew how to fight the Japanese. Walter R. Borneman noted that: > in a fragile period of the American psyche when the general American public, still stunned by the shock of Pearl Harbor and uncertain what lay ahead in Europe, desperately needed a hero, they wholeheartedly embraced Douglas MacArthur – good press copy that he was. There simply were no other choices that came close to matching his mystique, not to mention his evocative lone-wolf stand – something that always resonated with Americans. Secretary of State Cordell Hull raised the possibility of MacArthur's evacuation. Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower wrote in his diary: > I cannot help thinking that we are disturbed by editorials and reacting to "public opinion" rather than to military logic. "Pa" Watson is certain we must get MacArthur out, as being worth "five Army corps". Roosevelt considered sending MacArthur to Mindanao to coordinate the defense of the Philippines from there, but another consideration arose. The fall of Singapore sealed the fate of the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command (ABDA), of which MacArthur's command was nominally a part. Discussions were held with the British about future command arrangements. A broad agreement was reached that the United States would assume responsibility for the Southwest Pacific. A senior American officer was required, and MacArthur was the obvious choice. On 23 February, MacArthur received a message that had been drafted by Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Marshall. It read: > The President directs that you make arrangements to leave and proceed to Mindanao. You are directed to make this change as quickly as possible;... From Mindanao you will proceed to Australia where you will assume command of all United States troops;... Instructions will be given from here at your request for the movement of submarine or plane or both to enable you to carry out the foregoing instructions. You are authorized to take your chief of staff [Major] General [Richard K.] Sutherland. MacArthur responded with a request that he might select the time of his departure. "Unless the right moment is chosen for this delicate operation", he wrote, "a sudden collapse might occur." "With regard to the actual movement", he went on, "I deem it advisable to go to Mindanao by combined use of surface craft and submarine, and thence by air, further movement by submarine being too time consuming." Marshall replied that Roosevelt would allow him to choose the time and method of his departure. ABDA was dissolved on 27 February, and MacArthur nominally came under Dutch command, but was ordered to continue communicating directly with the War Department. MacArthur inspected the PT boat squadron on 1 March. With air cover provided by his four remaining Curtiss P-40 Warhawks, MacArthur and his wife Jean took a half-hour ride on PT-41. Although the sea was tranquil, Jean still felt queasy. Ostensibly, the purpose of MacArthur's visit was presenting Bulkeley with the Distinguished Service Cross for sinking an "unidentified 5,000-ton enemy ship with torpedoes without serious damage to his ship or casualty to his crew", but afterwards MacArthur took Bulkeley aside and asked him if it would be possible to make the 600-mile (970-kilometer) journey through uncharted waters at night in PT boats. Bulkeley told him that it would be "a piece of cake." When some days passed without any further word on the matter, follow-up messages were sent on 6 and 9 March. By 10 March, MacArthur had decided that the Bataan front was not in danger of imminent collapse, and replied that he planned to depart on 15 March, when the submarine USS Permit was scheduled to arrive at Corregidor. Radio broadcasts in the United States calling for MacArthur to be placed in charge in Australia had been picked up by MacArthur's headquarters in Corregidor, and it had to be assumed that the Japanese had heard them too. There were ominous signs: Japanese surface patrols had been stepped up in the Subic Bay area, and there were reports of Japanese destroyers heading north from the southern Philippines. MacArthur therefore elected not to wait for the Permit, but to leave as soon as possible, by PT boat on the night of 11 March. Major General Jonathan M. Wainwright was left in command on Bataan and Corregidor. "When I get back", MacArthur told him, "if you're still on Bataan, I'll make you a lieutenant general." Wainwright replied: "I'll be on Bataan if I'm still alive." Of the decision to depart by PT boat rather than wait for the submarine, Lieutenant Robert B. Kelly, executive officer of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, and commander of PT-34, later recalled: > Having served with Lieutenant Bulkeley as his second in command on this and a prior assignment, I was privy to much of what transpired during his conferences with General MacArthur during the decision making process. MacArthur's decision to use the PT boats for the evacuation of his party dramatically emphasized to the American public the overwhelming odds against which the United States was fighting in the Philippines. It evened an old score with the United States Navy. And since he had a tendency towards claustrophobia and did not relish making the trip on a submerged submarine with a commander whom he did not personally know, it provided an acceptable alternative which he elected to exercise. ## Escape ### Preparations Bulkeley and his crews overhauled the PT boats for the voyage. All of the engines had performed hard war service, and had been operated for double the recommended mileage without overhaul. As a result, they were reduced to operating at half speed. Since there were no replacement parts, the gaskets, which normally would have been discarded, had to be carefully cleaned and replaced. Each PT boat would carry twenty 55-gallon drums of additional fuel on the deck. This reduced the top speed of the boats to about 30 knots (56 kilometers per hour; 35 miles per hour). To make room for the passengers, Bulkeley had to leave 32 of his men behind, who would be sent to fight as infantry on Bataan. Sutherland, who was MacArthur's chief of staff, drew up the passenger lists. Rockwell and his chief of staff, Captain Herbert J. Ray, were ordered to accompany MacArthur. They were already under orders to return by submarine, but this was switched to accompanying MacArthur when his date of departure was brought forward. A United States Army Air Corps officer, Brigadier General Harold H. George, was included at the request of the United States Army Air Forces. MacArthur was accompanied by his family: his wife Jean, four-year-old son Arthur, and Arthur's Cantonese amah, Loh Chui. MacArthur later defended his decision to take her instead of an American nurse. "Few people outside the Orient", he wrote, "know how completely a member of the family an amah can become, and Ah Cheu [sic] had been with us since Arthur's birth. Because of her relationship to my family, her death would have been certain had she been left behind." In case a doctor was needed, Major Charles H. Morhouse was summoned from Bataan to accompany the party. The remaining thirteen were members of MacArthur's staff, who were loyal and experienced; some had been with MacArthur for years. Creating a new staff in Australia would have taken time, while taking his existing one would enable him to commence work soon after arrival in Australia. They would be more valuable there than in the Philippines, where they would have been taken prisoner. Sutherland included two of his own men: his assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Francis H. Wilson, and his stenographer, Master Sergeant Paul P. Rogers. Promoted from private that day, Rogers was the only enlisted man on the list, which he typed. A number of men gave him letters to post. Because there was no food for the passengers on the PT boats, Jean and MacArthur's aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel Sidney L. Huff, packed tins of food into four duffel bags, one for each boat. Huff removed the four-star rank number plates from MacArthur's car so they could be used in Australia, and took a mattress for the MacArthurs to lie on. Stories later circulated that it was full of cash or gold. Other stories had it that furniture from MacArthur's residence in the Manila Hotel had been loaded on board the PT boats, even, in one version of the story, the piano. In fact, each passenger was limited to one piece of luggage weighing 35 pounds (16 kilograms) or less. Jean took a small suitcase with some clothes. It sported a label from the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama, where she stayed during her honeymoon. Loh Chiu wrapped her possessions in a handkerchief. MacArthur took nothing. ### By PT boat Only PT-41, which carried MacArthur and his family, departed from Corregidor's North Dock. The passengers of the remaining boats were taken to Bataan in launches and boarded there. While his family boarded, MacArthur spoke to Major General George F. Moore, the commander of the Harbor Defenses of Manila and Subic Bays. "George", he told him, "keep the flag flying. I'm coming back." PT-41 departed at 19:45 on 11 March and 15 minutes later joined the other three. A navy minelayer led the PT boats through the protective minefield in single file. The boats then assumed a diamond formation, with PT-41 in the lead and PT-34 bringing up the rear. If attacked by the Japanese, PT-41 was to flee while the other three boats engaged the enemy. The seas were moderate, but most of the passengers quickly became seasick. MacArthur later recalled: > The weather deteriorated steadily, and towering waves buffeted our tiny, war-weary, blacked-out vessels. The spray drove against our skin like stinging pellets of birdshot. We would fall into a trough, then climb up the steep water peak, only to slide down the other side. The boat would toss crazily back and forth, seeming to hang free in space as though about to breach, and would then break away and go forward with a rush. I recall describing the experience afterward as what it must be like to take a trip in a concrete mixer. During the night, the four boats became separated. Bulkeley spent time looking for the other three boats, but was unable to find them in the darkness. At dawn he gave up, and headed for one of the alternative hiding places. Kelly's PT-34 was the first to reach the rendezvous point, a cove on Tagauayan Island, two hours late at 09:30. There was no sign of the other boats, and Rockwell, in the same boat with Kelly, was far from convinced that Kelly had found the correct island. Some repairs were made, and the boat was refueled by hand pumps from the drums. Two men were posted atop the island's tallest hill to watch out for the Japanese and the other boats. PT-32, which had only two good engines, had straggled behind the others. Around dawn, Schumacher spotted what appeared to be a Japanese destroyer heading towards him. He jettisoned his fuel drums so he could increase speed and run from it. He ordered his crew to man the .50-caliber machine guns and get ready to launch torpedoes. Akin prepared to toss a barracks bag filled with code books overboard. However, as the light improved, and the vessel drew closer, another look through the binoculars revealed that it was not a Japanese destroyer at all, but PT-41, carrying an angry Bulkeley. Schumacher was ordered to recover the drums he had jettisoned, but this proved to be a time-consuming task, and a dangerous one in broad daylight, and it had to be abandoned after only a few drums were recovered. Bulkeley had his gunners sink the rest. The two boats then hid for the day in a nearby cove. In the afternoon, PT-41 and PT-32 made their way to Tagauayan, where they found PT-34. There was a discussion about whether to proceed to Mindanao, or wait for Permit. Bulkeley warned that the seas might even be higher. But, since there was no assurance that the submarine would make it, MacArthur decided to continue, departing in daylight at 18:00 so as to be sure to meet their air transport there. Since PT-32 had no fuel to make Mindanao, its passengers were divided between PT-41 and PT-34. Soon after they had departed, PT-35 belatedly arrived at the rendezvous point. Akers found the crew of PT-32 there, and discovered that the other two boats had been and gone. He therefore set out for Cagayan de Oro as well. At 19:00, about an hour after they had left Tagauayan, PT-34 and PT-41 spotted a Japanese cruiser. Bulkeley made a sharp turn due west, and headed at top speed, about 20 knots (37 km/h; 23 mph), into the setting sun. Whether because of the high waves, the glare of the sun, or simple inattentiveness, the cruiser did not spot them. After midnight, the weather began to worsen, with heavy swells and sporadic squalls. Kelly later recalled: > Big foaming waves fifteen or twenty feet high thundering over the cockpit, drenching everybody. Our binoculars were full of water and our eyes so continuously drenched with stinging salt that we couldn't see, in addition to which it was pitch-black. We were making good speed through strange waters with islands all around us. We could see the outlines of the big ones – Negros and Mindanao – very dimly against the horizon through the storm. But there were dozens of small ones and probably hundreds of reefs. > > You had to keep one hand in front of your eyes to avoid the slapping force of the water and yet you needed both to hold on. > > The Admiral was pretty wrought up. "I've sailed every type of ship in the Navy except one of these MTBs", he shouted at me above the wind, "and this is the worst bridge I've ever been on. I wouldn't do duty on one of these for anything in the world – you can have them." By dawn, the winds and swells had subsided, but the delay caused by the bad weather had slowed the two boats, and they now had to travel across the Mindanao Sea in daylight. Cagayan was sighted shortly after 06:30 on 13 March. Although PT-34 had led all the way from Tagauayan, Kelly now let Bulkeley take the lead, as he had the channel charts. PT-41 therefore pulled up at the wharf first, with MacArthur on the bow. They were met by Colonel William Morse, an officer on the staff of the Brigadier General William F. Sharp, the commander of U.S. forces on Mindanao. MacArthur told Bulkeley "I'm giving every officer and man here the Silver Star for gallantry. You've taken me out of the jaws of death, and I won't forget it." A few hours later, PT-35 reached Cagayan. Willoughby later recalled: > We were behind schedule and reached the north coast of Mindanao in broad daylight. It was a clear, dazzling day. Fortunately, no Japanese planes cut across the blue sky, though the enemy was known to make regular mail flights from Mindanao to Luzon. We were pretty conspicuous as the hours dragged on. USS Permit, under the command of Lieutenant Wreford G. Chapple, reached Tagauayan on 13 March, and found PT-32. With two of his three engines out of action, Schumacher felt that his boat was no longer seaworthy. He had Chapple destroy the boat with Permit's deck gun. Chapple then took the fifteen PT-32 crewmen back to Corregidor. There, eight of the crew were disembarked, while Chapple embarked forty more passengers, thirty-six of them codebreakers. Nonetheless, Chapple was ordered to conduct a regular war patrol, which he did. He finally reached Australia on 7 April. Unaware of this, Bulkeley attempted to locate PT-32. Over the next few days he flew over the area as a passenger in various aircraft, including a P-35 and a P-40, in the hope of finding it. ### By aircraft The commander of U.S. Army Forces in Australia, Lieutenant General George H. Brett, received a radiogram from General Marshall in Washington, D.C., alerting him that MacArthur would be requesting bombers to transport his party from Mindanao to Australia. A subsequent message from MacArthur requested his "most experienced pilots, and the best available planes in top condition", but the only long-range aircraft that Brett had were Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 19th Bombardment Group which had seen hard service in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies campaigns. He therefore approached Vice Admiral Herbert F. Leary, the commander of naval forces in the Anzac Area, to ask for a loan of some of twelve newly arrived Navy B-17s. Leary, who had a reputation for refusing requests unless he could see how the Navy would benefit, turned Brett down. Brett sent four of the 19th Bombardment Group's old planes. Two were forced to turn back with engine trouble. One of the others accidentally dumped 300 US gallons (1,100 litres; 250 imperial gallons) of its fuel. The pilot flew on, and nearly made it to Del Monte Field, but just a few miles from his destination, the fuel tanks ran dry and the engines stopped; the B-17 crash landed in the sea. Two of the crew were killed, but the rest reached the shore, thence to Del Monte Field. Only one B-17, piloted by Lieutenant Harl Pease, reached Del Monte, and this B-17 was in poor condition, with failed brakes and a faulty supercharger. Sharp ordered it back to Australia before MacArthur arrived. Despite the inoperative brakes, Pease made the return trip, carrying sixteen passengers. Thus, with the arrival of PT-35, all of MacArthur's group had reached Mindanao safely, but there were no aircraft at Del Monte Field to meet them. They were taken to the Del Monte Plantation, where they were lodged in the guest houses and had breakfast in the clubhouse. MacArthur sent a couple of sharp messages to Brett in Melbourne and Marshall in Washington. On their second day there, a Filipino woman arrived who wanted to speak to MacArthur. Her son was fighting on Luzon, and she had walked 25 miles (40 kilometers) in the hope that the general would have some news about him. He did not, but the fact that she was aware of MacArthur's presence was disturbing to the party, since the Japanese were only 30 miles (48 km) away at Davao on the south coast of Mindanao. Brett went back to Leary, expecting to be turned down again, but this time, Leary gave Brett the aircraft he wanted. "Perhaps", Brett speculated, "Leary had heard from Washington". The newly formed 40th Reconnaissance Squadron crewed the bombers. One B-17 turned back, but two reached Del Monte Field on 16 March, landing in the dark on a runway lit by flares. Lieutenant Frank P. Bostrom, the pilot of the first plane, calculated that everyone could be carried in just two planes if they left most of their baggage behind. They split into two groups and the two bombers took off at 01:30 on 17 March. MacArthur rode in the radio operator's seat, which did not need to be manned as the aircraft were travelling under radio silence. For most of the passengers, the trip was dark and cold, with only a blanket between them and the metal skin of the aircraft. As the two aircraft approached Darwin, word was received that a Japanese air raid was in progress there. The two B-17s therefore flew on to Batchelor Airfield, where they touched down at 09:30. MacArthur awarded Silver Stars to the crews of the two bombers. Brett's chief of staff, Brigadier General Ralph Royce, was on hand to greet them; he had sent two Australian National Airways DC-3s to take them to Melbourne. However, Jean now refused to fly any further, so MacArthur asked for a motorcade to take them to the nearest railway station. Sutherland had received word of an incoming Japanese air raid, and asked Morhouse to intervene. Morhouse told MacArthur that since Arthur, who had suffered badly from seasickness and airsickness, was on an intravenous feed, he could not guarantee that the boy would survive the 800 miles (1,300 km) trip along an unsealed desert road to Alice Springs. MacArthur then agreed to take the planes to Alice Springs. As they took off, an air raid siren sounded. ### By train From Alice Springs, 12 of MacArthur’s staff flew the remaining 1,200 miles (1,900 km) to Melbourne via Adelaide in the DC-3 aircraft. The weekly passenger train having left Alice Springs the day before, railwaymen cobbled together a three-car train for MacArthur, his family, Sutherland, Morhouse and Huff to take them southwards on the decrepit railway, adding a sleeping car at a siding on the way. Two Australian sergeants were aboard to serve meals; an army nurse undertook the housekeeping. To reach the dining or sleeping car, passengers had to wait until the locomotive stopped, then get off and walk along the train. But there were many stops, and the train often had to lay over in crossing loops because opposing it on the single track were trains conveying supplies and men to the north. It took 48 hours of traveling at no more than 20 miles per hour (32 kilometers per hour) before the party disembarked from their "ancient conveyance", on the morning of 20 March, at Terowie where all traffic, passengers and freight alike, had to change to broad-gauge trains. Having thought his whereabouts would have been secret, MacArthur was alarmed to find crowds, a military guard of honor and reporters waiting for his 9 am arrival. The reporters' expectations of a briefing were unmet: he simply said that his policy during operations was to limit himself completely to the briefest publicity and to confine such statements to general releases from his headquarters. He followed briefly with the reason he was in Australia and concluded with a catchphrase that both alluded to his perilous journey and embodied his single-minded focus on liberating the Philippines that became widely publicized during the next three years: "I came through and I shall return". The new train for the 150 miles (240 km) journey to Adelaide through a cooler, grassy region of South Australia was more commodious and, as a special movement, much faster. Comfort was incomparably better, since the South Australian Railways Commissioner had included his personal carriage, normally used for inspections, in the train hurriedly prepared for the party. Somewhat refreshed but still greatly fatigued, the family arrived in Adelaide in the early afternoon, to be met on the platform at the Adelaide railway station by senior U.S. and Australian army officers, diplomats and local dignitaries. The carriages, including the Commissioner's carriage at the back, departed for Melbourne at 7 pm attached to The Overland express. At 9 am on 21 March, MacArthur's journey ended when his train arrived at Melbourne's Spencer Street station, where he was greeted by the Australian Minister for the Army, Frank Forde. ## Aftermath Roosevelt issued a public statement on 17 March: > I know that every man and woman in the United States admires with me General MacArthur's determination to fight to the finish with his men in the Philippines. But I also know that every man and woman is in agreement that all important decisions must be made with a view toward the successful termination of the war. Knowing this, I am sure that every American, if faced individually with the question as to where General MacArthur could best serve his country, could come to only one answer. On Bataan, the reaction to MacArthur's escape was mixed, with many American and Filipino troops feeling bitter and betrayed. When Wainwright broke the news to his generals "they were all at first depressed by the news... But I soon saw that they understood just as I understood." Some people with family members in the Philippines were dismayed. One wrote to Roosevelt that "Nothing you could have done would have broken their morale and that of their parents at home so thoroughly". Wainwright held out on Corregidor until 6 May. To Joseph Goebbels, MacArthur was a "fleeing general", while Benito Mussolini labeled him a coward. Marshall decided that the best way to counter this was to award MacArthur the Medal of Honor. MacArthur nominated Bulkeley for the Medal of Honor, but the Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, Admiral Ernest King, was not going to let MacArthur award the Medal of Honor to a naval officer, so he wrote a citation for Bulkeley on behalf of the Navy. Roosevelt presented it to Bulkeley in a ceremony in the Oval Office on 4 August 1942. The staff that MacArthur took with him from Corregidor formed the nucleus of General Headquarters Southwest Pacific Area. The "Bataan Gang", as they came to be called, remained with MacArthur for the duration, and were noted for their fanatical loyalty to him. MacArthur eventually kept his promise, and returned to the Philippines. The Bataan Gang returned to Corregidor in March 1945 on four PT boats.
12,547,405	Jena Six	1,173,482,023	Six black teenagers in Louisiana, convicted in a 2006 beating	[ "2006 controversies in the United States", "21st-century American trials", "African-American people", "American people convicted of assault", "Crimes in Louisiana", "December 2006 crimes in the United States", "Juvenile law", "LaSalle Parish, Louisiana", "People convicted of battery", "Post–civil rights era in African-American history", "Quantified groups of defendants" ]	The Jena Six were six black teenagers in Jena, Louisiana, convicted in the 2006 beating of Justin Barker, a white student at the local Jena High School, which they also attended. Barker was injured on December 4, 2006, by the members of the Jena Six, and received treatment at an emergency room. While the case was pending, it was often cited by some media commentators as an example of racial injustice in the United States. Some commentators believed that the defendants had been charged initially with too-serious offenses and had been treated unfairly. A number of events had taken place in and around Jena in the months before the Barker assault, which the media have associated with an alleged escalation of local racial tensions. These events included: the hanging of rope nooses from a tree in the high school courtyard, two violent confrontations between white and black youths, and the destruction by fire of the main building of Jena High School. Extensive news coverage related to the Jena Six often reported these events as linked. Federal and parish attorneys concluded from their investigations that assessment was inaccurate for some of the events; for instance, the burning of the high school was an attempt to destroy grade records. Six students—Robert Bailey, then aged 17; Mychal Bell, then 16; Carwin Jones, then 18; Bryant Purvis, then 17; Jesse Ray Beard, then 14; and Theo Shaw, then 17—were arrested for the assault of Barker. Mychal Bell was initially convicted as an adult of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. His convictions were overturned on the grounds that he should have been tried as a juvenile. Before a retrial in juvenile court, Bell pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of simple battery. The other five defendants later pleaded "no contest" to the same offense and were convicted. The Jena Six case sparked protests by people who considered the arrests and subsequent charges, initially attempted second-degree murder, as excessive and racially discriminatory. The protesters asserted that white Jena youths involved in similar incidents were treated more leniently. On September 20, 2007, between 15,000 and 20,000 protesters marched on Jena in what was described as the "largest civil rights demonstration in years". Related protests were held in other US cities on the same day. Subsequent reactions included songs alluding to the Jena Six, numerous editorials and opinion columns, and congressional hearings. ## Background to the assault Jena High School is located in the town of Jena, Louisiana, which has about 3,000 people. Some early reporting indicated that students of different races seldom sat together, for instance in the cafeteria, although this has been disputed. According to early reports of the school environment, black students when outside typically sat on bleachers near the auditorium, while white students sat under a large tree in the center of the school courtyard, referred to as the "white tree" or "prep tree". According to some of the school's teachers and administrators, the tree in question was not a "white tree", and students of all races had sat under it at one time or another. At a school assembly held on August 31, 2006, a black male freshman asked the principal whether he could sit under the tree. According to Donald Washington, United States Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, the principal said the question was posed in a "jocular fashion". The principal told the students they could "sit wherever they wanted". CNN reported that the freshman and his friends sat under the tree. ### Noose hanging The following morning, students and staff discovered rope nooses hanging from the tree; reports differ as to whether there were two or three nooses. A black teacher described seeing both white and black students "playing with [the nooses], pulling on them, jump-swinging from them, and putting their heads through them" that same day. Craig Franklin, assistant editor of The Jena Times, said the nooses were hung as a prank by three students directed at white members of the school rodeo team. The school's investigating committee had concluded that "the three young teens had no knowledge that nooses symbolize the terrible legacy of the lynchings of countless blacks in American history". The names of those who hung the nooses were not publicly disclosed. ### Repercussions The school disciplinary process that followed is unclear. It was reported that the principal, Scott Windham, learned that three white students were responsible and recommended expulsion, that the board of education overruled his recommendation, and that school superintendent Roy Breithaupt agreed with the overruling. It was initially reported that the punishment was reduced to three days of in-school suspension. Under the district's Crisis Management Policy Procedures, the three students were isolated at an alternative school "for about a month", spent two weeks on in-school suspension, served Saturday detentions, had to attend Discipline Court, were referred to Families in Need of Services, and had to have an evaluation before they were able to return to school. The school superintendent was quoted as saying, "Adolescents play pranks. I don't think it was a threat against anybody". Black residents of Jena have said that this comment stoked racial tensions leading to subsequent events. According to US Attorney Donald Washington, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigators found that the hanging of the nooses "had all the markings of a hate crime". But, it could not be prosecuted as such since juveniles are rarely prosecuted in the federal system, and this offense did not meet departmental standards for charges to be brought. La Salle Parish District Attorney J. Reed Walters stated that Washington had found no federal statute under which the teens could be prosecuted, just as he had found no applicable state statute. Walters opined: "The people that [hung the nooses] should be ashamed of what they unleashed on this town". The school called police to the school in the days after the noose incident. The principal called an assembly on September 6, 2006. The Jena Police Department asked Parish Attorney Walters to attend and speak at the assembly. Already pressed for time due to a case under preparation, Walters felt that the students were not paying proper attention to him. He warned them, "I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. With the stroke of a pen I can make life miserable for you or ruin your life. So I want you to call me before you do something stupid". Though black students say Walters was looking at them when he made the comments, Walters and school board member Billy Fowler, also present, deny it. Walters said that he was irritated at "two or three girls, white girls, [who] were chit-chatting on their cellphones or playing with their cellphones". ### School arson, fight, and confrontation On November 30, 2006, the main building of the high school was destroyed by arson. Although it would be many months before the perpetrators were known, the news media later widely cited the fire as a racially charged event leading up to the assault on Barker. On December 28, 2007, LaSalle Parish Sheriff- elect Scott Franklin announced that an investigation had shown that the fire was set in an effort to destroy grade records in the building and to close the school for a time. Six male suspects (three juveniles and three adults) had been arrested, and two more adult males were being sought. Franklin indicated that the fire was not racially motivated, and had no connection to the Jena Six. Two of the arson defendants pleaded guilty, and were sentenced to ten years in prison, with restitution ordered in the amount of \$10 million. On December 1, 2006, a private party was held at the Jena Fair Barn. Bailey and four other black youths tried to enter the party at about 11:00 p.m. According to U.S. Attorney Washington, they were told by a woman that no one was allowed inside without an invitation. The youths persisted, stating that some friends were already at the party. A white male, who was not a student, moved in front of the woman and a fight ensued. After the fight broke up, the woman told both the white male and the black students to leave the party. Once outside, the black students were involved in another fight with a group of white males who were not students. Justin Sloan, a white male, was charged with battery for his role in the fight and was put on probation. Bailey later said that one of the white males broke a beer bottle over his head, but there are no records of Bailey receiving medical treatment. The following day, an incident occurred at the Gotta Go convenience store, outside Jena in unincorporated LaSalle Parish, between Matt Windham and three black youths, including Bailey. Law enforcement reported that their accounts contradicted each other. Windham alleged that Bailey and his friends chased him, that he ran to get his gun, and that the students wrestled it away from him. According to the black students, as they left the convenience store, they were confronted by Windham with a shotgun. They said they wrestled the gun away from him and fled the scene. Bailey was charged with disturbing the peace, second-degree robbery, and theft of a firearm. ## Attack on Barker A group of black students punched, kicked, and stomped on a white 17-year-old Jena High School student, Justin Barker, on December 4, 2006. At first the black attackers claimed that they beat victim Justin Barker because he made a racist joke, but subsequently they advanced the explanation they beat him because they encountered three nooses. Superintendent Breithaupt described the battery as a "premeditated ambush and attack by six students against one. The victim attacked was beaten and kicked into a state of bloody unconsciousness". Barker was released from a local emergency room after three hours of treatment and observation for a concussion and an eye that had swollen shut. The emergency physician's record shows that he also had injuries to his face, ears, and hand. He attended his school's class ring ceremony and dance that evening. He later testified, "I waited 11 years to go to it. I wasn't going to let that get in my way". He left the dance early due to pain. During the trial, Barker testified that his face was badly swollen after the attack and that he suffered a loss of vision in one eye for three weeks. He said that he has suffered recurring headaches and forgetfulness since the attack. US Attorney Washington stated he did not believe the noose incident and the beatings were related. Walters likewise said that he believed there was no link between the noose incident and the beating. "When this case was brought to me and during our investigation and during the trial, there was no such linkage ever suggested. This compact story line has only been suggested after the fact." Although Washington believed that both the noose hangings and the Barker battery were symptoms of racial tension, he has also said that there was no apparent lingering anger among students at the school after the nooses were found. ## Criminal cases Law enforcement arrested six students, eventually dubbed the "Jena Six", who were accused in the attack on Barker. Five of them (Robert Bailey, Jr., then 17; Mychal Bell, then 16; Carwin Jones, then 18; Bryant Purvis, then 17; and Theo Shaw, then 17) were charged with attempted murder. The sixth student, Jesse Ray Beard (also known as Jesse Rae Beard), was charged as a juvenile. Walters charged Mychal Bell as an adult, although he was only 16, because of his previous criminal record and because Walters believed Bell initiated the attack. ### Mychal Bell proceedings District Judge J. P. Mauffray, Jr. presided over Bell's trial. On the first day of trial, June 26, 2007, Walters reduced the charges to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery. The charge of aggravated battery requires the use of a "dangerous weapon", and Walters argued that the tennis shoes worn by Bell while allegedly kicking Barker were dangerous weapons. A number of witnesses testified that they saw Bell strike Barker, while other witnesses were unsure Bell was involved at all. Before the trial began, public defender Blane Williams had urged Bell to accept a plea bargain. At trial he rested the defense case without calling any witnesses or offering any evidence. The six members of Bell's jury were all white. The 150-person jury pool included black citizens, who make up 10 percent of the parish's population, but none of the 50 potential jurors who showed up was black. Williams did not challenge the composition of the jury pool. The jury found Bell guilty, and he faced the possibility of up to 22 years in prison. The judge scheduled sentencing for September 20, 2007. Bell's new defense attorneys, Bob Noel, Walter Lee Perkins Jr., Peggy Sullivan, Louis Scott and Carol Powell-Lexing, requested a new trial on the grounds that Bell should not have been tried as an adult. A request to lower Bell's \$90,000 bond was denied on August 24, 2007, due to his juvenile record. Bell had been put on probation for a battery that occurred December 25, 2005. While on probation, he was convicted of another battery charge and two charges of criminal damage to property. One of the battery charges was reportedly for punching a 17-year-old girl in the face. The media had initially reported that Bell had no prior criminal record. On September 4, 2007, Judge Mauffray vacated the conspiracy conviction on the grounds that Bell should have been tried as a juvenile, but he let the battery conviction stand. Bell appealed his conviction, principally on the ground that he had been improperly tried as an adult. On September 14, 2007, Louisiana's Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Bell's battery conviction, agreeing that this remaining charge was not among those for which a juvenile may be tried as an adult. Following the appellate ruling, on September 21, 2007, Judge Mauffray denied the request for Bell to be eligible for bail pending possible further appeal. On September 26, Parish Attorney Walters announced that the prosecution would not appeal the appellate ruling, but would try Bell as a juvenile. Bell was released on \$45,000 bond, subject to electronic monitoring and under the supervision of a probation officer. On October 11, 2007, Mauffray found that Bell had violated the terms of his probation for previous convictions. The judge sentenced Bell to 18 months in a juvenile facility on two counts of simple battery and two counts of criminal destruction of property, and Bell was taken into custody. According to Walters, the matter was unrelated to the assault on Barker, and it had not been referred to during the Barker proceedings. The defense filed a motion to dismiss the Barker charges on the ground that retrying Bell would amount to double jeopardy. On November 8, 2007, Mauffray denied the motion. Bell's retrial in the Barker assault was scheduled for December 6. Three days before the trial began, he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of battery, and was sentenced to 18 months in a juvenile facility, with credit for time served. He agreed to testify against any of the other assault defendants at trial. All appeals were dropped as part of the plea agreement. ### Remaining defendants On September 4, 2007, charges against Carwin Jones and Theo Shaw were reduced to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy, as were those of Robert Bailey, Jr. on September 10. Bryant Purvis was arraigned on reduced charges of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery on November 7, 2007, and pleaded not guilty. Because Louisiana law considers seventeen-year-olds to be adults for purposes of criminal culpability, the charges for these four were unaffected by the appellate ruling overturning Bell's conviction. Proceedings were on hold for some time pending resolution of various motions to require Mauffray to recuse himself. On July 31, 2008, Mauffray was removed from the cases by Judge Thomas Yeager for making questionable comments about the defendants. The Louisiana Supreme Court assigned Judge Yeager to hear the five remaining cases by order signed August 4, 2008. Walters appealed the recusal order, but his appeal was dismissed on March 4, 2009, as moot, or no longer relevant, as Mauffray had left the bench at the end of 2008. On June 26, 2009, the remaining five defendants entered pleas of "no contest" to a charge of simple battery. The court found them guilty as charged, and sentenced each to a fine of \$500 (waived in regards to Shaw due to the time he spent in jail), \$500 to be paid as court costs, restitution to be paid to the Barker family (with whom the defendants were ordered to have no contact), and seven days of unsupervised probation. The defendants' lawyers read a statement apologizing to the Barker family and to the town. Addressing the rumors that the attack had been provoked by Barker using a racial epithet, they said on behalf of the defendants: > To be clear, not one of us heard Justin use any slur or say anything that justified Mychal Bell attacking Justin nor did any of us see Justin do anything that would cause Mychal to react. Yeager, who presided over the plea and sentencing, also ordered the youths to avoid criminal activity, and not to disavow the statement made on their behalf in court. On June 26, it was announced that the civil case by Barker against the Jena Six members had been settled on undisclosed terms. His civil case against the school board was pending. ## Media coverage ### News coverage Initially, the Jena Six were largely ignored by the United States national media, though covered locally and within Louisiana. Both The Jena Times and The Town Talk (a regional newspaper published in Alexandria, Louisiana) covered the story from its inception. A number of African-American bloggers also covered the story before there was mainstream national press coverage. The first piece on the case to be published by an outside source ran on May 9, 2007, in Left Turn, a small alternative news magazine. The first mainstream US print media outlet to cover the matter was the Chicago Tribune, whose Southwest Bureau Chief, Howard Witt, wrote a piece covering the story on May 20. Witt had received a summary of the situation from Alan Bean, a Texas minister who had founded the advocacy group Friends of Justice. The group sent its document to other reporters and bloggers. In it Bean demanded that outside authorities, not those in LaSalle Parish, deal with the case, and that no incarceration of the defendants occur. Britain's The Observer also featured an article on the case on May 20. A segment on a BBC program This World followed on May 24. The case began to receive more extensive national media coverage in July 2007, with CNN interviewing Jena residents and parents of those involved. Given the racial history of the Deep South, many news reports from Jena evoked the Civil Rights Movement, referred to historic lynching, or Jim Crow. Some sources pointed to inaccurate reporting by the media. The Associated Press published an article noting the various reporting errors that have been made, including whether the tree was a "white tree", the number of nooses, and the discipline given to the noose-hanging students. Based on this, MTV posted a retraction for incorrect information that it had reported on the case from other news sources. ### Columnists and editorials Many major editorial pages and columnists have been sympathetic to the supporters of the Jena Six. They have used the case to discuss broader trends of racism in the US criminal justice system and to call for a renewed civil rights movement. Most editorials were published around the time of the Jena rally. The New York Post, in a September 23, 2007, editorial, stated "it's impossible to examine the case of the so-called Jena Six without concluding that these black teens have been the victims of a miscarriage of justice, with a clearly racial double standard at work". Byron Williams, writing on the Huffington Post, was one of several to cite the Urban League's 2005 finding that the average black male convicted of aggravated assault serves 48 months in prison, one-third longer than a comparable white man. The 2005 report also found that a black male who is arrested is three times more likely to go to jail than a white male arrested for the same crime. Citing the same statistics, syndicated columnist Clarence Page wrote that "The best legacy for the Jena 6 march would be a new movement, dedicated this time to the reduction and elimination of unequal justice wherever it appears. I don't care who leads it, but it shouldn't be for blacks only". Writing in The New York Times, Professor Orlando Patterson of Harvard University used the case to highlight the use of the prison system as a means of "controlling young black men", which is one factor in a broader "crisis in relations between men and women of all classes and, as a result, the catastrophic state of black family life". Other columnists have argued that inaccuracies in the media coverage unfairly tarnish the town and have led to a national overreaction, part of the tendency in the 24-hour news cycle. Dallas Morning News columnist Heather MacDonald, while condemning the noose hangings as a "despicable provocation", said that "the media, the (race) advocates and pandering politicians have erupted in an outpouring of seeming joy at the alleged proof that America remains a racist country". In a column in the Kansas City Star, Jason Whitlock drew attention to what he called factual inaccuracies in reporting of the story. He focused on the piece circulated by Bean to news outlets, "Bean's story is framed—by his own admission—as an indictment of the criminal justice system and the people in power in Jena and, therefore, the story is unfairly biased". Craig Franklin, assistant editor of The Jena Times, who says that he is the only writer to have covered this story from its inception, wrote in The Christian Science Monitor, "I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts ... the truth about Jena will eventually be known". ## Public response The case provoked reactions that the charges against the Jena Six were disproportionate and racially motivated. Supporters of the Jena Six circulated online petitions, raised money for legal defense, and held a demonstration in Jena on September 20, 2007. This event attracted thousands marching in protest. ### Rallies Rallies in support of the Jena Six were held in Jena on September 20, 2007, the date upon which Bell was scheduled for sentencing. An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 demonstrators attended the rally that day, severely overtaxing the facilities of the small town. Protesters took buses from such distant cities as Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Because of the congestion on the roads leading to Jena, many protesters left their vehicles and continued into town on foot. Attendees included civil rights activists Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Martin Luther King III, and rappers Mos Def and Salt-n-Pepa. Rapper-actor Ice Cube attended and financially supported the rally. Darryl Hunt, an African American who was wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of a young white newspaper reporter in 1984, was scheduled as a keynote speaker. The demonstrators were addressed by Darryl Matthews, General President of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, who said, "It is sobering to know that in 2007 Martin Luther King's dream of equal treatment, respect, fairness and opportunity is still not realized". ### Artistic tributes Several songs have been produced in response to the Jena Six case. John Mellencamp released a song and video called "Jena", with lyrics such as "Jena, take your nooses down" which gained considerable media attention, and which Mellencamp described as a "condemnation of racism". The video juxtaposes images of Jena, the high school, and the tree with video from the 1960s, including civil rights marchers and police beatings, video of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. speaking, and an image of a black man in shackles. The song and video led to Jena's mayor, Murphy R. McMillan, issuing a statement rebutting the accusations he believed were expressed and implied in the video. An episode of the Salt-N-Pepa Show on VH1 was filmed at the Jena rally. Bomani Armah released a song called "Jena 6". Blood at the Root is a play written by Dominique Morisseau about the Jena 6. Blood at the Root premiered on March 28, 2014 at Penn State Center Stage. The story is told through the lens of one of the Jena 6's sister, who also attended the high school. The audience is able to experience the series of events that led up to the convictions from multiple students' unique perspective. It has toured internationally and has been described as "catalyzing conversations on difficult and essential questions of race and justice". ### Other reactions Many online petitions have circulated calling for various actions in response to the Jena Six case. Online advocacy group Color of Change, which had previously advocated for victims of Hurricane Katrina, called for District Attorney Walters to drop all charges and for Governor Kathleen Blanco to investigate his conduct. Color of Change raised more than \$212,000 for the Jena Six legal defense, largely through online donations. While the NAACP provided a link to the fund through its website, initially, the donation link on the NAACP Jena Six support page steered potential donors to the generic NAACP donation page, with no way to designate funds for the Jena Six. Black bloggers objected, and several days later, the link was altered to reach the defense fund. The Southern Poverty Law Center represented Beard, hired local defense counsel to represent Bailey, and helped coordinate the overall defense strategy. In the months following the Jena Six rally, controversy arose about accounting and dispersal of the legal defense funds. Questions about the money were first sparked by photos posted on Robert Bailey's former MySpace account, which show him with quantities of hundred dollar bills stuffed in his mouth. The controversy expanded when radio host Michael Baisden accused Color of Change of being "shady" with their use of the funds. Color of Change responded to the accusations by posting links to canceled checks on their web site. In his November 10 report, Chicago Tribune correspondent Howard Witt noted that Color of Change was the only national civil rights group to be fully transparent with their use of the funds. But Witt raised broader questions about the funds, which totaled more than half a million dollars. He reported that attorneys for Bell claimed that they have yet to receive any money from him, and that the six families had refused to publicly account for the donations. On September 22, 2007, the FBI opened an investigation of a white supremacist website that listed the addresses of five of the Jena Six and the telephone numbers of some of their families "in case anyone wants to deliver justice". An FBI spokeswoman said the agency believed that the website "essentially called for their lynching". Civil rights advocate Al Sharpton has said that some of the families have continually received threatening and harassing phone calls. ## Later developments On September 25, 2007, Representative John Conyers (D), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that he would hold congressional hearings on what he described as "the miscarriages of justice that have occurred in Jena, Louisiana", with the goal of pressuring the United States Department of Justice into taking action. The hearing took place on October 16, 2007; Washington and Sharpton, among others, testified. Walters was invited to testify but declined. Most Republican members of the committee declined to attend. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) said to Washington and other Justice Department officials, "Shame on you. ... As a parent, I'm on the verge of tears," and said, "I want to know what you're going to do to get Mychal Bell out of jail!" US Attorney Washington responded that the federal government had a limited role to play in the matter. Representative Lee and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus called upon outgoing Louisiana Governor Blanco to pardon the Jena Six on December 19, 2007, stating that "we believe Mychal Bell and the Jena 6 have paid a sufficient debt to society for any transgressions they may have committed". Blanco's office responded that she cannot grant pardons without a recommendation from the state Pardon Board, and no meeting of that body was scheduled during her remaining term of office. Walters commented that Representative Lee's "passion for racial equality is admirable, but her grasp of the facts is not". He indicated that the attack on Barker was not just a schoolyard fight "but rather an unprovoked, unforeseen assault on a young man who had nothing to do with the hanging of the nooses". Governor Blanco's term of office ended without any pardons being granted. On July 31, 2007, the school had the controversial tree cut down. School Board member Fowler said, "There's nothing positive about that old tree. It's all negative. And I'm serving on the new School Board, and we're wanting to start fresh on some things". According to Fowler, the tree would have had to have been cut down to make way for the rebuilding of the school after the fire. Others thought that taking down the tree was not an effective way to address any problems of racism in Jena. "Cutting down that beautiful tree won't solve the problem at hand," said Caseptla Bailey, Robert Bailey's mother. "It still happened". The remains of the building have been cleared, and a bid accepted for the reconstruction. Jones and Purvis attended the BET Hip Hop Awards in Atlanta on October 13, 2007, and were invited to present the award for Video of the Year. When the two defendants came out on stage, they were greeted by a standing ovation. Emcee Katt Williams joked, "They don't look so tough, do they?" The two members delivered speeches thanking family, friends, the "Hip-Hop Nation", and those who came to Jena. Justin Barker and his parents filed a civil suit on November 29, 2007, against the parents of those accused of beating him, the adult members of the Jena Six (as of the time of the attack), an additional student named Malcolm Shaw, and the LaSalle Parish School Board. Barker's medical bills from his emergency room visit totaled more than \$5,000. The lawsuit alleges that the LaSalle Parish School Board inadequately supervised students and failed to maintain discipline. The Barkers also allege that the school board did not implement a plan to "discourage the dangerous activity of threatening and attacking other students while in possession of actual knowledge of said threats and prior attacks while the students are on school grounds". The case was on hold pending resolution of the criminal cases. When the Barkers' attorney learned that Jesse Ray Beard was using defense funds (which might be garnished under a civil suit) to pay for private school, he decided to push ahead with the case. Following a motion by Bell's civil attorney to recuse Mauffray in the civil case, proceedings were put on hold again pending appointment of a judge to hear that recusal motion. Mauffray subsequently retired. On March 16, 2009, Judge Ronald Lewellyan was assigned to hear the civil case. On June 26, 2009, Judge Lewellyan approved a settlement of Barker's claims against the Jena Six, though the claim against the school board remained pending. ## Jena Six's subsequent activities On August 6, Judge Yeager terminated Beard's probation (he remained under the conditions of his bail release in the Barker incident) so he could attend the Canterbury School in Connecticut. Half of the \$39,900 annual tuition was paid for with Jena Six defense fund money. At Canterbury, Beard played on the basketball, baseball, and football teams and graduated in 2010. On May 10, Bell was stopped in Olla, Louisiana, for speeding and not having proper vehicle insurance while on a weekend pass from his sentence. In an interview televised on CNN on August 24, 2008, Bell admitted to having struck Barker in 2006 and described Jena as "a real racist town". On August 27, 2008, the Louisiana High School Athletic Association turned down Bell's request for an extra year of athletic eligibility. Marcus Jones, Bell's father, blamed Bell's attorney at the time of the plea agreement for the denial. "If it weren't for his attorney, Mychal would be able to play football", Jones said. "They coerced him into taking that plea agreement. If he wouldn't have taken that plea, he wouldn't be in the position he's in now". In 2014, Bell was attending Southern University in Baton Rouge. Robert Bailey attended high school at Shaw High School in Columbus, Georgia, where he was granted an extra year's eligibility to play football. Theo Shaw was able to attend classes at another high school and have his credits transferred to Jena. He received a Jena High School diploma although he took part in the graduation ceremony at the other school. On June 3, 2018, he graduated from the University of Washington School of Law, having received a full scholarship as a Gates Public Service Law Scholar.
2,251,923	Hurricane Edith (1971)	1,172,694,174	Category 5 Atlantic hurricane	[ "1971 Atlantic hurricane season", "1971 in Mexico", "1971 meteorology", "1971 natural disasters in the United States", "Atlantic hurricanes in Mexico", "Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes", "Hurricanes in Belize", "Hurricanes in Honduras", "Hurricanes in Louisiana", "Hurricanes in Texas" ]	Hurricane Edith was the strongest hurricane to form during the 1971 Atlantic hurricane season and formerly the southernmost landfalling Category 5 hurricane on record in the Atlantic until 2007. Edith also stands as one of the only Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes to not have its name retired, next to 1953's Hurricane Carol, 1961's Hurricane Esther, 2005's Hurricane Emily, and 2019's Hurricane Lorenzo. Edith developed from a tropical wave on September 5 and quickly strengthened into a hurricane in the Caribbean Sea. Edith rapidly intensified on September 9 and made landfall on Cape Gracias a Dios as a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. Being a category 5 hurricane, Edith peaked at only 943 mbar (hPa), making Edith the least intense category 5 Atlantic hurricane on record. It quickly lost intensity over Central America and after briefly entering the Gulf of Honduras it crossed the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. After moving across the Gulf of Mexico a trough turned the storm to the northeast and Edith, after having restrengthened while accelerating towards the coast, made landfall on Louisiana with winds of 105 mph (169 km/h) on September 16. Edith steadily weakened over land and dissipated over Georgia on September 18. The hurricane killed two people when it passed near Aruba. Striking northeastern Central America as a Category 5 hurricane, Edith destroyed hundreds of homes and killed at least 35 people. In Texas high tides caused coastal flooding but little damage. Edith caused moderate to heavy damage in portions of Louisiana due to flooding and a tornado outbreak from the storm. One tornado, rated F3 on the Fujita Scale, damaged several homes and injured multiple people in Baton Rouge. The tornado outbreak extended eastward into Florida, of which a few destroyed entire buildings. Damage in the United States totaled US\$25 million (1971 USD, \$ 2022 USD). ## Meteorological history A tropical wave moved off the coast of Africa near Dakar on August 31. It moved westward into the Intertropical Convergence Zone, and organized into a tropical disturbance on September 2 with a small, circular area of convection. The system moved to the west, and on September 3, the convection diminished after moving west of 40° W. By the next day, the tropical disturbance was barely discernible from the clouds of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. The wave gradually became detached from the ITCZ, and based on a reconnaissance flight that confirmed the existence of a low-level circulation, it is estimated the system developed into a tropical depression on September 5 while located 255 miles (410 km) east of Grenada. The depression moved westward quickly, and moved through the southern Lesser Antilles early on September 6. The southern portion of the circulation passed over northeastern Venezuela, though after entering the Caribbean Sea, another reconnaissance flight was unable to confirm the existence of a low-level circulation. Shortly thereafter, while moving into an area of light wind shear, it was able to organize and strengthen further, and on September 7, the depression strengthened into Tropical Storm Edith near the island of Curaçao. While initially, a cold-core upper-level low persisted about 750 miles (1,210 km) northwest of the storm, Edith moved west-northwestward due to the influence of a narrow and persistent ridge of high pressure, which extended from the southwestern Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. As the storm continued into open waters of the Caribbean, the upper-level low gradually weakened and was replaced with an anticyclone. This allowed the storm to strengthen further, and on September 8, Edith became a hurricane in the south-central Caribbean Sea. On September 9, the storm rapidly intensified, and within 24 hours, Edith strengthened from a minimal hurricane to a powerful 160 mph (260 km/h) Category 5 hurricane just off the coast of Nicaragua. The cause for the explosive deepening is unknown, though it is speculated that the transformation in the upper troposphere from an upper-level low to an anticyclone led to a release of baroclinic energy. Reconnaissance aircraft crews in the peak of the storm reported extreme turbulence, causing concern for the safety of the crews. At its peak intensity, the very well-defined "pinhole" eye was only 5 miles (8.0 km) in diameter. Late on September 9, Hurricane Edith made landfall on northeastern Nicaragua at Cabo Gracias a Dios. Hurricane Edith rapidly weakened over the mountainous terrain of northeastern Central America, and 18 hours after it made landfall, it emerged into the Gulf of Honduras as an 80 mph (130 km/h) Category 1 hurricane. It continued to weaken as it moved northwestward, and made landfall near Belize City with tropical storm winds of 70 mph (110 km/h). Edith weakened further while crossing the Yucatán Peninsula, and emerged into the Gulf of Mexico near Campeche, Mexico late on September 11 as a minimal tropical storm. Edith initially failed to re-intensify as it moved northwestward, despite low amounts of wind shear and warm waters. This was because an anticyclone over the Gulf was closely connected with Hurricane Fern, which developed and moved over the northwestern portion of the Gulf of Mexico. The anticyclone resulted in an easterly upper-level flow across Edith, creating conditions not conducive for intensification. As Fern moved inland over Texas, the flow became more favorable around Edith, and 36 hours after entering the Gulf of Mexico, the storm began to reintensify slightly. Edith continued moving to the west-northwest, heading towards the coast of Mexico, but early on September 14, the storm stalled while located just off the coast of Tamaulipas. A mid-latitude trough of low pressure approached the storm, and caused Edith to turn to slowly drift towards the northeast. Located only miles from the Mexican coast, Edith again failed to strengthen until September 15, when it accelerated northeastward and regained hurricane status. The hurricane turned to the east-northeast as it approached the coast of Louisiana, and made landfall on September 16 in a sparsely populated area 30 miles (48 km) east of Cameron with winds of 105 mph (169 km/h), equivalent to a Category 2 hurricane in the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. Edith rapidly weakened over land, degenerating into a tropical storm over Louisiana, and into a tropical depression over Mississippi. It continued to the east-northeast, and dissipated over northwestern Georgia on September 18. ## Preparations Fourteen hours prior to Edith making landfall in Central America, the National Hurricane Center warned citizens about the extreme danger of the approaching hurricane, and asked them to prepare for hurricane conditions. While the storm was located in the Gulf of Mexico, the National Hurricane Center issued a Hurricane Warning from Cameron to Morgan City, Louisiana eighteen hours before the hurricane made landfall. Edith later struck land in the middle portion of the warning area. In Belize, officials ordered the mandatory evacuation of low-lying areas, resulting in hundreds of residents leaving to the United States through the international airport. Officials sent police troops to maintain order and prevent looting. In the Gulf of Mexico, several oil facilities were closed or placed on automatic controls. Drilling rigs as far east as the coastal waters off of Mississippi were prepared to evacuate in the event Edith moved further east than anticipated. Additionally, thousands evacuated coastal areas of Louisiana prior to the arrival of the hurricane. Several shelters opened in coastal cities, and many people prepared for the hurricane by purchasing emergency supplies. Officials closed schools throughout much of southern Louisiana. ## Impact ### Caribbean While passing through the southern Lesser Antilles, the tropical depression produced heavy rainfall and winds of around 35 mph (56 km/h). Edith produced tropical storm force winds in Aruba, and gusts reached 60 mph (97 km/h). Two fishermen were reported lost at sea and presumed dead as a result of Edith. Edith produced strong winds across northeastern Nicaragua and eastern Honduras, with Puerto Lempira reporting an unofficial sustained wind of 140 mph (230 km/h). Press reports indicated every house in the Cape Gracias area was destroyed or heavily damaged, leaving 7,000 homeless. The meteorological service in British Honduras stated there were 100 fatalities near Cape Gracias, though a later report indicated 35 people died in Nicaragua. There, damage was estimated at over US\$380,000 (1971 dollars\$, in dollars). Three United States Air Force aircraft delivered food, medical supplies, and fuel to the hurricane victims of Nicaragua. In Honduras, the hurricane produced 15 feet (4.6 m) tides and strong winds, while strong waves destroyed 40 fishing boats as well. While the hurricane reportedly destroyed entire villages, no deaths occurred in Honduras. Offshore islands in Belize reported winds of up to 60 mph (97 km/h). Edith produced flooding in a few towns in the southern portion of the country, with some buildings damaged. Heavy damage was reported near Monkey River Town. Impact in Mexico, if any, is unknown. ### United States Two stations in Texas recorded sustained tropical force winds, and Galveston reported a peak wind gust of 53 mph (85 km/h). While moving past the state, Edith produced above normal tides of over 4 feet (1.2 m) in locations, which flooded a portion of Highway 87. The storm dropped light to moderate amounts of rainfall peaking at 3.5 inches (89 mm) in Sabine Pass. The passage of Hurricane Edith resulted in downed trees and power lines, and damage totaling US\$180,000 (1971 dollars, \$900,000 in 2006 dollars). Off the coast of Louisiana, the hurricane wrecked three boats, but all the occupants were safely rescued. While making landfall in Louisiana, Edith resulted in above normal tides of up to 9.7 feet (3.0 m) above normal at Cypremont Point near Morgan City. The highest winds reported by a land station were 69 mph (111 km/h) at Cameron, where a wind gust of 96 mph (154 km/h) was also reported. However, due to the lack of recording instruments near the hurricane's landing point, whether higher winds occurred there is not known, although likely. Rainfall was moderate across Louisiana, including amounts of over 8 inches (200 mm) in the southwestern portion of the state. A strong rainband well ahead of the hurricane, combined with the intrusion of dry air into the hurricane's circulation, produced 16 tornadoes from Louisiana to Alabama. An F3 tornado touched down in the eastern residential suburbs of Baton Rouge, causing heavy property damage totaling \$2.5 million (1971 dollars\$, in dollars) along its intermittent 7 miles (11 km) path. The tornado also injured three people. An F2 tornado in Tangipahoa Parish caused \$250,000 in damage (1971 dollars\$, in dollars) along its 4-mile (6.4 km) path, while an F1 tornado in St. Martin Parish injured 6 people on its 3-mile (4.8 km) path. The hurricane caused extensive damage to the sugar cane crop in southwestern Louisiana. About a month after Edith struck the United States, President Richard Nixon declared portions of Louisiana as a disaster area, which allocated relief funds to aid the affected citizens. In Mississippi, wind gusts peaked at 70 mph (110 km/h) in Hattiesburg, with multiple locations reporting tropical-storm-force winds. Additionally, Edith produced moderate rainfall peaking at 6.15 inches (156 mm) in Liberty. In Alabama, the storm caused light rains, moderate wind gusts, and a storm tide of 2.7 feet (0.82 m) in Mobile. Edith spawned four tornadoes in Alabama, three of which were F2 tornadoes. Two touched down in Baldwin County; one destroyed two homes and damaged several others, and the other destroyed two mobile homes, a few barns, and damaged ten houses. Two tornadoes also touched down in Washington County, one of which destroyed several small buildings and downed a few trees. In Florida, Edith produced slightly above-normal tides and light rain. It spawned a tornado in Pensacola, Florida, injuring one person and inflicting \$25,000 in damage (1971 dollars, \$125,000 in 2006 dollars). Damage throughout the United States totaled \$25 million (1971 dollars\$, in dollars), primarily from crop damage in southwest Louisiana. No deaths were reported in the United States. ## See also - Other storms of the same name - List of Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes - Hurricane Wilma (2005) – The most intense Atlantic hurricane on record that rapidly strengthened to Category 5 intensity in a similar area - Hurricane Felix (2007) – The southern-most landfall Category 5 hurricane on record, which caused disastrous impacts across Central America - Hurricane Eta (2020) – A Category 4 hurricane that caused devastating impacts across Central America
31,999,778	Hands Across Hawthorne	1,164,949,318	2011 rally in Portland, Oregon, U.S.	[ "2011 in LGBT history", "2011 in Portland, Oregon", "2011 protests", "LGBT civil rights demonstrations", "LGBT culture in Portland, Oregon", "LGBT events in Oregon", "LGBT history in Oregon", "May 2011 events in the United States", "Protests in Portland, Oregon", "Violence against LGBT people in the United States", "Violence against gay men in the United States" ]	Hands Across Hawthorne was a rally held at the Hawthorne Bridge in the American West Coast city of Portland, Oregon, on May 29, 2011. The demonstration was in response to an attack, one week earlier, on Brad Forkner and Christopher Rosevear, a gay male couple who had been holding hands while walking across the bridge. According to the couple and the Portland Police Bureau, a group of five men followed Forkner and Rosevear along the bridge before physically assaulting them. The assault was condemned by Portland's mayor, Sam Adams, and its police chief, Mike Reese, and news of the attack spread throughout the Pacific Northwest and the United States. The attack prompted volunteers from the Q Center, a nonprofit organization that supports the LGBT community, to form street patrols as a means of monitoring Portland's downtown area. Several LGBT and human rights organizations sponsored Hands Across Hawthorne in response to the attack, with the purpose of linking hands across the entire span of the Hawthorne Bridge to show solidarity. More than 4,000 people attended the rally, which had been publicized on a single Facebook page 72 hours previously. Forkner, Rosevear, Mayor Adams, and other community leaders spoke at the rally. The event received attention throughout the United States. On June 5, residents of Spokane, Washington, held a similar hand-holding rally called "Hands Across Monroe", crossing the Monroe Street Bridge in Riverfront Park. ## Background ### Hate crimes in Portland Portland Police Bureau statistics showed a decrease in the number of "bias crime assaults", or "hate crimes", from 26 incidents in 2007 to 15 in 2009. In 2010, of just over 50 hate crime incidents reported in Portland, 20 involved gender or sexual orientation, far outnumbering racial hate crimes. In May 2010, a group of men in drag were harassed and assaulted by a group of five men. The filing of a police report resulted in a community forum at Portland's Q Center (a nonprofit organization supporting the LGBT community), which was attended by Portland Police Chief Mike Reese, Mayor Sam Adams, and Deputy District Attorney Rod Underhill, together with more than 100 city residents. The attacks led to the formation of the Queer Patrol (or Q Patrols) in July 2010, which consisted of foot patrols specifically designed to protect the LGBT community in downtown Portland. Sarah Mirk of The Portland Mercury attributed the rise in the recorded number of crimes related to gender or sexual identity in 2010 to the increased number of filed police reports, this due in part to the work of the Q Patrols. Hate crimes continued in the city; in November 2010, a man perceived to be gay was severely beaten and left unconscious while walking home in southeast Portland. According to Portland Police, eight bias crimes were reported between January 1 and April 30, 2011, half the number reported during the same period in 2010. ### Assault Brad Forkner and Christopher Rosevear (aged 23 and 24, respectively) were attacked on the Eastbank Esplanade on May 22, 2011, after holding hands while walking across the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland, Oregon. Details of the attack were released by Portland Police on May 24. Forkner and Rosevear said a group of five men followed them from Tom McCall Waterfront Park across the bridge, then beat them as they came down a ramp along the Esplanade. According to the description released by Portland Police, "as [the couple] walked they knew several men were behind them talking, laughing and pointing but they were not sure it was directed at them." Three of the five men attacked the couple from behind. Forkner was pushed into a railing and punched multiple times before breaking away to call 9-1-1. The attackers reportedly continued hitting Rosevear on the head, face, back and ribs until Forkner was able to call for police help. Forkner later recalled that he did not hear specific homophobic remarks, but believed the attackers may have been yelling in a foreign language. Forkner had swelling on his face, and Rosevear required stitches in his lip. The victims said that several witnesses were nearby, but did not offer help in any form. Police investigated the case as a "bias crime", noting the lack of provocation. As of December 2012 the five men who attacked Forkner and Rosevear remained unidentified. The attack was reported by newspapers in the Pacific Northwest and by gay-oriented media outlets nationwide. Sam Adams, Portland's gay mayor, and Police Chief Mike Reese both spoke out against the attack. Adams said, "We seek to be the city of the most equal opportunity, and we can only be that city if all people are safe and have a sense of safety on our streets and in our parks." The Cascade AIDS Project, where Forkner was the Pivot Center Coordinator at the time, launched a Facebook campaign following the attack called "Holding Hands, In Solidarity", encouraging people to post pictures of hand-holding. The Q Center also condemned the attack. The assault once again prompted Q Center volunteers to form Q Patrols as a means of monitoring the streets and reporting hate crimes to police. Plans were made to have Q Patrols available between 11 pm and 3 am until the weekend of Halloween. ## Rally Following the attack, Basic Rights Oregon (BRO), Cascade AIDS Project, Pride Northwest, the Q Center, and local churches organized a rally to link hands spanning the length of the Hawthorne Bridge to show solidarity. The event was publicized by a single Facebook page, created only 72 hours previously from Cascade AIDS Project's hand-holding photo gallery. Stephen Cassell, event organizer and Q Center board member, reportedly "thought of the action plan in the middle of the night and quickly posted the idea on Facebook." The organization Progressive Oregon, which advocates for progressivism within that state, also advertised the event. More than 4,000 people attended the event, which began at 7:30 pm. Members of the Community of Welcoming Congregations, a coalition of more than 100 congregations in Oregon that welcome members of the gay community, and the Portland chapter of the Human Rights Campaign, also attended the rally. As demonstrators gathered at the west side of the bridge, the rally began with speeches by Forkner and Rosevear. Forkner said that this was not the first time he had feared for his safety, nor did he expect it to be the last: > Thousands of people walk the streets of America and yes, even Portland, feeling like they are less than human, that their life is not as valued by society as their other, supposedly more "normal", peers. The effects of this internalized hatred are endless. They contribute to gang violence, to depression, to self-medicating via alcohol and drug abuse, to sexuality that people feel must be kept secret, explored in dark alleys and bathhouses rather than openly and safely. How can we talk about keeping ourselves safe, about being healthy, about being loved, if we are doing so in secret, if we are hurting in silence? Following Forkner's speech, Basic Rights Oregon executive director Jeana Frazzini thanked the couple, spoke of the symbolism of the hand-holding rally, and encouraged supporters to volunteer for the Q Patrol. During the rally, the crowd sang the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand". According to Cassell, Hands Across Hawthorne marked one of the first instances where Portland's major LGBT rights organizations worked together on an event other than the Portland Pride Festival. Details of the rally were reported by various publications. The Huffington Post contributor Chuck Currie, a United Church of Christ minister from Portland, used the attack and rally to question the impact of conservative evangelical religion and other anti-gay-rights organizations. Progressive Oregon and Just Out (an LGBT newspaper in Portland) noted the failure of the city's largest newspaper, The Oregonian, to cover the rally; the former sent a letter and petition to the paper's publisher N. Christian Anderson III, requesting "fair and balanced" coverage. Peter Bhatia, editor for The Oregonian, responded to the criticism and petition signed by more than 1,400 people by saying the paper's lack of coverage was a "mistake" caused by "human error". One week after the rally, Mayor Sam Adams and his staff linked hands at Portland City Hall in solidarity. On June 5, residents of Spokane, Washington, held a similar hand-holding rally in solidarity with the Portland community called "Hands Across Monroe", crossing the Monroe Street Bridge in Riverfront Park. That event was sponsored by The LGBT Center. ## See also - Hands Across America - Hate crime laws in the United States - History of violence against LGBT people in the United States
361,548	One Hot Minute	1,170,831,305	null	[ "1995 albums", "Albums produced by Rick Rubin", "Albums with cover art by Mark Ryden", "Funk metal albums", "Heavy metal albums by American artists", "Psychedelic rock albums by American artists", "Red Hot Chili Peppers albums", "Warner Records albums" ]	One Hot Minute is the sixth studio album by American rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers, released on September 12, 1995, by Warner Bros. Records. The worldwide success of the band's previous album Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991) caused guitarist John Frusciante to become uncomfortable with their popularity, eventually quitting mid-tour in 1992. Following a series of short-term replacements, the band hired guitarist Dave Navarro in 1993; it was his only studio album with the band. Recording for the album took place at the Sound Factory in Hollywood from June 1994 to February 1995. It marked the second collaboration between the band and producer Rick Rubin. A departure from the funk of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, One Hot Minute is characterized by heavy metal riffs and psychedelic rock influences, primarily due to the influence of Navarro, formerly of Jane's Addiction. Vocalist Anthony Kiedis, who had resumed addictions to cocaine and heroin in 1994 after being sober for more than five years, approached his lyricism with a reflective outlook on drugs and their harsh effects. As such, the lyrics reflect mostly dark and melancholy themes. Bassist Flea sang lead vocals on "Pea". One Hot Minute sold more than two million copies and was certified multi-platinum, and reached number four on the US Billboard 200. It also spawned three hit singles: "Warped", "My Friends" and "Aeroplane". Nevertheless, it was considered a commercial disappointment, because it sold fewer than half as many copies as Blood Sugar Sex Magik and received much less acclaim. Navarro was fired in 1998 due to his drug use, after which Frusciante returned to the band. ## Background Red Hot Chili Peppers had released Blood Sugar Sex Magik in 1991. The album was an instant hit, selling more than seven million copies in the United States, and turned the band into an international sensation. Guitarist John Frusciante was having difficulty coping with the band's newfound fame and began to dislike it. Frusciante often argued with his band mates and sabotaged performances. He began taking heroin and steadily increased his usage of the drug over time. Frusciante ultimately quit the band in 1992, during the Japanese leg of their tour. Frusciante returned to his home in California and became a recluse. Stunned, the remaining Chili Peppers, who had no suitable replacement, hired Arik Marshall to play the remaining dates after being forced to reschedule. Upon returning to Hollywood, the band placed an ad in the L.A. Weekly for open guitar auditions, which Kiedis considered to be a waste of time. After several months of unsuccessfully looking for a suitable guitarist, drummer Chad Smith suggested Dave Navarro. He had always been the band's first choice, but was busy recording Deconstruction with Eric Avery following the 1991 breakup of Jane's Addiction. Navarro eventually accepted the position after productive jam sessions. ## Recording and production Kiedis knew that the band's sound would inevitably change when Navarro joined. In June 1994, the band entered The Sound Factory, a recording studio in Los Angeles, to begin recording its next album. The band completed a few basic tracks before Kiedis began having difficulty singing. He'd been through a dental procedure in which an addictive sedative, Valium, was used. The medication triggered a relapse, and he once again became dependent on drugs. Kiedis had slipped from five years of sobriety and began reusing narcotics he'd sworn never to use again. The band took a short break from recording to perform at Woodstock '94, the first show Navarro played with the Peppers. After resuming production, Navarro questioned the methods of the Peppers' recording procedures. He wondered why such a considerable amount of jamming was involved with the album's conception. Various qualms followed, and the process soon became uncomfortable for the band. Months went by, and only small amounts of material were written. Kiedis made a trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in December for Christmas, where his family realized he'd resumed an active addiction once again. He returned to Hollywood in late January 1995, when he finally finished recording his vocals. The rest of the recording was completed within the next month. John Lurie played harmonica on the title track. Kiedis was a fan of Lurie's group The Lounge Lizards. Lurie became a friend of the band and sat in with them occasionally over the years, mainly as a saxophonist. ## Writing and composition Considering Kiedis had resumed heavy drug use and Frusciante was no longer present for collaboration, songs were written at a far slower rate. Working with Frusciante had been something Kiedis took for granted: "John Frusciante had been a true anomaly when it came to song writing. He made it even easier than Hillel Slovak to create music, even though I'd known Hillel for years. I just figured that was how all guitar players were, that you showed them your lyrics and sang a little bit and the next thing you knew you had a song. That didn't happen right off the bat with Dave." Drummer Chad Smith suggested it was writer's block that was holding Kiedis back from coming up with lyrics, however Kiedis strongly denied this. With the writing process taking too much time and Kiedis returning to his drug habit, for the first time on any of the band's albums, Flea, besides contributing music as usual, wrote some of the lyrics, including "Transcending," his tribute to River Phoenix along with the intro and outro to "Deep Kick," a song that told the story of his and Kiedis's youth. Also, Flea sang lead vocals (to "Pea") for the first time on any album. Stylistically, One Hot Minute diverged from the Chili Peppers' previous records—especially Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The album was characterized by prominent use of heavy metal guitar riffs and hints of psychedelic rock. Navarro, unlike Flea and Kiedis, was not influenced by funk music. He told Guitar World in 1996, "It doesn't really speak to me. But then again, when I'm playing with three other guys who I love and feel camaraderie with, it's enjoyable to play funk." Navarro's own style was influenced mainly by classic rock guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Carlos Santana, as well as gothic rock guitarists Robert Smith and Daniel Ash. Continuing a trend that started on Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Kiedis diverged even further away from his signature rapping, only doing so on a few tracks. One Hot Minute took almost two years to write, and its recording and production was not a smooth process. Navarro felt as though he was an outsider to the other members. His writing in Jane's Addiction was independent from other contributors, whereas the Peppers were a far more collaborative group. Navarro himself noted that the band's dynamic was more balanced than that of Jane's Addiction, which was often dominated by frontman Perry Farrell. Overall, One Hot Minute lyrically confronted the dark, melancholy and remorseful feelings Kiedis kept to himself. Many of the songs were written at a time when he was hiding his resumed addiction. "Warped" directly faced Kiedis's distraught moods as a hysterical cry for help: "My tendency for dependency is offending me/It's upending me/I'm pretending to be strong and free from my dependency/It's warping me." He also felt disappointed that "no one had suspected that I'd slipped from my more than five years of sobriety." The track itself was composed of heavy guitar riffs and echoing vocals which attempted to convey a distressed state. "Aeroplane", the album's third single, was more upbeat than many of the album's songs; but it still contained various references to Kiedis's personal issues: "Looking into my own eyes/I can't find the love I want/Someone better slap me before I start to rust/before I start to decompose." The song also featured Flea's daughter Clara and her kindergarten class singing backing vocals on the last verse. Additionally, "Pea" is targeted at "the guys who beat the shit out of me [Flea] at the Mayfair on Franklin & Bronson". "Tearjerker" was a tribute to Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain. Kiedis felt Cobain's death "was an emotional blow, and we all felt it. I don't know why everyone on earth felt so close to that guy; he was beloved and endearing and inoffensive in some weird way. For all of his screaming and all of his darkness, he was just lovable." "My Friends" addressed more of Kiedis' own somber thoughts rather than those of "his friends": "My friends are so distressed/And standing on the brink of emptiness/No words I know of to express/This emptiness." Many of the songs were known by alternate/working titles during the recording/writing process: "Swirly" ("Warped"), "Music is My Aeroplane" ("Aeroplane"), "Psychedelic" ("Deep Kick"), "Baseballs" ("Coffee Shop"), "The Pea Song" ("Pea"), "Gang of Four" ("One Big Mob"), "Epic" ("One Hot Minute"), "Frog" ("Shallow Be Thy Game"), "River" ("Transcending"), "Evil" ("Let's Make Evil"), "Punk Blender" ("Blender") "Stretching You Out" ("Stretch"), and "Melancholy Mechanics of My Mind" and "Velvet" ("Melancholy Mechanics"). Black Fish Ferris Wheel was almost the title of the album. Artist Mark Ryden, who designed the One Hot Minute cover artwork, had even come up with a mock design using that as the album's title before the band settled on One Hot Minute. The album also went by various other working titles such as The Sensitives, Turtlehead, The Good and Bad Moods of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Blight Album. ### Outtakes Thirteen songs from the One Hot Minute sessions made it to the final cut of the album. "Melancholy Mechanics" was released as a bonus track on the Japanese pressing of the album, as well as a b-side to the "Warped" single, and "Let's Make Evil" and "Stretch" (originally connected to the end of "One Big Mob") were released on the "My Friends" single. "Bob" (a song about close friend Bob Forrest) would finally surface 11 years later as an iTunes bonus track in 2006. The song features percussion by Stephen Perkins. "The Junkie Song", which was mentioned in interviews and also features Perkins, remains unreleased. "Blender" (described as a short, chaotic song) was one of two songs ("Stretch" being the other) that was dropped from the album's final cut at the last minute. The song has never been released, but resurfaced as a leak in 2023. "The Intimidator" and "Slow Funk", two songs mentioned in interviews by Chad Smith, have never been released. Flea mentioned in interviews that "The Intimidator" was inspired by Miles Davis" while it has been speculated from comments made by Chad Smith that "Slow Funk" was a working title for "Falling Into Grace". There are also various unreleased rough mixes of the album's tracks that included extra instruments, extra lyrics or extended endings. ## Promotion and release While piecing together the final components of the album, the band recorded a video for "Warped". They asked Flea's brother-in-law, Gavin Bowden, to direct it. The video feature the members of the band scantily clad and involved Kiedis and Navarro kissing towards the end as a way of breaking the monotony of cumbersome video recording. Thinking nothing of it, they continued to shoot and finished several days later. Warner Bros., however, saw the video and instantly wanted it thrown away, considering it to be unmarketable and that the kiss and the homoerotic imagery would alienate a large portion of the band's fan base. The band came to a consensus to let the kiss remain on the final cut, prompting a backlash from the college segment of their audience, who took offense at the action. Kiedis said of the situation: "If they couldn't accept what we were doing, we didn't need them anymore." One Hot Minute was released on September 12, 1995. It was certified Gold just more than two months later on November 11; since then it has gone Double Platinum in the United States. The album peaked at number four on the Billboard Top 200. "My Friends" peaked at number one on the Modern Rock and Mainstream Rock charts. The song also peaked at number 29 on the UK Singles Chart, and "Aeroplane" at number 11. Several days following the album's release, Kiedis continued to use drugs despite the numerous interviews he was scheduled to attend. ## Critical reception One Hot Minute was not as universally well received as Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and was ultimately considered to be a poor follow-up. It did, however, receive mixed to positive reviews from critics. Daina Darzin of Rolling Stone said "One Hot Minute dives into the emotionally deep end of drug addiction and loss", and that the album "is a ferociously eclectic and imaginative disc that also presents the band members as more thoughtful, spiritual—even grown-up. After a 10 plus-year career, they're realizing their potential at last." David Browne of Entertainment Weekly said that "One Hot Minute wails and flails like a mosh-pit workout tape, but it also has moments of outright subtlety and maturity." He goes on to praise Kiedis for "keeping his boorish tendencies under control." Browne, however, criticizes the band for "attempts at cosmic philosophy which often trip up on hippie-dippie sentiments", and some songs "fall back on tired frat-funk flop sweat." "The Peppers work their own little patch with considerable expertise," wrote Peter Kane in Q. "The incoming Navarro rarely fails to deliver the goods and upfront the taut ball of energy going by the name of Anthony Kiedis still makes for a suitably rubbery-lipped frontman, if not exactly a lovable one." Q also included One Hot Minute in its 'best of the year' roundup: "A bulging, blistering blend of a skewed ballads and physically intimidating workouts that charge around like a bull on a promise." AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine said that "following up Blood Sugar Sex Magik proved to be a difficult task for the Red Hot Chili Peppers", and "Navarro's metallic guitar shredding should have added some weight to the Chili Peppers' punk-inflected heavy-guitar funk, but tends to make it plodding." Erlewine went on to add that "by emphasizing the metal, the funk is gradually phased out of the blend, as is melody." Robert Christgau gave the album a rating of "dud". "My Friends" was considered by Erlewine to be a blatant attempt to hold on to the mainstream audience gained by "Under the Bridge", and that in contrast, "the melodies are weak and the lyrics are even more feeble." The song also "tries to be a collective hug for all [of Kiedis's] troubled pals." Rolling Stone, on the other hand, said the song was "lovely", and incorporated a "vaguely folky chorus, and sports the same sad wishfulness of 'Under the Bridge' and 'Breaking the Girl'." The article went on to praise "Warped" claiming it "mixes harrowing lyrics with a multi-toned, layered intro and a whirling dervish of noises and big-rock rhythms surfing through and over big, funky hooks. It's like, well, a drug rush." Rolling Stone went on to say that the title track was "funky and fun. It's about love and sex. What the hell. Some things don't have to change." Entertainment Weekly said "some of these songs last a little too long and could have benefited from a trimming", though they credited Kiedis for sounding "nearly spiritual" on "Falling into Grace". ## Unreleased documentary In 1994 and 1995 the band, along with director Gavin Bowden, began work on a documentary, Deep Kick, named after the third track on the album. The documentary was expected to be similar to Funky Monks, which documented the making of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, although it would also feature mini-films intercut featuring each member of the band. Some footage from the documentary has been released on the internet including Anthony's segment along with a segment of the band with the Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man" playing over the footage. Footage from the in-studio version of the "My Friends" music video also came from this shoot. It is unknown if the project was ever completed and if it was, why Warner never released it. ## Tour The One Hot Minute tour began several days after the release of the album. The band opened the tour with a European leg. Kiedis felt that as a musician, he was becoming somewhat lackluster. The short European leg ended in early November, and the U.S. portion was scheduled to begin 10 days later; however, it was postponed until early February. A few shows into the U.S. leg, Kiedis injured his leg badly while engaging in what he calls "eyes-closed robotic dancing." He tripped over a monitor and fell off the stage, ending up hanging by his calf from his microphone cable, resulting in a cast which he wore for the next two months. Kiedis reflected that it "was nice to see that people were still interested in coming out to see what we do," as there'd been a four-year gap since the release of Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Following the conclusion of the U.S. tour, the band took two weeks off before several Australia and New Zealand performances. The Peppers then played at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco in June, before finishing the tour in Europe. Kiedis had remained sober the entire tour and maintained positive disposition during shows. Navarro, however, was growing tired of touring, and that was beginning to grate on his fellow band-mates. Kiedis suffered an additional injury in Prague after falling off the stage while attempting to execute a back flip. He was forced to wear a back brace for the next few shows, which restricted his actions to the area around his microphone. After shows in Paris and London, the band returned home to Los Angeles. Kiedis began taking drugs once again, though he forced himself to discontinue after several weeks. The band was then asked to play in the North Pole for roughly 100 contest winners of a concert set up by Molson, a Canadian beer company. While the show was mildly motivating to the band, they returned home after two days. Months went by without any scheduled concerts due to the album's poor sales. Following another relapse and a stint in rehab, Kiedis and the rest of the band prepared for a summer tour, their first in almost seven months. Before the tour began, Kiedis had a motorcycle accident and was rushed to the hospital after severely injuring his hand. Due to his drug addiction, it took seven doses of morphine before the pain was assuaged. Following discharge from the hospital, he was forced to wear a full-arm cast for several months, resulting in the cancellation of all remaining scheduled concerts. Halfway through Kiedis's recovery, the band was asked to play the Fuji Rock Festival in July 1997. By that time, Kiedis's cast had receded down to the elbow and he felt well enough to play. A large typhoon had been forecast to hit the festival several hours before the show. The concert took place anyway, and when the Chili Peppers got on stage to play, the audience was being soaked in torrential rains, and the band found it virtually impossible to play their instruments. After eight songs, the lighting and sound equipment was torn from the stage and the band was obliged to an impromptu finish. ## Follow-up album and Navarro's departure Returning home, the Chili Peppers parted ways and, for the most part, remained secluded from each other through the rest of 1997. No new material was written during that time, and it was not until the beginning of 1998 that the band began rehearsal. At that point, Navarro had become dependent on drugs, with Kiedis also struggling to remain clean. The band decided they would have a talk with Navarro and attempt to convince him to enter rehab. The discussion escalated into a heated dispute. In April 2010, Navarro discussed this incident, stating that: "One was my drug use at the time. The other was musical differences. Anthony says it was because I tripped and fell over an amp while on drugs. I say that he was on more drugs than me at that point. We both had a loose relationship with reality. Who do you want to believe?" The band made an attempt to begin writing for a follow-up and had written and began recording a song titled "Circle of the Noose", but it was never completed. The song, the last to feature guitar work from Navarro, was a tribute to the late qawwali-devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Navarro described the song as pop and dirge-like, and said it was one of his favorite songs he created with the band. He said: "The best way I can describe it is it's like pepped-up '60s folk with '90s ideals, but I'd hate to label it as folk because it's not, it moves." According to Flea, it contained a sample of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. On February 3, 2016, a rough mix of "Circle of the Noose," recorded on March 16, 1998, was leaked to the internet. At this point in 1998, Kiedis and Flea decided it was time to fire their guitarist. Navarro was furious when confronted by Kiedis and Flea, but eventually accepted his termination. The Peppers were fighting, and on the verge of breaking up. Flea was beginning to question the band's future and thought it may be necessary to break the band up. He made one last attempt to keep the band together, asking Frusciante to rejoin. Frusciante had recently completed a drug rehabilitation program after more than five years of heroin addiction, and gladly accepted the invitation. During the tour for One Hot Minute, all songs from the album except "One Hot Minute," "Tearjerker" and "Falling Into Grace" were played. Those three have never been played live by the band. As of 2016, "Pea" and "Aeroplane" are the only songs from One Hot Minute the Peppers have played in full since Navarro left the band. The band did, however, tease "My Friends," "Let's Make Evil" and "Walkabout" during the I'm With You World Tour, and "Deep Kick" was teased during The Getaway World Tour. Chad Smith was asked by fans during a February 2014 online interview about the band's reasons for not performing the songs, and he responded by saying "We don't really feel that connected to that record anymore. No special reason, not to say we'd never play those songs, but we don't feel that emotionally connected to that music right now." On October 2, 2021, Smith and Navarro performed "My Friends" together for the first time in 25 years at the Ohana Festival. They were joined by Taylor Hawkins on vocals, Pat Smear on guitar and Chris Chaney on bass. ## Track listing ## Personnel Red Hot Chili Peppers - Anthony Kiedis – lead vocals - Dave Navarro – guitars, backing vocals - Flea – bass guitar, backing vocals, lead vocals on "Pea" and co-lead vocals on "Deep Kick" - Chad Smith – drums, percussion Additional musicians - Keith "Tree" Barry – violin on "Tearjerker" - Jimmy Boyle – backing vocals on "One Big Mob" - Louis Mathieu - backing vocals on "One Big Mob" - Lenny Castro – percussion on "Walkabout", "My Friends", "One Hot Minute", "Deep Kick", and "Tearjerker" - Aimee Echo – backing vocals on "One Hot Minute", "One Big Mob" - Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa – chants on "Falling into Grace" - John Lurie – harmonica on "One Hot Minute" - Stephen Perkins – percussion on "One Big Mob", "Warped" and "Bob" (iTunes bonus track) - Kristen Vigard – backing vocals on "Falling into Grace" - Gabriel James Navarro - crying on "One Big Mob" - The Aeroplane Kids - backing vocals on "Aeroplane" Production - Stephen Marcussen – mastering engineer - Rick Rubin – producer - Dave Sardy – mixing engineer, recording engineer - Dave Schiffman – engineer - Don C. Tyler – digital editor Design - Mark Ryden – album artwork ## Charts ### Weekly charts ### Year-end charts ## Certifications
376,179	The Wiggles	1,170,366,793	Australian children's music group	[ "1991 Australian television series debuts", "2000s Australian television series", "2010s Australian television series", "APRA Award winners", "ARIA Award winners", "ARIA Hall of Fame inductees", "Australian Broadcasting Corporation original programming", "Australian buskers", "Australian children's entertainers", "Australian children's musical groups", "Australian children's musicians", "Australian children's television series", "Australian preschool education television series", "Disney Channel original programming", "English-language television shows", "Musical groups established in 1991", "Nick Jr. original programming", "Television series with live action and animation", "The Wiggles", "Treehouse TV original programming" ]	The Wiggles are an Australian children's music group formed in Sydney in 1991. The group are currently composed of Anthony Field, Lachlan Gillespie, Simon Pryce and Tsehay Hawkins, as well as supporting members Evie Ferris, John Pearce, Caterina Mete and Lucia Field. The Wiggles were founded in 1991 by Field, Murray Cook, Jeff Fatt, Greg Page and Phillip Wilcher. Wilcher left the group after their first album. Page retired in 2006 due to ill health and was replaced by understudy Sam Moran, but returned in 2012, replacing Moran. At the end of 2012, Cook, Fatt and Page retired and were replaced by Gillespie, Pryce and Emma Watkins. Cook and Fatt retained their shareholding in the group and all three continued to have input into its creative and production aspects, while engaging in occasional reunion performances. Watkins departed the group in 2021, with Hawkins taking her place. Field and Fatt were members of the Australian pop band the Cockroaches in the 1980s, and Cook was a member of several bands before meeting Field and Page at Macquarie University, where they were studying to become pre-school teachers. In 1991, Field was inspired to create an album of children's music based upon concepts of early childhood education, and he enlisted Cook, Page, and Fatt to assist him. They began touring to promote the album and became so successful, they quit their teaching jobs to perform full-time. The group augmented their act with costumed characters Dorothy the Dinosaur, Henry the Octopus and Wags the Dog, as well as the human character Captain Feathersword, played by Paul Paddick since 1993. Shirley Shawn the Unicorn was later introduced. They originally travelled with a small group of dancers, which later grew into a larger troupe. The group's albums, DVDs and television programs have been produced independently since their inception. The height of their popularity came in the early 2000s, after they broke into the American market. The group were formally consolidated in 2005. They were listed at the top of Business Review Weekly's top-earning Australian entertainers four years in a row and earned A\$45 million in 2009. The Wiggles have enjoyed almost universal approval throughout their history, and their music has been played in pre-schools all over the world. They have earned multiple Gold, Platinum and double Platinum records; have sold 23 million DVDs and 7 million CDs; and have performed, on average, to one million people per year. The band has earned multiple Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) and Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Music Awards, and they have been inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. ## History ### 1988–1991: Background Anthony Field and Jeff Fatt were members of the Cockroaches, a Sydney pop band known for their "good-time R&B material" and several singles recorded by independent labels during the 1980s. In 1988, Field's infant niece, who was the daughter of Cockroaches founder and band member Paul Field, died of SIDS, causing the group to disband. Anthony Field enrolled at Macquarie University in Sydney to complete his degree in early childhood education, and later stated that his niece's death "ultimately led to the formation of [the] Wiggles". Murray Cook, also "a mature-aged student", was the guitarist in the pub rock band Bang Shang a Lang before enrolling at Macquarie. Greg Page, who had been a roadie for and sang with the Cockroaches during their final years, had enrolled in Macquarie to study early childhood education on Field's recommendation. Field, Cook, and Page were among approximately 10 men in a program with 200 students. In 1991, while still a student, Field became motivated to use concepts in the field of early childhood education to record an album of music for children. The album was dedicated to Field's niece. A song he wrote for the Cockroaches, "Get Ready to Wiggle", inspired the band's name because they thought that wiggling described the way children dance. Like a university assignment, they produced a folder of essays that explained the educational value of each song on the album. They needed a keyboardist "to bolster the rock'n'roll feel of the project", so Field asked his old bandmate Fatt for his assistance in what they thought would be a temporary project. The group received songwriting help from John Field, Anthony's brother and former bandmate, and from Phillip Wilcher, who was working with the early childhood music program at Macquarie. After contributing to their first album, hosting the group's first recording sessions in his Sydney home, and appearing in a couple of the group's first videos, Wilcher left the group and went into classical music. The group reworked a few Cockroaches tunes to better fit the genre of children's music; for example, the Cockroaches song "Hot Tamale", written by John Field, was changed to "Hot Potato". Anthony Field gave copies of their album to his young students to test out the effect of the group's music on children; one mother returned it the next day because her child would not stop listening to it. To promote their first album, the Wiggles filmed two music videos with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and created a self-produced, forty-minute-long video version. Finances were limited, so there was no post-production editing of the video project. They used Field's nieces and nephews as additional cast, and hired the band's girlfriends to perform in character costumes. Cook's wife made their first costumes. They used two cameras and visually checked the performance of each song; that way, according to Paul Field, it took them less time to complete a forty-minute video than it took other production companies to complete a three-minute music video. ### 1991–1993: Early career The Cockroaches' former manager, Jeremy Fabinyi, became the group's first manager. Using their previous connections, he negotiated with the ABC to help them promote their first recording. The album cost approximately A\$4,000 to produce and it sold 100,000 copies in 1991. Anthony Field and Cook got teaching jobs, while Page finished his degree, so they could only perform during school holidays; finding time to do so was, as Field reported, "challenging". Fabinyi advised them to tour in unusual settings throughout Sydney and New South Wales. The Wiggles' debut performance was at a friend's daycare facility in Randwick, New South Wales, for about a dozen children. They played for crowds at shopping centres like Westfield in Sydney and at small pre-school events and parties, and busked at Circular Quay, then moved on to regional tours and shows for playgroup associations, averaging about 300 people in the audience. They were promoted by local playgroups or nursing mothers' associations with whom they split their proceeds. They performed at pre-schools with other ABC children's performers; when 500 people attended these concerts just to see the Wiggles, they started doing their own shows, and according to Field, "Suddenly people started rolling up to performances in astonishing numbers". In 1993, Field, Cook, and Page decided to give up teaching for a year to focus on performing full-time, along with Fatt, to see if they could make a living out of it. As Fatt reported, "it was very much a cottage industry". They used many of the business techniques developed by the Cockroaches, choosing to remain as independent and self-contained as possible. John Field, Mike Conway, who later became the Wiggles' general manager, trumpeter Dominic Lindsay, and Cockroaches saxophonist Daniel Fallon performed with them. Anthony Field, with input from the other members, led most of the production of their music, home video releases, and live shows. Their act was later augmented with supporting characters: the "friendly pirate" Captain Feathersword and the costumed characters Dorothy the Dinosaur, Henry the Octopus, and Wags the Dog. These characters were initially performed by the band members themselves: Field played Captain Feathersword and Wags; Cook played Dorothy; and Fatt played Henry. In 1993, actor Paul Paddick permanently joined the group to play Captain Feathersword; he later became known as "the fifth Wiggle" and was as popular as the regular bandmembers. At first, the group travelled with a small group of dancers hired from a local dance studio to perform with them. After the production of their second album, the Wiggles, who were called by their first names when they performed, began to wear costumes on stage as Fabinyi suggested and as the Cockroaches had done, and adopted colour-coded shirts: Page in yellow, Cook in red, Fatt in purple, and Field in blue. The coloured shirts also made it easier for their young audience to identify them. As Field reported, the decision to emphasise colour was "a no-brainer, considering our pre-school-age audience". Cook and Fatt already owned shirts in their colours, but Field and Page "met in a Sydney department store and literally raced to see who got the blue shirt". ### 1993–2004: Australian and international success Through the rest of the 1990s, the Wiggles maintained a busy recording and touring schedule, becoming as Field reported and despite his strong dislike of touring, "the hardest-working touring act in the country". They released multiple albums and home videos and, depending upon the word of mouth of their audience, performed to increasingly large audiences in Australia and New Zealand despite having to re-introduce themselves to a new audience of children approximately every three years. They produced a new album and video each year and toured to promote them. By late 1993, they "grew bigger than anyone had thought", and hundreds attended their concerts; by 1995 they had set records for music and video sales. In 1997, Twentieth Century Fox produced a feature-length film, The Wiggles Movie, which became the fifth-highest grossing Australian film of 1998, earning over a million-and-a-half dollars. In spite of their early success in Australia, Paul Field reported that the band was unable to produce a television program on the ABC, where they felt they would receive the most exposure to the pre-school market. "Around 1996–1997", they filmed a television pilot for the ABC, but as The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 2002, "the project never got off the ground due to irreconcilable artistic differences". As a result, the Wiggles financed a TV program of 13 episodes themselves and sold it to Disney Channel in Australia and to Channel Seven, where it became a hit. By 1998, the Wiggles were ready to move on to international markets, despite its members' health issues, especially Anthony Field's. The reaction of producers in the UK was less positive than the group would have liked, although they were eventually able to make inroads there, but their real success came in the US. Disney arranged for them to perform at Disneyland in California, where they were discovered by Lyrick Studios, the producers of Barney & Friends. Both Anthony and Paul Field reported that Lyrick, despite their initial misgivings about whether American audiences would accept the band's Australian accents, came to understand the Wiggles and their goals, and after successful tests with American children, enthusiastically promoted them. The Wiggles used many of the same promotion techniques in the US that they had used in Australia, and chose to keep their concerts simple and maintain the same values that were successful in Australia. The Wiggles performed during the intermission of Barney Live stage shows, which The New York Times likened to "getting the warm-up slot for the Stones" in the pre-school entertainment world. In 2000, when video sales took off in the US, Lyrick began to distribute Wiggles videos and advertised them by including Wiggles shorts as trailers in their Barney videos, which, as Anthony Field stated, "pushed us over the edge". At first, the group's videos were distributed in boutique stores such as FAO Schwarz and Zany Brainy, and on-line. According to Paul Field, they entered the mass media market when their videos became top-sellers at Amazon.com, and their first two videos, Yummy Yummy and Wiggle Time, landed in the top ten at Amazon.com. Stores such as Wal-Mart began to take notice, and began to sell Wiggles videos. The band released nine DVDs in the next three years to keep up with the demand. As they had done in Australia, the Wiggles chose to tour, but start off small, with simple props and sets instead of hiring a touring company. Some of their first appearances in America were at Blockbuster Video parking lots in 1999 to small audiences—as Fatt said, "a dozen people". They performed at small venues such as church halls and 500-seat theatres in Brooklyn and New Jersey, and upgraded to larger venues as ticket sales increased. Anthony Field reported that one week they would perform to 8,000 in Sydney and to 20 people the following week at a parking lot in a small town in the US. One time, they performed for a dozen people at the Mall of America in Minnesota, but half of the audience were hired by Lyrick. Eventually, they moved to larger arenas such as the Beacon Theatre and Madison Square Garden. They performed at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, for six weeks. Their audiences began to increase, and they toured Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the US, and the UK. The Wiggles' popularity in the US increased "in the shell-shocked weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York City in 2001", when the group performed there, even when other acts cancelled their tours, a decision that earned them loyalty and respect. According to Cook, the press proclaimed that they were braver than many Australian sports teams that had cancelled their appearances. Paul Field stated, "New York has really embraced them. It was a kind of watershed." Strong sales of the Wiggles videos eventually caught the attention of Disney Channel in the US, who was impressed by their "strong pro-social message". In January 2002, Disney began showing Wiggles video clips between their programs. By June of that year, the popularity of the clips prompted Disney Channel to add both of the Wiggles' television series to their schedule and showed full episodes multiple times per day. Anthony Field reported that despite their "modest production values", the shows were popular with pre-schoolers. Beginning in 2002, the Wiggles filmed four series worth of television programs exclusively with the ABC. The network called them "the most successful property that the ABC has represented in the pre-school genre". By the end of 2002, according to Field, "we knew we were involved in something extraordinary in the US". Their concert schedule in North America doubled, seemingly overnight; they began performing up to 520 shows per year all over the world. They also began to produce other stage shows in places the Wiggles themselves were unable to visit, in Australia, the UK, and US, that featured their characters, a host, and a few dancers. The Age called this time period (about the mid-2000s) the group's "high point"; they earned A\$45 million a year in revenues, and had several licensing deals and an international distribution agreement with Disney. Despite their success, Anthony Field almost left the group in 2004, shortly after his marriage and the birth of his first child, due to his serious medical issues, which were worsened by the Wiggles' demanding tour schedule. After meeting chiropractor James Stoxen in Chicago, Field improved his health to the point that he was able to continue. He began to hire teams of chiropractors for himself, his fellow bandmembers, and cast members in every city they performed, which he credited with making it possible for them to fulfill their touring requirements. ### 2005–2006: Page's retirement In December 2005, lead singer Page, at age 33, underwent a double hernia operation. He withdrew from the Wiggles' US tour in August 2006, after suffering fainting spells, lethargy, nausea, and loss of balance. He returned to Australia, where doctors diagnosed his condition as orthostatic intolerance, a chronic but not life-threatening condition. Page's final performance with the Wiggles was in Kingston, Rhode Island. On 30 November 2006, the Wiggles announced Page's retirement from the group. In a video message posted on the group's web page, Page said: "I'll miss being a part of the Wiggles very much, but this is the right decision because it will allow me to focus on managing my health." The Sydney Morning Herald called it "unsettling". Page was replaced by Sam Moran, who had served as an understudy for the Wiggles for five years and had already stood in for Page for 150 shows. Initially, the Wiggles struggled over their decision to replace Page, but after their audience's positive response to Moran, they decided to continue as a group because they thought that was what their young audience would want. According to Fatt, who called it "a huge decision" and "a teachable moment" for them, they chose to be honest with their young audience as they made the transition from Page to Moran. As part owner of the Wiggles, Page received a payout of about \$20 million. ### 2006–2012: Moran era Although Moran's transition as the Wiggles' lead singer was "smooth" for the young children of their audience, it was more difficult for their parents. Moran said that "most children understood". Field reported that by the group's 20th anniversary in 2011, due to the ever-changing nature of their audience, most of their young fans were unfamiliar with Page. Cook stated that Moran's transition was challenging for the group because replacing their lead singer "changed their sound". Fatt characterised Moran's singing style as more operatic, so they chose different keys to sing and perform. The Wiggles never publicly disclosed how much Moran was paid, but it was reported that he earned \$200,000 per year. Moran was featured in his first album and video as a member of the group in early 2007, and a new series of the Wiggles' television program featuring Moran was filmed and began airing in Australia. At the end of 2007, the Wiggles donated their complete back catalogue of 27 master tapes to Australia's National Film and Sound Archive. Their business ventures during these years included opening up "Wiggles World" sections in theme parks in North America and the Arab World, internet offerings, the creation of new television shows, and a five-year-long partnership with the American television network Sprout in 2009. In December 2010, Cinemalive beamed a Wiggles concert live from Acer Arena into movie theatres all over Australia, for children and their families unable to attend their shows. In early July 2011, Fatt developed arrhythmia and underwent "urgent but routine" heart surgery, when he was fitted with a pacemaker after feeling unwell for several weeks and blacking out. He missed the group's US tour as a result, after not missing a show in 20 years. Also in mid-2011, the Wiggles celebrated their 20th anniversary with circus-themed shows and performances throughout Australia and the outback in a circus tent, as well as a "physically grueling" birthday-themed tour of 90 shows throughout Australia, which Paul Field called "one of the biggest of their careers". Sydney's Powerhouse Museum commemorated the group's anniversary with an exhibit that displayed Wiggles memorabilia. In 2011, the worldwide financial crisis hit the group, and they recorded their first drop in revenues in 10 years, at approximately \$2.5 million, a total decrease of 28 percent. Royalties partially offset the difference between their 2010 and 2011 revenues. Their managing director Mike Conway called 2011 their toughest year financially. For the first time, they had negative equity, with more liabilities than assets, and the owners had to provide the funds for them to continue operations. Conway stated that their losses were due to less touring time in the US, difficulties in placing their DVDs in Walmart, and their required investment in a new digital platform. ### 2012: Reunion with Page and departure of Cook, Fatt and Page In January 2012, and amidst a great deal of controversy, the Wiggles announced that Page had regained his health and was returning to the group in the place of Moran. He returned as an employee "exactly on the same level as [Moran]", rather than a co-owner, having relinquished his business interest in the group after he left in 2006. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the band members' interest in Page's return was sparked when they reunited during the group's induction in the ARIA Hall of Fame in November 2011. It was originally planned for Page to remain with the group temporarily until August 2012. Business Review Weekly reported that the presentation of Moran's departure had been mishandled and had potentially damaged their brand image. Paul Field agreed, stating that they "could have handled the communication and management of the transition better". Cook later admitted that they were shocked by the backlash in the press and among the parents of their audience. As part of his severance package, Moran continued to collect song royalties and was granted use of the Wiggles' studios. In mid-2012, the Wiggles announced that Cook, Fatt and Page would be retiring from touring with the group; Emma Watkins, the first female member of the Wiggles, replaced Page, Lachlan Gillespie replaced Fatt, and Simon Pryce replaced Cook. Anthony Field remained in the group because he found it too difficult to give up and because he still had a passion for educating children. According to Paul Field, staying in the band "was a vital decision to placate American, British and Canadian business partners". Cook, Fatt and Page remained involved with the creative and production aspects of the group. Fatt and Cook had been talking about quitting touring for many years; Cook announced his intention to retire first, citing a desire to spend more time with his family, and then Fatt announced his own retirement shortly thereafter. Page, who was still struggling with his health issues and had stated that his interest was in working with the group's original line-up, was subsequently asked to extend his stay until the end of the year so he would leave alongside Cook and Fatt, to which he agreed. Cook reported that the original members were confident that the new group would be accepted by the fans because they passed on their founding concepts of early childhood education to Gillespie, Pryce and Watkins. The new members, like Moran (who was not approached to return), were salaried employees. Watkins had previously worked with the group, first performing character roles in 2010, when Anthony Field approached her to join the main line-up. He had initially asked her to tour with the group after being impressed by a behind-the-scenes video she had filmed. Once she had joined the group, Field asked Watkins to dye her hair red, as well as learn how to play the drums. Gillespie had joined the company performing as part of the live shows in 2009, while Pryce had previously worked as a backing vocalist on some of the band's albums. The group, for their farewell tour, visited eight countries and 141 cities, for a total of almost 250 shows in over 200 days for 640,000 people. Gillespie, Pryce and Watkins wore "in training" T-shirts, and debuted the song "Do the Propeller" during these concerts. The final televised performance of the original band members, along with the new members, was on 22 December 2012, during the annual Carols in the Domain in Sydney. Their final performance, after over 7000 shows over the years, was on 23 December at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. Also by 2012, the Wiggles performed to audiences whose parents attended their shows in their early years, and they were hiring performers who were part of their audience as young children. ### 2013–2021: "New Wiggles" era The new iteration of the Wiggles, with Field and its new members, began touring in early 2013. Cook became the group's road manager in mid-2013. Pryce reported that since the Wiggles' audience changed every few years, the transition to the new group was easier for their young audience than it was for their parents. One of their challenges, especially for their early tours, was learning the Wiggles' catalogue of 1400 songs. After a seven-year absence from Australian television, they filmed a new television series, called Ready, Steady, Wiggle!, in their spare time at their studio in Sydney between tours and on the road. Watkins, who had a film-making degree, played an important role in its production. Field admitted that they found it "hard going" until they returned to television. Merchandise featuring the original group outsold the new group's products, and they failed to sell-out their concerts. By 2014, however, the Wiggles found success with their new line-up, when they doubled their concert ticket sales from the year before, and won the 2014 ARIA Award for Best Children's Album with Apples & Bananas. In 2015, Paul Field called the new group "an amazing success". According to Kathy McCabe of News Corp Australia, it took 18 months for the new group to be accepted by their audience. In 2014, it was announced that the Wiggles would produce their second feature film; comedian Ben Elton was slated to write the script and co-write the soundtrack. McCabe credited their success to Watkins, who became the group's stand-out member. According to Field, an American journalist called her young fans, who came to concerts dressed in yellow and wearing bows like her, the "mini Emma army". She was so popular that a new television series, Emma!, featuring Watkins as a solo performer, was produced in 2015. Anthony Field compared Watkins to Elvis Presley, while Paul Field called her "an aspirational role model" for their young audience and reported that she had increased their fan base of girls. Up to 80% of the audience at concerts would emulate her costuming and wear yellow; by 2021 it was estimated that 50% of the group's merchandising was specific to the "Emma" brand. In early 2015, Gillespie and Watkins revealed that they had been dating for two years; they announced their engagement in May 2015. They were married in April 2016, but made public their separation in August 2018. At first, the members of the new group were salaried employees, but in 2020, Peter Ker of The Australian Financial Review reported that Watkins and Gillespie had each acquired approximately 8% of the company and were given directorships in June 2018; Pryce was the only member who did not have equity in the business. Ker also reported that Anthony Field owned 36%, while Fatt and Cook each owned 24% of the business. A new costumed character, Shirley Shawn the Unicorn, was added in 2019, who was later revealed to identify as non-binary. The COVID-19 pandemic halted the group's capacity to tour in 2020, which led to a downsizing of the company's staff and an increase in filming online content. Throughout the new members era, the original line-up engaged in occasional reunion performances. In February 2016, the original group members performed a charity concert for an over-18 audience at the Dee Why RSL club in Sydney. The original line-up performed reunion charity concerts on 17 and 18 January 2020 to raise funds for the Australian bush fires with proceeds going to the Australian Red Cross and the WIRES Wildlife Rescue Service. Onstage on 17 January, Page suffered a cardiac arrest; he stopped breathing and required CPR and three jolts from a defibrillator. Page was discharged from hospital the following week. In March 2021, the Wiggles performed on Triple J's Like a Version segment. Cook and Fatt returned alongside Field, Gillespie, Pryce and Watkins to cover Tame Impala's "Elephant" which they interspersed with "Fruit Salad"; the cover reached No. 1 on the annual Triple J Hottest 100 poll for 2021. This was the first cover to top the chart, as well as the first time a children's act had led the ranking. ### 2021–present: Expanded line-up The Wiggles commemorated their 30th anniversary in January 2021 with a song entitled "We're All Fruit Salad!", containing lyrics centred around unity and acceptance, and featuring guest performers of different cultural backgrounds, after Field expressed a desire to include more diversity in the band. In August 2021, four new members were added to the Wiggles in a supporting capacity, with the aim of embracing cultural and gender diversity, and better reflecting contemporary society. Evie Ferris, Kelly Hamilton, Tsehay Hawkins and John Pearce debuted in an exclusive web series entitled Fruit Salad TV, made available on YouTube in September. Watkins announced her departure from the group in October 2021 and was replaced by Hawkins in the primary line-up; she became the band's first woman of colour. The expanded line-up made their live performance debut as the pre-match entertainment of an Australia women's national soccer team game in November, followed by a national Australian concert tour in early 2022. Caterina Mete, the long-standing choreographer for the Wiggles, joined the group as a supporting member at the commencement of the tour. Field's daughter, Lucia Field, debuted as a supporting member in July, wearing blue like her father. The group made their first appearance on the cover of the Australian edition of Rolling Stone magazine in September, before making history as the first band in Australia to perform two arena tours in one year. A new instalment of the Ready, Steady, Wiggle! television series, the first to feature the expanded line-up, premiered in March 2023. The original line-up continued to perform occasionally during this period. Cook, Fatt, Anthony Field and Page performed an adults-only reunion tour at arenas around Australia in early 2022. They also made contributions to the 2022 tribute album ReWiggled, which debuted at number one on the ARIA Albums Chart and became the group's first number-one album in Australia. ReWiggled was named Best Children's Album at the 2022 ARIA Awards, where the Wiggles were presented with the award for Best Australian Live Act, for their dual tour featuring the group's regular and original members. The original quartet also performed at Falls Festival across Australia in late 2022 and early 2023. ## Members Current members - Anthony Field – Blue Wiggle (1991–present) - Lachlan Gillespie – Purple Wiggle (2013–present) - Simon Pryce – Red Wiggle (2013–present) - Tsehay Hawkins – Yellow Wiggle (2021–present), Red Wiggle (2021; supporting) Current supporting members - Evie Ferris – Yellow Wiggle (2022–present), Blue Wiggle (2021–2022) - John Pearce – Purple Wiggle (2021–present) - Caterina Mete – Red Wiggle (2022–present) - Lucia Field – Blue Wiggle (2022–present) Former members - Murray Cook – Red Wiggle (1991–2012) - Jeff Fatt – Purple Wiggle (1991–2012) - Greg Page – Yellow Wiggle (1991–2006, 2012) - Phillip Wilcher (1991–1992) - Sam Moran – Yellow Wiggle (2006–2012) - Emma Watkins – Yellow Wiggle (2013–2021) Former supporting members - Kelly Hamilton – Yellow Wiggle (2021–2022) ## Musical style The Wiggles have written new music each year since their inception; they sequestered themselves for a month each summer and wrote three albums' worth of original children's music based on simple concepts familiar to young children, and using several genres of music and types of instruments. Most of their songs were short and started with the chorus because they felt that young children needed to be presented with a song's topic in their first few lines. They wrote songs individually at first, but eventually wrote as a group, often with John Field, trumpet player Dominic Lindsay, and Paddick. Fatt, the only member of the original group without a degree in early childhood education, tended to focus on composing music. Fatt told reporter Brian McElhiney, who called the group's songwriting process "a collaborate affair", that they wrote repetitive pop songs or jingles, which were appealing to children. Watkins reported that she was invited to write songs for their albums, even though she was primarily a dancer. John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, who appeared in a Wiggles video in 2002, told The New York Times that he was "very impressed" with the group's songwriting, especially with their drum sound. According to Anthony Field, the transition from writing music for an adult rock band to writing children's music was not a big one for the Wiggles. He explained that the music of the Cockroaches and the Wiggles was similar, but just featuring different subject matter in the lyrics. Moran stated that the Wiggles wrote songs they liked and would listen to, and then made them appropriate for children. They approached simple and relocatable topics, such as food and nutrition, as teachers would in a pre-school setting, with simple melodies that were easy for children to sing and remember. The group sang the same 60s-style pop as the Cockroaches, but with different lyrics, although they were not confined to songs about love and could write about anything that interested and excited young children, which was limitless. The music they chose to write and perform was influenced by nursery rhymes, folk music, and rock songs of the 1950s and 1960s. Page reported, "First and foremost, we're entertainers". The Wiggles captured the interest of children by first entertaining them, and then by presenting them with educational messages. The group wrote and performed children's music that was different from what had been done previously; as Cook stated, "we didn't just go down the route of what people think is kids' music". They were not tied to one style or genre of music and often experimented in the studio; while some of their recordings were orchestral, others had a more live feel. The group were aware that their songs were often children's first exposure to music. Guitar Magazine speculated that since Cook was one of the first guitarists children were exposed to, he may be the most influential guitarist in the world. Cook was conscious that he was probably the first guitarist children would see and appreciated the opportunity to inspire children to learn to play guitar later. In 2013, after Cook retired from touring with the group and became their touring manager, he reported that newer bands like Regular John approached him and said that the Wiggles were the first band "they got into". ## Educational theory The Wiggles' songwriting and performances were rooted in their professional training as pre-school teachers and in the concepts of early childhood education. Field reported, as he studied music for young children at university, being "shocked ... at the non-inclusive way music for children was usually performed". According to Field, children had to sit silently as musicians played "traditional songs often featuring negative or outdated lyrics and dealing with subject matter of no interest to small children". The lack of songs with themes and topics that interested children inspired Field to record the Wiggles' first album. The group's "golden rule", according to Field, was to make the content of their songs and shows "developmentally appropriate and fun". Their music, stage shows, and television and DVD productions were developed, as The New York Times reported, "from the premise that a young child has a short attention span, is curious about a limited number of objects and activities, loves having a job to do and is thrilled by mastering basic movements". They also respected their audience's intelligence and insight about entertainment, information and honesty. As Field said, "Young children identify with relevant concepts, and enjoy being entertained and being part of the entertainment. They are willing to commit to interacting if you are direct, inclusive, and positive". The group understood that challenging young children to engage in difficult tasks is more effective than simply telling them to do it. They believed that young children were egocentric, so they stared continually into the camera in their videos and TV shows, and explained every action because they believed that young children needed to be told what to expect so that they do not feel left out and in order to feel safe. The Wiggles' stage shows are full of action and audience participation. By the group's "New Wiggles" iteration, they featured inside jokes for the adult members of their audience and the bandmembers tended to wander throughout the audience. Pryce, as an experienced stage performer, was conscious that their shows were the first live theater young children experienced; as a result, the group adapted the content of their shows to accommodate their audience's development and understanding. Paddick's role as Captain Feathersword became more important in the mid-1990s, especially in the group's stage shows, when he was able to incorporate his circus and opera training, as well as impersonations that were popular with their audience's parents. They believed in empowering children by practices such as greeting their audience members with "Hello, everyone", instead of "Hello, boys and girls" which, as Paul Field explains, "unnecessarily separates children and has undertones of condescension". Kathleen Warren, the band members' former professor at Macquarie University, believed that the group's practice of asking their audience to "Wake Up Jeff" when Fatt pretended to fall asleep was "very much in keeping with the way they work with children". Warren stated that asking children to interrupt Fatt's slumber helped them build confidence and to feel more in control of their lives. Fatt was the only original member of the Wiggles without a background in early childhood education; he explained that was the reason falling asleep was chosen as his gimmick and that "it was a way of getting me involved in the shows without actually having to do anything". Paul Field reported that children in the Wiggles' audience felt "great excitement" and were disappointed if not given the opportunity to help Jeff in this way. Anthony Field, who called it "a simple audience participation and interaction gag we've done since the start of the group", claimed that it endeared Fatt to their audiences. The group's members took turns falling asleep in the early days of the group, but it became Fatt's gimmick because "it was a perfect fit". When Fatt retired, Gillespie took over the task of falling asleep. Simple movements were developed by their choreographers, including Leeanne Ashley, to accompany each song because, as The New York Times reported, they believed "in the power of basic movements to enchant young children". According to reporter Anders Wright, they intentionally made mistakes in their dance moves in order to identify more with their young audience. The group incorporated more dancing into their performances after the birth of Field's oldest daughter in 2004. In later years, corresponding with Field's developing interests in acrobatics and gymnastics, they added these elements to their stage shows, including, as Field reported, hiring several world-class athletes such as former trampoline champion Karl Shore. Watkins, whom Paul Field called "a dancer of many disciplines", was initially hired as a member of their troupe and referred to herself as "mainly a dancer". Between 1999 and 2003, to test the group's appeal across cultures, Warren used one of the Wiggles' CDs as an educational tool in a village near Madang, on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. She found that the Madangese children were able to relate to the group's songs, and that they were able to sing along and participate in their simple choreography. Although the Wiggles' recorded and performed songs, dances, and musical styles from different cultures and languages, the Wiggles did not find that adapting their music to non-Australian cultures was necessary to reach children in other countries. The Wiggles recognised that as long as they spoke at the same level as their audience, their Australian accents would not matter, and that young children were able to adapt to a variety of contexts and to different pronunciations of common words, no matter where they resided. ## Brand and finances Throughout the group's history, the members and management have retained full creative control and ownership of every aspect of their business in an effort to remain as independent as possible. As Field stated, the band's corporation was "not your regular 'corporate culture'. The group does not have a chief executive, instead making decisions through consensus and made business decisions based upon their experience as performers and their knowledge of early childhood education. Endorsements of toys and other products are made carefully and only with products that correlated with their image. There are high expectations regarding the behaviour and attitude of everyone associated with the group, although in 2021, Watkins denied the existence of "a Wiggles code-of-conduct manual hidden away somewhere". Other ventures of band's corporation included franchising their concept to Africa, South America, and Taiwan. The group also licensed "Wiggles World" sections to various theme parks in the United States and Australia, as well as play centres in both regions. The Wiggles became formally consolidated in 2005. The group's board of directors consisted of the original three members, as well as Paul Field, who had been the manager of the group since the mid-1990s, and Mike Conway, who had worked for Ernst & Young in England and became a co-manager in 2001. It was reported that as part owner of the Wiggles, Page was given a A\$20 million payout when he left the group in 2006; he officially ceased to be a company shareholder in 2008. After their retirement in 2012, Cook and Fatt, as well as Anthony Field, each retained 30% ownership of the brand, and Paul Field and Conway each owned 5%. Gillespie, Pryce and Watkins were reported to be salaried employees when they joined the group in 2012. Paul Field departed as the company's general manager in March 2020, in the midst of a period of "organisational change". It was reported through corporate filings that Watkins and Gillespie each acquired approximately 8% ownership of the business as well as company directorships in June 2018, while Pryce had not gained equity of the group. At the time of reporting, it was suggested that Anthony Field owned 36% of the brand, becoming the majority shareholder, while Fatt and Cook each owned 24%. By 2021, it was estimated that the group earned A\$30 million per year. ## Reception The Wiggles have enjoyed "almost universal approval" throughout their history. Their songs have been sung and played in pre-schools around the world. Between 2000 and 2010, the Wiggles earned 21 Gold records. The group's albums have been certified by ARIA as double Platinum, Platinum and Gold in Australia, as well as certified Gold in the US. They original group performed, on average, to one million people per year. The Wiggles' music has also received over one billion streams on digital services. In 2014, The Sydney Morning Herald called their shows slick and fast-paced. After 2003, front-row tickets to their sold-out concerts in the US were scalped for US\$500. The group responded by reducing the number of seats sold per transaction, in order to keep prices down and avoid further tickets scalping. In 2008, the group found themselves in the midst of what The Daily Telegraph called a "ticketing scandal"; scalpers tried to sell an A\$19 ticket on eBay for almost A\$2,000 and a set of three tickets for A\$315 for concerts in Melbourne, and a group of three tickets to a Wiggles UNICEF charity concert in Sydney had a price tag of A\$510. The tickets were taken off eBay and voided. In what Paul Field called "one of the highlights of their 15 years of being together", The Wiggles were awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Australian Catholic University in 2006. Cook gave an address during the private ceremony honouring them. They were awarded another honorary doctoral degree in 2009 from their alma mater, Macquarie University. The group were named UNICEF goodwill ambassadors in 2008; they held a special concert to raise money for the organisation. In 2010, the four original members of the Wiggles were appointed Members of the Order of Australia for their service to the arts in Australia, especially children's entertainment, and for their contributions and support of several charities. They called the honour their "biggest recognition yet". The group has always invited children with special needs and their families to pre-concert "meet and greet" sessions. According to Fatt, many parents of these children have reported that the Wiggles' music has enhanced their lives, and that children with autism "respond to [the] Wiggles and nothing else". The Wiggles, throughout their history, have visited and performed for patients at the Sydney Children's Hospital every Christmas morning. ## Discography Studio albums - The Wiggles (1991) - Here Comes a Song (1992) - Stories and Songs: The Adventures of Captain Feathersword the Friendly Pirate (1993) - Yummy Yummy (1994) - Big Red Car (1995) - Wake Up Jeff! (1996) - Wiggly, Wiggly Christmas (1996) - The Wiggles Movie Soundtrack (1997) - Toot, Toot! (1998) - It's a Wiggly Wiggly World (2000) - Wiggle Time! (2000) - Yule Be Wiggling (2000) - Hoop Dee Doo: It's a Wiggly Party (2001) - Wiggly Safari (2002) - Wiggle Bay (2002) - Go to Sleep Jeff! (2003) - Whoo Hoo! Wiggly Gremlins! (2003) - Top of the Tots (2003) - Cold Spaghetti Western (2004) - Santa's Rockin'! (2004) - Sailing Around the World (2005) - Here Comes the Big Red Car (2006) - It's Time to Wake Up Jeff! (2006) - Splish Splash Big Red Boat (2006) - Racing to the Rainbow (2006) - Getting Strong! (2007) - Pop Go the Wiggles! (2007) - You Make Me Feel Like Dancing (2008) - Sing a Song of Wiggles (2008) - Go Bananas! (2009) - Hot Poppin' Popcorn (2009) - Let's Eat (2010) - Ukulele Baby! (2011) - It's Always Christmas with You! (2011) - Surfer Jeff (2012) - Taking Off! (2013) - Furry Tales (2013) - Pumpkin Face (2013) - Go Santa Go! (2013) - Apples & Bananas (2014) - Wiggle House (2014) - Rock & Roll Preschool (2015) - Meet the Orchestra! (2015) - Wiggle Town! (2016) - Carnival of the Animals (2016) - Dance Dance! (2016) - Nursery Rhymes (2017) - Duets (2017) - Wiggly, Wiggly Christmas! (2017) - Nursery Rhymes 2 (2018) - Wiggle Pop! (2018) - Big Ballet Day! (2019) - Party Time! (2019) - Fun and Games (2020) - Choo Choo Trains, Propeller Planes & Toot Toot Chugga Chugga Big Red Car! (2020) - Lullabies with Love (2021) - Halloween Party (2021) - Super Wiggles (2022) - Ready, Steady, Wiggle! (2023) ## Awards and nominations
33,021,243	Giovanni Antonio Grassi	1,166,085,052	Italian Jesuit missionary, educator, and superior	[ "1775 births", "1849 deaths", "19th-century American Jesuits", "19th-century Italian Jesuits", "19th-century Italian astronomers", "Deans and Prefects of Studies of the Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences", "Italian emigrants to the United States", "Jesuit College in Polotsk alumni", "Jesuit provincial superiors", "Jesuit scientists", "People from Schilpario", "Presidents of Georgetown University", "Provincial superiors of the Jesuit Maryland Province", "Rectors of the Pontificio Collegio Urbano de Propaganda Fide" ]	Giovanni Antonio Grassi SJ (anglicized as John Anthony Grassi; 10 September 1775 – 12 December 1849) was an Italian Catholic priest and Jesuit who led many academic and religious institutions in Europe and the United States, including Georgetown College in Washington, D.C., and the Pontificio Collegio Urbano de Propaganda Fide in Rome. Born in the Republic of Venice, Grassi was a promising student of mathematics and the natural sciences, especially astronomy. He completed his studies at the Jesuit College in Polotsk, in the Russian Empire, in 1804 and was appointed rector of the Institute for Nobles. The following year, he was ordered to replace the last remaining Jesuit missionary in China; this began a five-year journey across Europe in which he was ultimately unable to secure passage to the distant country. He instead began teaching at Stonyhurst College in England. Grassi was sent to the United States in 1810, where he became the superior of the Jesuits' Maryland Mission and the president of Georgetown College. For significantly improving its curriculum and public reputation, as well as obtaining its congressional charter, Grassi became known as Georgetown's "second founder". He returned to Rome in 1817 as Archbishop Leonard Neale's representative before the Congregation de Propaganda Fide. He later became the rector of the College of the Holy Martyrs in Turin and provincial superior of the Jesuits' Turin Province. Grassi became a close confidant of King Charles Felix of Sardinia and spent time in Naples as confessor to Charles Felix's widow, Queen Maria Cristina. He also intervened on behalf of Charles Albert to allow him to succeed Charles Felix on the throne. In 1835, Grassi moved to Rome as the rector of the Pontificio Collegio Urbano de Propaganda Fide, a school for missionaries, and was later named the Jesuit Superior General's assistant for Italy. ## Early life and education Giovanni Antonio Grassi was born on 10 September 1775 in Schilpario, Lombardy, in the Republic of Venice. He studied under the Somaschi Fathers, before going to the diocesan seminary of Bergamo, where he studied theology for two years and was ordained a priest. On 16 November 1799, Grassi entered the Society of Jesus, which had been officially suppressed by the pope since 1773. He proceeded to the Jesuit novitiate in Colorno, on 21 November 1799, becoming one of the novitiate's first students. Due to the nearly worldwide suppression of the Jesuit order, the novices at Colorno were allowed only to pronounce their simple vows. Because Empress Catherine the Great had declined to suppress the Jesuits, the order fled Western Europe and survived in the Russian Empire, and Polotsk (in present-day Belarus) became the order's center. Grassi went to the Jesuit College in Polotsk in 1801 to complete his priestly education, while the master of novices of the Colorno novitiate, Joseph Pignatelli, assured him that he would eventually return to Italy. Grassi was an excellent student in the natural sciences, and he completed his theological studies at the college in Polotsk in 1804. He then became the rector of the college's Institute for Nobles and a teacher of higher mathematics. ### European voyage Upon completing his education, Grassi began preparing for an assignment to minister to Armenians in Astrakhan, and was studying Armenian. He and two others were then summoned to Saint Petersburg by Gabriel Gruber, the Jesuit Superior General. On their arrival on 19 January 1805, Gruber informed them that they would be sent to Peking to replace the one remaining Jesuit missionary in China, Louis Antoine de Poirot. The Superior General determined that it would be preferable for the missionaries to travel by sea, rather than overland with a departing Russian delegation. The General outfitted them with new vestments and chalices for celebrating Mass, mathematical and scientific instruments, medicines, furs for the winter, and gifts for the people. The trio departed by sled for Sweden, intending to go to London, where the Superior General had arranged for a ship to take them to Canton. Shortly after departing, Grassi and two others fell ill and were attended by a doctor for ten days in a small town on the Russian–Swedish border. They eventually reached Stockholm, Sweden, on 22 March 1805, where the Russian minister to Sweden informed them that the British would not permit them to sail from London. Therefore, the party instead went to Copenhagen, but discovered that there were no ships that could take them to Canton, and spent a month in Copenhagen waiting for the next ship to take them to London. The party reached London on 25 May, but found no ships that would take them to China. Lord George Macartney, the former British ambassador to China, failed to convince the directors of the East India Company to allow the Jesuits to travel on their vessels. The party set sail for Lisbon, Portugal, where they hoped to secure passage to Macau. Their journey was delayed by a stop in Cork, Ireland, and they eventually arrived in Lisbon on 28 September 1805. The apostolic nuncio to Portugal informed them that due to the Portuguese persecution of the Jesuits under the Marquis of Pombal, they would not be permitted to board a Portuguese vessel without written approval from the pope. Meanwhile, Grassi studied astronomy under Count Damoiseau de Montfort. In March 1806, the three were informed that the Congregation de Propaganda Fide in Rome had become uneasy about their mission to China. Realizing that they would be in Portugal for considerably longer, the party began studying at the University of Coimbra for two months. Grassi also started tutoring the eldest son of Count Arcos in mathematics. Due to an escalation of the persecution of Christians in China, the Superior General decided that he would no longer permit their mission. On 23 September 1807, he ordered them to go to Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, England, and await further instruction. Their vessel had to circumvent the French fleet invading Portugal, causing it to run out of food and almost run out of water. They finally reached Liverpool and then Stonyhurst College on 21 December 1807. At the college, Grassi taught Italian and Latin, while studying calculus and astronomy. He also studied mathematics and astronomy at the Royal Institution in London. ## American missionary In 1810, Gruber's successor as Superior General, Tadeusz Brzozowski, ordered Grassi to go to the United States. Grassi set sail from Liverpool on 27 August, and landed in Baltimore, Maryland, on 20 October. He met with John Carroll, the Archbishop of Baltimore, and proceeded to Georgetown College in Washington, D.C. He found Baltimore "completely deserted," contrary to what a map of the city suggested; Washington was an even greater contrast to the cities of Europe he was used to, describing it as "not even one-eighth ...built up" and the Capitol unfinished. He also discovered the country was largely hostile to Catholics and especially wary of the Jesuits. Grassi applied for American citizenship immediately upon arriving, and would become a naturalized citizen on 27 December 1815. When Grassi arrived at Georgetown, he found the college in a state of severe mismanagement. Its enrollment had dropped precipitously, tuition was prohibitively expensive, the size of the faculty was inadequate. The college was also operating on a significant financial deficit. In the preceding two decades, the school had had eight presidents, and there was a perennial debate about what the school's purpose should be. Bishop Carroll described Georgetown as having "sunk[en] to its lowest degree of discredit." In his first year, Grassi taught Italian and Spanish. On 12 August 1812, he attained the rank of gradus in the Society of Jesus, indicating that he had passed the examen ad gradum at the end of his Jesuit formation and had professed all four vows of the Jesuit order. ### Presidency of Georgetown College Grassi was appointed president of Georgetown College on 1 October 1812, succeeding Francis Neale. He was also appointed by the Superior General as the superior of the Jesuits' Maryland Mission, to succeed Charles Neale, Francis' brother. Due to the Napoleonic Wars, the letter of his appointment did not reach Washington until June, and he assumed office on 15 August. John Carroll informed Grassi that the Superior General did not have authority to appoint Grassi as president and rector, as Georgetown College was not owned by the Jesuit order itself but by the Corporation of Roman Catholic Clergymen; indeed, Grassi was the first president who had not been elected by the board of directors or appointed by Carroll. Nonetheless, Carroll did not oppose Grassi's assumption of leadership, and the board unanimously elected Grassi, but did not confer on him all the powers normally associated with the office. The following year, he went to St. Inigoes, Maryland, to complete his retreat before pronouncing his final vows, where he contracted a fever that lasted for a year. When Grassi assumed office, Georgetown was struggling financially, with just 31 students enrolled, and Carroll was considering closing the school. Grassi immediately instituted a significant reform of the faculty and curriculum, hiring talented faculty and firing those who were inferior. He also improved discipline among the students. The number of subjects taught at the college increased, and the number of enrolled students increased four-fold. During his presidency, he continued to teach algebra, mensuration, and arithmetic. He also instructed students in astronomy, using instruments he had brought from Stonyhurst. Grassi made by his own hand or had a Jesuit brother make wooden orreries (since the college did not have money to purchase brass ones) for displaying the motion of the planets, as well as other apparatuses to demonstrate principles of mechanics or hydraulics. He also established a museum, that housed these devices, among other items; this museum drew members of the public, including U.S. senators and representatives. Upon request, Grassi used these instruments to calculate the longitude of Washington, D.C., and the timing of eclipses. Grassi also oversaw Georgetown during the British burning of Washington in the War of 1812. He maintained good relations with the American political leaders and with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Andrey Yakovlevich Dashkov, who frequently visited the college. Though he opposed what he viewed as unbridled freedom in the United States, he approved that it was conducive to the free exercise of religion, which was banned by some of Europe's civil governments. He criticized slavery in the United States as being inconsistent with a national spirit of liberty, and considered it the country's greatest flaw, but wrote that the material conditions of some slaves were superior to those of Europe's peasantry, and regarded immediate, universal emancipation as too dangerous. He also wrote of how Black people were children of God and spoke positively of their faith. While he opposed slavery in the abstract, Grassi's appointment as superior of the Maryland Jesuits thrust him into a world in which slavery was accepted and quotidian. As superior, he was responsible for managing the slaves owned by the Maryland Jesuits. After the pope restored the Society of Jesus in 1814, Grassi negotiated a concordat with Carroll's successor, Archbishop Leonard Neale (a brother of Charles and Francis) regarding the division of parishes in the United States between the Jesuits and the secular clergy. He took advantage of the enrollment of the sons of various members of Congress at Georgetown to obtain, through the assistance of William Gaston (a Georgetown alumnus and the only Catholic member of Congress), a congressional charter for Georgetown College on 1 March 1815, which raised the institution to university status. In Archbishop Carroll's estimation, Grassi had "revived the College of G<sup>e</sup>-Town, which [had] received great improvement in the number of students and course of studies." For this, Grassi has been described as Georgetown's "second founder". With this great number of students came an increase in the religious and ethnic diversity of students, including more Protestant, French and Irish students. Overall, this led to an increase in the public reputation of Georgetown. His presidency ended on 28 June 1817, and he was succeeded by Benedict Joseph Fenwick. His term as superior of the Maryland Mission also ended, where he was replaced by Anthony Kohlmann on 10 September. ## Return to Europe ### Representative to the Propaganda Fide In July 1817, Archbishop Neale sent Grassi to Rome to persuade the Congregation de Propaganda Fide to reverse a previous order to reinstate several priests in Charleston, South Carolina, whom Neale had removed from ministry. Grassi would remain in Europe for the rest of his life, despite the calls of Peter Kenney, the visitor to the United States on behalf of the Superior General, to return Grassi to Georgetown. His removal from the United States was lamented by many of the church leaders, including one Bishop Benedict Joseph Flaget, who had proposed Grassi to become the Bishop of Detroit. Notwithstanding initial instructions to return to the United States, Grassi remained in Italy, as his physicians told him that he would not survive a voyage across the Atlantic due to a hernia. While in Rome, he successfully pleaded before the Propaganda Fide for the full canonical restoration of the Jesuit order in England. ### Provincial superior and royal confessor Grassi became the procurator (approximately equivalent to a treasurer) of the Jesuit province of Italy, as well as the socius (assistant) to the Jesuit provincial superior of Italy. On 17 November 1821, he became the rector of the College of Nobles in Turin, a position he held until 1831. During his rectorship, the school prospered and became the premier Jesuit boarding school on the Italian peninsula. While in Turin, he developed a relationship with the House of Savoy, and was appointed confessor to King Charles Felix and Queen Maria Cristina of Sardinia. As a result of his closeness with the royal family, King Charles Felix frequently sought Grassi's advice on several matters, and died in Grassi's arms. In March 1821, Charles Felix's cousin, Charles Albert, had encouraged a revolt against Charles Felix's predecessor and brother, Victor Emmanuel I, that had forced Victor Emmanuel to abdicate. When Charles Felix ascended to the throne, he quashed the revolt. He later discovered the role that Charles Albert played in instigating the plot and intended to remove him from the line of succession. Grassi persuaded Charles Felix not to take this action against Charles Albert. In thanks, when Charles Albert succeeded Charles Felix, he pledged to protect the Jesuits in his kingdom; this promise would later be broken when Charles Albert expelled the order from the Kingdom of Sardinia. On 10 May 1831, Grassi was appointed the first provincial superior of the newly created Jesuit Province of Turin as well as the rector of the College of the Holy Martyrs. During this time, he was permitted to continue serving as confessor to Maria Cristina, for a total of 25 years, even though it required that he reduce his duties as provincial. Eventually, he moved to Naples without first notifying the Superior General, and he became the rector of the San Sebastian boarding school. Grassi resumed his position at the College of the Holy Martyrs in 1832, but soon thereafter traveled with Maria Cristina to the Jesuit college in Chambéry. Wanting him to choose a permanent residence, the Superior General recalled Grassi in 1835. He returned to Naples as the confessor to Princess Maria Vittoria of Savoy. He remained in the city to undertake charitable work during the cholera pandemic of 1836. In 1840, Grassi became the rector of the Pontificio Collegio Urbano de Propaganda Fide, replacing Liberio Figari. He held this position for two years, and was succeeded by Giovanni Batta Dessi. He then served as the assistant to the Superior General for Italy from 1842 to 1849, and was the archivist of the Jesuit generalate house in Rome. His transfer to Rome was made despite strong protests from Filiberto Avogadro di Collobiano, a Sardinian senator, on the grounds that it would be cruel to Maria Cristina. Grassi also assisted in writing the biography of Joseph Pignatelli, his former novice master, and testified in 1842 during his cause for beatification. By virtue of his American citizenship, he was permitted to remain in Rome—as well as even wear his cassock in public and teach classes—during the revolution of 1848 and under the government of the Roman Republic in 1849. Grassi died on 12 December 1849 in the house of Cardinal Angelo Mai in Rome.
2,178,135	Operation Rösselsprung (1944)	1,171,107,050	German military operation	[ "1944 in Yugoslavia", "Aerial operations and battles of World War II involving the United Kingdom", "Articles containing video clips", "Battles involving the Independent State of Croatia", "Battles involving the Yugoslav Partisans", "Battles of World War II involving Chetniks", "Conflicts in 1944", "German World War II special forces", "Josip Broz Tito", "June 1944 events", "May 1944 events", "Military operations of World War II involving Germany", "Seven Enemy Offensives", "World War II raids", "Yugoslavia in World War II" ]	Operation Rösselsprung (German: Unternehmen Rösselsprung, lit. 'Knight's move') was a combined airborne and ground assault by the German XV Mountain Corps and collaborationist forces on the Supreme Headquarters of the Yugoslav Partisans in the Bosnian town of Drvar in the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. It was launched 25 May 1944, with the goal of capturing or killing Partisan leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito and destroying the headquarters, support facilities and co-located Allied military missions. It is associated with the Seventh Enemy Offensive (Serbo-Croatian: Sedma neprijateljska ofanziva) in Yugoslav history, forming part of the Seven Enemy Offensives historiographical framework. The airborne assault itself is also known as the Raid on Drvar (Serbo-Croatian: Desant na Drvar). Operation Rösselsprung was a coup de main operation, involving direct action by a combined parachute and glider-borne assault by the 500th SS Parachute Battalion and a planned subsequent link-up with ground forces of the XV Mountain Corps converging on Drvar. The airborne assault was preceded by heavy bombing of the town by the Luftwaffe. The ground forces included Home Guard forces of the Independent State of Croatia along with collaborationist Chetniks. Tito, his principal headquarters staff and the Allied military personnel escaped, despite their presence in Drvar at the time of the airborne assault. Fierce Partisan resistance in the town itself and along the approaches to Drvar contributed to the failure of the mission. Other factors included the German intelligence agencies refusing to share the limited information available on Tito's exact location, and the lack of contingency planning by the commander of the German airborne force. ## Background On 6 April 1941 the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia from multiple directions, rapidly overwhelming the under-prepared Royal Yugoslav Army which capitulated 11 days later. In the aftermath of the invasion Yugoslavia was partitioned between the Axis powers through a combination of annexations and occupation zones. An Axis puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia (Serbo-Croatian: Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) was established on the territory of modern-day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, controlled by the fascist and ultra-nationalist Ustaše. The NDH was divided by a German–Italian demarcation line, known as the "Vienna Line"; the Germans occupied the north and northeastern parts of the NDH, and the Italians the south and southwestern sections. The NDH immediately implemented genocidal policies against the Serb, Jewish and Romani population of the puppet state. Following the collapse of Yugoslavia, armed groups appeared, and in the territory of the NDH, while the predominantly Serb resistance to Ustaše rule was initially not strongly aligned with ideology, two principal groups soon established themselves, the communist-led Partisans and the Serb nationalist Chetniks. The Partisans were resolutely anti-Axis throughout the war, but the Chetniks extensively collaborated with Italian occupation forces garrisoned in the NDH from mid-1941, and also with the Germans, especially after the Italian capitulation in September 1943. The Axis Case White and Case Black offensives of the first six months of 1943 caused significant setbacks for the Partisans; however, in September the Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito took advantage of the capitulation of Italy and managed to increase the territory under his control and double his forces to around 200,000 men, arming them with captured Italian weapons. In late November, he held a National Congress at Jajce in a liberated area of the NDH, during which he was designated marshal of Yugoslavia and prime minister. He established his headquarters nearby at Drvar in the Dinaric Alps and temporarily suspended his successful tactic of being constantly on the move. Generalfeldmarschall Maximilian von Weichs, the Wehrmacht Commander-in-chief Southeast Europe, admitted a few weeks later that "Tito is our most dangerous enemy." Tito's personal headquarters was initially located in a cave below a ridgeline about 1 km (0.6 mi) north of the centre of Drvar. Below the cave ran the Unac River, creating an obstacle to movement between the town and the cave, and a rail line ran along the ridgeline above the cave. As well as Partisan headquarters, several Partisan and Communist Party support, training and youth organisations were based in and around Drvar at the time, along with the Tito Escort Battalion which was responsible for Tito's personal safety. The British and Soviet military missions to the Partisans were also stationed in villages close to Drvar, as were some United States military officers. The British mission was headed by Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, who was in London at the time of the raid, and included Major Randolph Churchill, son of Winston Churchill. At the time of Operation Rösselsprung (German: Unternehmen Rösselsprung), the British mission was led by its second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Vivian Street. ### Partisan dispositions around Drvar Apart from Partisan headquarters and related organisations in and around Drvar, there were between 12,000 and 16,000 Partisans in the area of operations that would be subject to the ground assault by XV Mountain Corps. Near Drvar were elements of the 1st Proletarian Corps commanded by Koča Popović; this corps consisted of the elite 1st Proletarian and 6th Lika Proletarian Divisions, the Corps headquarters being located in the village of Mokronoge, 6 km (3.7 mi) east of Drvar. Its subordinate formations were further away, the 6th Lika Proletarian Division west of Drvar, and the 1st Proletarian Division deployed in the area around Jajce and Mrkonjić Grad, some 50 km (31 mi) east of Drvar. The nearest large Partisan formation to Drvar was the 3rd Lika Proletarian Brigade of the 6th Lika Proletarian Division based in the Resanovci and Trubar villages some 10 km (6 mi) south and southwest of Drvar. In the wider area of operations were the Partisan 5th Corps commanded by Slavko Rodić and the 8th Corps commanded by Vlado Ćetković. The 5th Corps was deployed to the northeast and northwest of Drvar with its headquarters south of the Mrkonjić Grad–Ključ road, and the 8th Corps was positioned to the southeast with its headquarters in the mountains between the Glamoč and Livno valleys. Importantly for the coming battle, the 4th Krajina Division of the 5th Corps was deployed between Bihać and Bosanski Petrovac. Two brigades of the 4th Krajina Division and one brigade from the 39th Krajina Division formed a defensive arc north of Drvar, running from Bihać through Krupa to Sanski Most. The 9th Dalmatian Division of the 8th Corps was deployed to the south between Livno and Bosansko Grahovo. ### German intelligence Three German intelligence organisations attempted to determine the location of Tito's headquarters and the disposition of Partisan forces in Drvar. The first of these was the Benesch Special Unit of Section II of the Abwehr (the Wehrmacht intelligence service), some members of which had been involved in identifying Tito's presence in the town of Jajce prior to the German offensive to retake the town. The Benesch Special Unit was part of the Brandenburg Division, and was staffed by ethnic Germans who spoke local languages. The unit had many contacts with both the Chetniks and the Ustaše Militia, and had been tracking Tito since October 1943. Leutnant Kirchner of that unit had been responsible for locating Tito before the re-capture of Jajce, and he established a patrol base near Bosansko Grahovo. He got very close to the Drvar cave, and located the Allied military missions, but despite German radio intercepts confirming that Drvar was the site of Tito's headquarters, Kirchner was unable to pinpoint the cave as the location of the headquarters. Kirchner was attached to the 500th SS Parachute Battalion for the operation. The second intelligence organisation was FAT (Front Reconnaissance Troop) 216 of Section I of the Abwehr. FAT216, commanded by Leutnant Zavadil, was also attached to the 500th SS Parachute Battalion, but did not contribute much to the intelligence used to plan the raid. On Adolf Hitler's orders, SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, the intelligence branch of the SS), who had commanded the operation to rescue Mussolini in September 1943, was independently involved in intelligence gathering in the lead-up to the raid. Skorzeny acted on behalf of the SD, and after obtaining information from a Partisan deserter that pinpointed Tito's headquarters at the cave, he proposed a plan to infiltrate Drvar with a small group of soldiers to assassinate Tito. Skorzeny soon discovered that the plan to eliminate Tito had been compromised, and had nothing further to do with the operation. It appears that he did not pass on the useful intelligence he had gathered to SS-Hauptsturmführer Kurt Rybka, the commander of the 500th SS Parachute Battalion, who was responsible for planning the critical airborne aspects of the operation. Largely due to interservice rivalry and competition, the three organisations did not share the intelligence they gathered, which had a significant effect on the tactical planning and execution of the operation. The Germans found forged documents that stated 25 May was Tito's birthday and therefore planned the attack for that day. ### Partisan intelligence The Partisans had an effective intelligence network. They had been aware of the presence of the 500th SS Parachute Battalion in Yugoslavia for some time, and of the general threat of an airborne assault for over six months. They may have become aware of the isolation of the 500th SS Parachute Battalion or the concentration of transport aircraft and gliders at Zagreb and Banja Luka over a month before the operation. The Partisans also managed to capture the deserter that Skorzeny had interrogated. As a result of these early indicators of an attack, Tito's main headquarters was relocated to another cave near the village of Bastasi, 7 km (4.3 mi) west of Drvar. Tito then used the Drvar cave during the day, but returned to the Bastasi cave at night. As a further precaution, elements of the 6th Lika Proletarian Division were moved closer to Drvar. On 23 May 1944, a single German Fieseler Fi 156 reconnaissance aircraft flew several parallel runs up and down the Una valley over Drvar at around 600 m (2,000 ft); activity consistent with conducting aerial photography. The aircraft paid particular attention to the villages of Prinavor and Trninić Brijeg where the British military mission and American military personnel were located. This was observed by Street, the acting commander of the British military mission, who assumed it was spotting for a bombing raid and advised both Tito and the Americans. Both Allied missions moved their locations as a result. Despite the intelligence received and observations made by the British, the Partisans appear to have been quite complacent about the threat; Tito's chief of staff, Arso Jovanović, swore that "a German attack was impossible". The most obvious indicator that Tito was unaware of the imminent attack is that he remained at the Drvar cave overnight on the evening of 24 May, following a celebration, instead of returning to Bastasi. Through Ultra intercepts of German signal traffic, the British had become aware that the Germans were planning an operation codenamed "Rösselsprung". However, the information available did not include where the operation would occur or what its objectives might be. ## Planning Following intelligence collection, higher level planning for the operation began on 6 May 1944, after von Weichs had issued his initial orders. Hitler gave his approval to von Weichs' final plans on 21 May. The order to XV Mountain Corps was issued by Generaloberst Lothar Rendulic, the commander of 2nd Panzer Army, on the same day, leaving only three days for preparation. General der Infanterie Ernst von Leyser, commander of XV Mountain Corps headquartered at Knin, was responsible for the conduct of the operation. The ground forces of von Leyser's XV Mountain Corps were significantly reinforced from Army Group F, the 2nd Panzer Army and V SS Mountain Corps reserves. These reinforcements included two panzer companies, the reconnaissance battalions of the 1st Mountain Division (the 54th Mountain Reconnaissance Battalion) and the 369th (Croatian) Infantry Division, and most of the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen. The total number of German troops allocated to the operation was about 16,000 men. In outline, the XV Mountain Corps plan was for a heavy aerial bombardment of Partisan positions in and around Drvar by Luftwaffe aircraft, followed by a parachute and glider assault by the 500th SS Parachute Battalion who had the task of capturing or killing Tito and destroying his headquarters. The assault also included tasks to capture or destroy the Allied military missions to the Partisans. On the same day, ground elements of XV Mountain Corps were to converge on Drvar to link up with the 500th SS Parachute Battalion. A small reconnaissance aircraft was tasked to fly into Drvar after its capture to retrieve Tito or his body. ### 500th SS Parachute Battalion Rybka received an outline of the operation on 20 May, and more details the following day. He realised that the gliders and transport aircraft would be insufficient for the whole of the 500th SS Parachute Battalion to be delivered to Drvar in one lift, so he came up with a plan involving two waves. The first wave of 654 troops would conduct the assault at 07:00 and a second wave of 220 troops would follow about five hours later. Critically, the intelligence he was given regarding the suspected location of Tito's headquarters (codenamed "Citadel") was that it was in or near a cemetery on high ground southwest of the centre of Drvar, nearly 2 km (1.2 mi) from Tito's actual headquarters cave. This would have far-reaching effects on the planning and execution of the assault. Rybka's plan for the first wave called for the insertion of 314 parachute troops in three groups (Red, Green and Blue) to secure the town, and another 354 troops in six glider-borne assault groups to carry out specific tasks. The glider-borne group tasks were: - Panther Group (110 soldiers) – capture "Citadel" and destroy Tito's headquarters – to land at the cemetery - Greifer (Grabber) Group (40 soldiers) – destroy the British military mission in the village of Prnjavor 2 km south of Drvar on the road to Bosansko Grahovo - Stürmer (Stormer) Group (50 soldiers) – destroy the Soviet military mission between the centre of Drvar and the Unac river - Brecher (Breaker) Group (50 soldiers) – destroy the American military mission in the village of Trninić Brijeg 2 km south of the centre of Drvar - Draufgänger (Daredevil) Group (70 soldiers including members of the Brandenburg Division, the Abwehr officer Lieutenant Zavadil and some collaborationist Chetniks) – capture the crossroads (codenamed "Western Cross") immediately to the west of Drvar including a nearby suspected communications facility - Beißer (Biter) Group (20 soldiers) – seize an outpost radio station to the south of Prnjavor then assist the Greifer Group The second wave of 220 troops based on the training company of the 500th SS Parachute Battalion was to insert by parachute at midday. Rybka does not appear to have planned for any significant contingencies such as errors in the intelligence on the location of Tito's headquarters. His only known contingency plan was that he would fire a red signal flare to order all available forces to converge on his position for subsequent tasks. On 22 May 1944, the 500th SS Parachute Battalion was transported to airfields at Nagy-Betskerek (Zrenjanin), Zagreb and Banja Luka, dressed in Wehrmacht uniforms for security reasons. The troops were not briefed on the operation until a few hours before it was launched. They then linked up with their transport aircraft, including the ten-man Luftwaffe DFS230 gliders that would deliver the glider-borne troops onto their objectives. By 24 May, all preparations for the airborne assault were complete. ### Ground forces The plan for the ground forces of von Leyser's XV Mountain Corps was for nine separate but coordinated thrusts toward the Drvar–Bosanski Petrovac area from all directions. The groupings and tasks were: - The 384th Infantry Regiment of the 373rd (Croatian) Infantry Division (Croatian legionnaires), with elements of the 2nd Company of the 202nd Panzer Battalion, referred to as Kampfgruppe Willam after its commander, Oberst Willam, was to advance east at 05:00 from the village of Srb toward Drvar. Kampfgruppe Willam had the primary responsibility for relieving then taking command of the 500th SS Parachute Battalion in Drvar on 25 May, and was then to attack in the direction of Bosanski Petrovac. - A battalion group of the 373rd (Croatian) Infantry Division was to set out at 05:00 from Lapac and drive east through Kulen Vakuf to capture the crossroads at Vrtoče. If necessary, they were then to advance northwest toward Bihać to open the road. - The 92nd Motorised Regiment, with the 54th Reconnaissance Battalion (from the 1st Mountain Division), the 55th Pioneer Battalion (from the 1st Cossack Division), the 468th Armoured Car Company, and a regimental group of the 2nd Croatian Light Infantry Brigade was to advance southeast from Bihać and Bosanska Krupa at 05:00 through Vrtoče to capture Bosanski Petrovac as quickly as possible, destroy the Partisans in that location, and occupy the Partisan airfield and supply installations. After capturing Bosanski Petrovac, elements were to be sent toward Drvar to prevent the withdrawal of Partisans along that road and to link up with the 500th SS Parachute Battalion in Drvar. - A regimental group of the 7th SS Division was to advance west from the area of Mrkonjić Grad, break through Partisan resistance east of the Sana and then advance on a wide front to block escape routes east out of Drvar. Part of this group was to advance from Jajce along the rail line and roads through Savici to reach their objective, the area around Mliniste power station. - An ad hoc Kampfgruppe Panzergrenadier Sturmbattalion consisting of officer cadets, with 1st Company of the 202nd Panzer Battalion, under the command of the 7th SS Division, was to advance from Banja Luka toward Ključ to seize the crossing point across the Sana utilised by the Partisans. - The 105th SS Reconnaissance Battalion with an additional panzer company was to advance from Livno and occupy any Partisan supply installations in the Livno Valley, and prevent any Partisan withdrawal to the south of Drvar by attacking through Bosansko Grahovo toward Drvar. - The 369th Reconnaissance Battalion of the 369th (Croatian) Infantry Division (Croatian legionnaires), under the command of the 105th SS Reconnaissance Battalion, was to advance from Livno up the Glamoč Valley against Partisan forces withdrawing from Drvar to the southeast. - The 1st Regiment of the Brandenburg Division, along with the collaborationist Chetnik Dinara Division of Momčilo Đujić, were to advance from Knin toward Bosansko Grahovo and conduct special operations against Partisans in the Prekaja-Drvar area. ## Operation The offensive began at 05:00 on 25 May 1944 with the advance of ground forces from their assembly areas surrounding their assigned operational areas. About 06:35, five squadrons of Luftwaffe bombers, including Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers, began bombing targets within Drvar and Bosanski Petrovac. A total of 440 sorties were flown on that day. ### Airborne assault and initial response The 500th SS Parachute Battalion began to parachute and glide onto their objectives at 07:00, most parachutists and glider pilots being able to land relatively close to their targets despite the smoke and dust from the bombing. Some gliders landed significantly off course, including one that landed in front of the Bastasi cave 7 km to the west of Drvar, and several that landed in a locality named Vrtoče near Drvar (not to be confused with Vrtoče between Bihać and Petrovac, which was on the axis of advance of the 92nd Motorised Regiment). The occupants of the glider that landed in Bastasi were immediately killed by members of the Tito Escort Battalion guarding the cave, and the occupants of the gliders at Vrtoče had to fight their way toward Drvar. After landing, the first wave of the 500th SS Parachute Battalion quickly gained control of Drvar. Panther Group supported by Red Group overcame minimal resistance at the cemetery and Rybka established his headquarters behind the cemetery walls, but there was no sign of Tito or his headquarters. Greifer Group and Brecher Group were also unsuccessful as the British and American groups had moved following the aerial reconnaissance on 23 May. Parts of Stürmer Group landed their gliders in a field immediately south of the Drvar cave and came under fire from members of the Tito Escort Battalion on the high ground in the area of the cave. The Draufgänger Group landed their gliders at the "Western Cross", then assaulted a building they believed was the Partisan communications centre. The building was actually the office of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia Central Committee, who resisted fanatically until the building was levelled using satchel charges. Both Blue Group and Green Group, consisting of parachute troops that landed in the eastern part of Drvar where most of the population lived, were also engaged in heavy fighting. The Young Communist League of Yugoslavia had just finished a conference in Drvar, and many of the delegates were still staying in the town. Many youths took up whatever arms they could obtain and commenced fighting the parachutists who were attempting to establish a cordon on the eastern side of the town. About 2 km further east on the road to Mokronoge was a Partisan officer training school with about 130 students. On hearing the fighting from the direction of Drvar, the students marched west initially armed with only pistols and a few rifles. They split into two groups, a smaller group that crossed the Unac and advanced west along the railway line on the ridge leading toward Tito's cave, and a larger group that collected arms and ammunition from several stray canisters of German equipment dropped by parachute. The larger group of students attacked Green and Blue Groups from the east around 08:00, suffering severe casualties, but maintained continuous pressure on the German flank. About 09:00, the Germans had largely secured Drvar, and the available troops went from house to house, armed with photographs of Tito, brutally questioning the civilians they could find. Soon after this commenced, Rybka realised that Partisan resistance was concentrated to the north in the vicinity of the cave. He, therefore, fired the red signal flare to rally his troops for an assault in that direction. ### Assault on Tito's cave and the Partisan counterattack At about 10:30, Rybka launched a frontal attack across the Unac supported by at least one MG42 machine gun firing into the mouth of the cave. The Germans reached the base of the hill, fifty metres from the cave, but suffered severe casualties in the assault. They were also running low on water. Before this attack, Tito and around 20 staff had taken refuge in the cave. While Rybka was assembling his troops for this attack, surrounding Partisan forces were rushed toward Drvar. Three battalions of the 3rd Lika Proletarian Brigade of the 6th Lika Proletarian Division approached from the southeast. One battalion attacked the German position at the cemetery while the other two swung around to strike the Germans from the west. About 11:15, after Rybka's first attack had been defeated, Tito and the small group gathered with him escaped from the cave. There was a platform at the mouth of the cave, and they climbed down a rope through a trapdoor in the platform, although the panic displayed by Tito's mistress Davorjanka Paunović (codenamed "Zdenka") and his dog Tigar caused some delays. The party split up and following a creek leading away from the Unac, the small groups climbed the heights to the east and withdrew toward the village of Potoci. ### Second German attack and withdrawal The second wave of parachute troops was dropped in two groups to the west of the cemetery at about midday. The drop zone was within fields of fire of the Partisans to the west of Drvar, and the paratroops suffered many casualties during the drop. Collecting the remainder, Rybka mounted a second attack, but the pressure on his flanks was too heavy, and the assault again failed. Fighting continued throughout the afternoon with both sides taking heavy casualties. In the late afternoon, Rybka ordered his forces to withdraw to the area of the cemetery where he formed a defensive perimeter. During the withdrawal, at least one group of troops was cut off and killed. About 18:00, Rybka was wounded by a grenade blast and was later evacuated with other casualties in the light aircraft intended to carry away Tito after his capture. Roughly at the same time, his Partisan counterpart in Drvar, Milan Šijan, the commander of the 3rd Lika Proletarian Brigade, was also wounded by German machine gun fire. By 21:30, the Germans had consolidated their position in the cemetery, although they were completely surrounded by the Partisans. During the night, the 3rd Lika Proletarian Brigade attacked the cemetery, with the 1st Battalion of the 3rd Brigade of the 9th Dalmatian Division reinforcing the assault. At 03:30 on 26 May, the final Partisan attack was launched against the cemetery, breaching the walls in several places, but the paratroopers held on. ### Ground force assault and Partisan withdrawal Although its total strength was estimated at 185,500 men in late May 1944, the 2nd Panzer Army was not able to rally more than 16,000 troops for Operation Rösselsprung due to ever-increasing Partisan activity throughout the country. The Germans had to rely on special forces and improved tactics. The Partisans defended the territory they controlled with significant demolition and mining of roads. Roadblocks were manned by patrols and smaller detachments, whose task was to hold off the enemy until reinforcements arrived. During Operation Rösselsprung, the Germans rendered these tactics ineffective by combining strong and fast motorised columns with adequate pioneer support. This combination was especially successful for the column led by the 92nd Motorised Regiment. The second German tactical innovation was the employment of five reconnaissance battalions for independent operations deep inside Partisan-controlled territory. #### 25 May Throughout 25 May, the ground forces of XV Mountain Corps were not able to advance as quickly as planned. There was unexpected resistance from the Partisan 1st Proletarian, 5th and 8th Corps along their axes of advance, and there was very poor communication and coordination between the columns. The ground forces were also subjected to Allied air attacks by Air Vice-Marshal William Elliot's Balkan Air Force throughout the day, called in by the British mission using their surviving radio. At 05:00 on 25 May, Kampfgruppe Willam commenced its attack from Srb in an easterly direction, aiming to cover the 20 km (12 mi) to Drvar as quickly as possible. It encountered organised resistance from the 2nd Lika Proletarian Brigade of the 6th Lika Proletarian Division. After a day's fighting, the Germans had captured Trubar, but were unable to overcome the defences of the hills east of the village. Recognising the importance of Kampfgruppe Willam's task, the commander of the 373th Division, Generalleutnant Eduard Aldrian, ordered the battalion group of the 373th Division to abandon its advance from Lapac to Martin Brod and reinforce Kampfgruppe Willam instead. The remaining brigade of the 6th Lika Proletarian Division, the 1st Lika Proletarian Shock Brigade, was deployed to the north along the Una river. The 2nd Lika Proletarian Brigade requested assistance from the 1st Lika Proletarian Shock Brigade, but divisional headquarters ordered it to send reinforcements to Drvar instead. At 21:00, the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Lika Proletarian Brigade launched a successful local counterattack on the vanguard of Kampfgruppe Willam, separating it from the main body. Willam then decided to halt the advance and place the remaining units into all-round defence. At 22:25, Aldrian ordered him to resume the attack, but Willam reported that this was impossible due to loss of contact with his own units. The 92nd Motorised Regiment Kampfgruppe consisted of two columns, a western column based on the 92nd Motorised Regiment, and an eastern column consisting of the 54th Reconnaissance Battalion and 1st Home Guard Jäger Regiment of the 2nd Croatian Light Infantry Brigade. The western column advanced southeast from Bihać, and encountered resistance from the 6th Krajina Brigade of the 4th Krajina Division. By the end of the day, the western column had reached Vrtoče, halfway between Bihać and Bosanski Petrovac. Being fully motorised, it used its mobility to outmanoeuvre the Partisans, bypassing their main defensive positions to the west, the Cossack pioneers playing an important role in keeping the column moving. The eastern column started its advance from Bosanska Krupa, aiming to establish contact with the western column at Vrtoče. It advanced 10 km before being held up by the defences of the 8th Krajina Brigade of the 4th Krajina Division. The forces commanded by the 7th SS Division were organised into northern, central and southern columns. The northern column consisted of Kampfgruppe Panzergrenadier Sturmbattalion and included a company of tanks. It moved swiftly southwest from its start point near Banja Luka, and had reached Čađavica (at a crossroads halfway between Mrkonjić Grad and Ključ) by the evening of 25 May, brushing off the 16th Krajina Brigade of the 39th Krajina Division deployed on the right flank of its axis of advance. The rapid advance meant that the 13th Krajina Brigade of the 39th Krajina Division was unable to organise an effective defence. The 39th Krajina Division then ordered the 13th Krajina Brigade to block the road from Čađavica to Ključ to prevent the loss of Ključ, but only one battalion of the brigade managed to reach that position by dawn on 26 May. The central column consisted of the 7th SS Reconnaissance Battalion reinforced with one battery of self-propelled guns, which had a special task: it was to strike from Mrkonjić Grad, penetrate deeply into the Partisans’ rear and destroy the HQ of the 5th Partisan Corps in Ribnik. Despite having only two battalions in the area (the third was facing Kampfgruppe Panzergrenadier Sturmbattalion at Čađavica), the 13th Proletarian Brigade managed to hold off this thrust. The southern column was based on the 13th SS Mountain Regiment, reinforced by I Battalion of the 7th SS Mountain Artillery Regiment and some Chetniks. This column launched its assault from the Jajce area, and had the task of reaching Mliništa (20 km south of Ključ). By 17:20, II Battalion of the 13th SS Mountain Regiment had taken Šipovo, but any further advance was halted by the defences of the 1st Proletarian Brigade. The Germans deployed two columns to attack north from Livno. The 369th Reconnaissance Battalion with some 200 men from the 6th Ustaša Brigade advanced towards Glamoč, and the 105th SS Reconnaissance Battalion with a panzer company thrust in the direction of Bosansko Grahovo. By 16:00 on 25 May 1944, the 369th Reconnaissance Battalion column had reached the village of Han-Vrbe, some 5 km from Bosansko Grahovo. At that point, it was attacked by the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Krajina Brigade and was forced to retreat. During the retreat, this column was attacked by two more battalions of the 3rd Krajina Brigade and was pushed back to its start line at Livno with heavy losses. A preliminary German report estimated their losses at 50, but the 3rd Krajina Brigade estimated German losses at 191 dead and wounded. The 105th SS Reconnaissance Battalion column overcame the resistance of local Partisan units and the 1st and 4th Battalions of the 13th Dalmatian Brigade, and by the end of the day had reached Crni Lug, some 20 km from Bosansko Grahovo. In the evening, the 13th Dalmatian Brigade was ordered to march towards Tičevo and Drvar to reinforce the Partisan forces in that area. The 1st Regiment of the Brandenburg Division, reinforced by a pioneer company from the 373rd (Croatian) Infantry Division and the Chetnik Dinara Division, attacked along the Knin–Bosansko Grahovo axis, pushed back the local Grahovo–Peulje Partisan Detachment and by the end of the day had reached positions some 5 km beyond Strmica. Escorted by elements of the 3rd Krajina Brigade, Tito made his way to Potoci, where he was met by a battalion of the 1st Proletarian Brigade. At Potoci, they were met by the staff of the Allied military missions. The British mission signals officer had brought the only surviving radio. Initially, Tito had been in favour of continuing the attack on the SS paratroopers, but after reassessing the situation, he cancelled further attacks. As the German intention to encircle the Supreme Command in a small area around Drvar with approaching units, and then destroy it with land forces had become apparent by now, serious reorganisation of Partisan dispositions was required. After German troops were observed in the area of Potoci, Tito and his companions were escorted towards Kupres. The 2nd Panzer Army was monitoring the operation closely. The report of a special troop, which had been sent into the Partisans’ rear with the help of disguised Chetniks several days earlier, drew particular attention from Rendulic. According to this report, received late on 25 May, Tito was in the area of Potoci, halfway between Drvar and Ribnik. Rendulic ordered the commander of the 7th SS Division to immediately form a special company-strong detachment, with a mission to infiltrate behind the Partisan lines to kill Tito and destroy the Partisan Supreme Command. The detachment was formed on the night of 25/26 May from the 11th Company of the 13th SS Regiment, several pioneers, and a group of specially trained personnel from the Brandenburg Division. As the detachment failed to penetrate into the Partisan territory that night, it tried again the following night. #### 26–27 May About 05:00 on 26 May, a Luftwaffe fighter-bomber formation engaged the Partisan troops withdrawing from Drvar. The western column of the 92nd Motorised Regiment Kampfgruppe was ordered to help assist the eastern column by detaching a reinforced panzer company from Vrtoče. On the morning of 26 May, the German columns advancing from Bihać towards Ključ, and from Livno and Knin towards Bosansko Grahovo, overcame the Partisan units in their paths, and continued their advance facing little resistance. The 92nd Motorised Grenadier Regiment, advancing from Vrtoče, took Bosanski Petrovac without a fight about 08:00. It continued its march to Drvar and relieved the 500th SS Parachute Battalion at 12:45. Kampfgruppe Willam established radio contact with the 500th SS Battalion around 07:00, and at 17:00 entered Drvar via Kamenica. The 105th SS Reconnaissance Battalion arrived at Bosansko Grahovo at 10:30, where it was joined by the 1st Regiment of the Brandenburg Division at 16:00. Kampfgruppe Panzergrenadier Sturmbattalion entered Ključ at 14:15. In the eastern sector, the Partisan line of defence was still holding. During 26 and 27 May, the 7th SS Division continued exerting strong pressure on the 1st Proletarian Division in the upper Sana River Valley, but failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough. By the end of 27 May, the front line had stabilised to the north and south of Ribnik. After the defeat it had suffered the previous day, the 369th Reconnaissance Battalion column did not resume its advance towards Glamoč on the 26th. On 26 May, due to the rapidly changing situation and communications difficulties, a degree of confusion emerged on both sides. Out of contact with their corps headquarters, the 4th Krajina Division continued to retain two brigades along the Bihać-Bosanski Petrovac road, even though the 92nd Motorised Regiment had already passed along this route and into their rear. The critically important Bosanski Petrovac-Ključ road to the south was left unguarded, endangering Tito and Partisan Supreme Headquarters as they fled from Drvar. XV Mountain Corps failed to recognise and exploit these flaws in Partisan deployments. After the 500th Parachute Battalion had been relieved, the XV Mountain Corps ordered the units in the Drvar area to disperse. The 92nd Motorised Regiment with all subordinated units was ordered to return north and attack the brigades of the 4th Krajina Division on Mount Grmeč, to secure the main supply road from Bihać to Bosanski Petrovac; this action, codenamed "Grmeč", was scheduled to start on the morning of 27 May. The 373rd Division with the newly subordinated 1st Regiment of the Brandenburg Division was ordered to conduct a sweep-and-destroy operation in the area south and southeast of Drvar; this operation was codenamed "Vijenac", and was to take place concurrently with "Operation Grmeč". The 9th Dalmatian Division managed to repulse all attacks on 27 May, pushing the Brandenburgers and Chetniks back to Bosansko Grahovo. On 27 May, the 369th Reconnaissance Battalion column again tried to advance on Glamoč, but with no success. Unhappy with the development of the operation to this point, Rendulic cancelled Operations "Grmeč" and "Vijenac" on the afternoon of 27 May, and ordered von Leyser to move all units back to their start positions for a concentric attack on the area where Tito and two Partisan corps headquarters (1st Proletarian and 5th) were believed to be located. The attack was scheduled to begin on the morning of 28 May. Rendulic also sent the 105th SS Reconnaissance Battalion to the Livno-Glamoč area which had been left wide open by the defeat of the 369th Reconnaissance Battalion thrust. Tito, his staff and his escort continued toward Kupres, travelling on foot and horseback, as well as on the wagons of a narrow-gauge logging railway. During this trek, one of the members of the Soviet mission was wounded by shellfire. ## Aftermath Throughout their escape, the British mission were able to maintain contact with their headquarters by radio and continued to call in support from the Balkan Air Force against the German formations taking part in Operation Rösselsprung and the Luftwaffe aircraft in the skies over Yugoslavia. This included over one thousand sorties. A costly ground attack was also launched by a combined Partisan, British and United States force on the German-held Dalmatian island of Brač. Code-named "Operation Flounced", the assault was mounted from the British-held island of Vis further out in the Adriatic Sea on the night of 1/2 June. Fighting continued late into 3 June 1944 and resulted in the reinforcement of the island by a further 1,900 German troops. After three days of fighting, the combined forces returned to Vis. The Partisans suffered losses of 67 dead, 308 wounded and 14 missing, and Allied units suffered 60 dead, 74 wounded and 20 missing, with the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jack Churchill, being captured by the Germans. After six days evading the Germans, the leader of the Soviet mission, Lieutenant General Nikolai Vasilevich Korneev, who had lost a leg in the Battle of Stalingrad, suggested an air evacuation of Tito and the Soviet mission and this was expanded by Street to include the whole party. After three days deliberation, Tito agreed on 3 June and Street arranged the evacuation the same night from an RAF-operated airfield near the town of Kupres. Seven Douglas C-47 Skytrain aircraft, one with a Soviet crew and the remainder with US crews, carried Tito and his party, the Allied missions and 118 wounded Partisans to Bari in Italy. Late on 6 June, Tito was delivered by the Royal Navy escort destroyer HMS Blackmore to Vis, where he re-established his headquarters and was joined by the Allied missions. The Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, believed that the British had known more about the attack than they claimed, based on the absence of both Maclean and Churchill from Drvar at the time of the attack. On 28 May, he sent a message to Korneev detailing his suspicions. Although Tito's headquarters, along with several other Partisan organisations, was temporarily disrupted and key staff were lost during the operation, all Partisan organisations were quickly relocated and resumed operations. Drvar reverted to Partisan control within a few weeks of the operation. The operation was a failure, as Tito, his principal headquarters staff and the Allied military personnel escaped, despite their presence in Drvar at the time of the airborne assault. The operation failed due to several factors, including Partisan resistance in the town itself and along the approaches to Drvar. The failure of the German intelligence agencies to share the limited information available on Tito's exact location also contributed to the unsuccessful outcome for the Germans, and this failure to share intelligence was compounded by a lack of contingency planning by the commander of the German airborne force. The 500th SS Parachute Battalion was decimated during Operation Rösselsprung, suffering 576 killed and 48 wounded. Only 200 soldiers of the battalion were fit to fight on the morning of 26 May. It continued throughout the rest of the war as the only SS parachute unit, although its name was later changed to the 600th SS Parachute Battalion. Operation Rösselsprung was its only combat parachute operation. According to a German report, the ground troops of XV Mountain Corps suffered 213 killed, 881 wounded, and 51 missing during Operation Rösselsprung. The same report claimed that 6,000 Partisans were killed. The commander of the 7th SS Division, SS-Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Waffen-SS Otto Kumm claimed that Partisan losses included 1,916 confirmed and another 1,400 estimated killed, and 161 taken prisoner. Kumm also claimed that six Allied aircraft were shot down during the operation. According to a Partisan source, their total losses were 399 killed, 479 wounded, and at least 85 missing. Of this total, the casualties suffered in fighting with the 500th SS Parachute Battalion at Drvar numbered 179 killed, 63 wounded, and 19 missing. Ultimately, according to intelligence historian Ralph Bennett, "[t]he long-term significance of the Drvar raid was simply that it failed." Although Tito was born on 7 May, after he became president of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, he celebrated his birthday on 25 May to mark the unsuccessful attempt on his life. ## In film Operation Rösselsprung was depicted in the 1963 Partisan film Desant na Drvar directed by Fadil Hadžić.
42,402	Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany	1,172,276,781	null	[ "1930s in Germany", "1930s in LGBT history", "1940s in LGBT history", "Gay history", "Law of Nazi Germany", "Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany", "State crime" ]	Before 1933, homosexual acts were illegal in Germany under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. The law was not consistently enforced, however, and a thriving gay culture existed in major German cities. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, the first homosexual movement's infrastructure of clubs, organizations, and publications was shut down. After the Röhm purge in 1934, persecuting homosexuals became a priority of the Nazi police state. A 1935 revision of Paragraph 175 made it easier to bring criminal charges for homosexual acts, leading to a large increase in arrests and convictions. Persecution peaked in the years prior to World War II and was extended to areas annexed by Germany, including Austria, the Czech lands, and Alsace–Lorraine. The Nazi regime considered the elimination of all manifestations of homosexuality in Germany one of its goals. Men were often arrested after denunciation, police raids, and through information uncovered during interrogations of other homosexuals. Those arrested were presumed guilty, and subjected to harsh interrogation and torture to elicit a confession. Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals; around 50,000 of these were sentenced by civilian courts, 6,400 to 7,000 by military courts [de], and an unknown number by special courts. Most of these men served time in regular prisons, and between 5,000 and 6,000 were imprisoned in concentration camps. The death rate of these prisoners has been estimated at 60 percent, a higher rate than those of other prisoner groups. A smaller number of men were sentenced to death or killed at Nazi euthanasia centres. Nazi Germany's persecution of homosexuals is considered to be the most severe episode in a long history of discrimination and violence targeting sexual minorities. After the war, homosexuals were initially not counted as victims of Nazism because homosexuality continued to be illegal in Nazi Germany's successor states. Few victims came forward to discuss their experiences. The persecution came to wider public attention during the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, and the pink triangle was reappropriated as an LGBT symbol. ## Background Germany was the home of the first homosexual movement. The word homosexual was coined by a German-language writer; the first periodicals intended for a gay, lesbian, and transgender readership were published in Germany, and the world's first homosexual rights organization was founded in Berlin in 1897. In the 1920s gay culture flourished in Germany's major cities, especially Berlin. Political compromises allowed many homosexuals to live freely in their private lives and in dedicated subcultural spaces, provided they did not significantly infringe on the public sphere. One theory holds the Nazis' rise to power was fueled by a conservative backlash against perceived immorality, but according to historian Laurie Marhoefer, this was not a significant factor. Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which was passed after the unification of Germany in 1871, criminalized sexual acts between males. The German supreme court ruled that a conviction required proof the men had had penetrative sex, typically anal but sometimes oral sex; other sexual activities were not punishable. The Rechtsstaat limited the enforcement of the law because men were not arrested or indicted without concrete evidence. As a consequence, conviction rates were low and a significant number of those convicted were sentenced to pay a fine rather than serve a jail sentence. Terms exceeding one year were rare. In 1928, the Nazi Party responded negatively to a questionnaire about their view of Paragraph 175, saying: "Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy." Nazi politicians regularly railed against homosexuality, saying it was a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the German people. In 1931 and 1932, the Social Democrats publicized the homosexuality of Ernst Röhm, a prominent Nazi politician, in an attempt to discredit the Nazis. The Röhm scandal fuelled the long-lasting but false idea that the Nazi Party was dominated by homosexuals, a recurring theme in 1930s left-wing propaganda. The Nazi Party temporarily tolerated a few known homosexuals, including Röhm, but never adopted such tolerance as a general principle or changed its views on homosexuality. There is no evidence that homosexuals were over-represented in the Nazi Party. ## History ### Nazi takeover and initial crackdown (1933) In mid-1932 a crackdown on homosexual subcultures in Prussia began after Chancellor Franz von Papen deposed the Prussian government. Some homosexual bars and clubs in Berlin had to shut down after police raids. In January 1933 the Nazi Party took power; immediately, their real and perceived enemies were the subject of a violent crackdown. On 23 February of that year the Prussian Ministry of the Interior ordered Berlin police to shut down any remaining establishments catering to "persons who indulge in unnatural sexual practices". This order was extended to other parts of Germany. In Cologne, almost all gay bars were forced to close. In Hanover all had closed by the end of the year. In Hamburg police targeted both prostitutes and homosexual spaces, including the main train station, public toilets, and gay bars, leading to a more-than-sixfold increase in indictments under Paragraph 175 by 1934. The anti-homosexual crackdown was intended to please the Nazis' conservative backers, who had put them into power, as well as socially conservative voters. Both the Vatican and Protestant churches praised the crackdown. For example, in October 1933 Clemens August Graf von Galen, the Bishop of Münster, wrote approvingly of the Nazis' efforts to "eradicate" the "open propaganda for godlessness and immorality". In March 1933 the Nazi authorities began to confiscate printed material on homosexual topics. Any LGBT-related magazines that had survived earlier censorship were closed down and copies were burned. Their publishers were targeted; Adolf Brand's house was raided five times and police stole all of his photographs, 6,000 magazine issues, and many books. Friedrich Radszuweit's company was subjected to similar raids. During the Nazi takeover, German–Jewish homosexual-rights campaigner Magnus Hirschfeld was abroad on a lecture tour for the World League for Sexual Reform. On 6 May the Nazis' paramilitary wing, the SA, raided his Institute for Sex Research in coordination with German students. The institute's library of more than 12,000 books was publicly burned on 10 May on the Opernplatz; and its offices, together with those of The World League for Sexual Reform, were destroyed. On 8 June the law-reform organization Scientific-Humanitarian Committee voted to dissolve itself. In 1933, many homosexual organizations attempted to destroy membership lists and other information the Nazis could use to target dissidents. Former activists made agreements to keep quiet to protect others. Some homosexuals, including Thomas and Klaus Mann, went into exile. The Swiss city of Basel in particular was a destination for homosexuals fleeing Nazi Germany. Other homosexuals of a more right-wing inclination, including Hans Blüher, who initially welcomed the Nazi takeover, remained in Germany. Some joined the SA, mistakenly believing that Röhm would protect them. The most-visible members of the LGBT community, including prostitutes, transvestites, and activist leaders, were targeted, and high-profile locations were shut down. The average homosexual's daily life, however, did not change, and some gay bars in Hamburg and smaller cities remained open. Some men were able to adapt to the closures by meeting with gay friends in primarily heterosexual establishments. Most homosexuals were not yet afraid of the Gestapo. They believed they could keep a low profile until the end of the Nazi regime, seen as coming soon. During the initial years of Nazi rule, the number of men sentenced to prison under Paragraph 175 increased, from 464 in 1932 to 575 in 1933 and 635 in 1934. There was no systematic persecution of individual homosexual behavior, and until 1935, convictions remained below the high of 1,107 convictions set in 1925. ### Röhm purge and expanding persecution (1934–1935) After the 1933 revolution, Hitler began to see Röhm as a threat to his power and the SA as a liability due to their random acts of violence, which detracted from the Nazis' desired image as the party of law and order. On 30 June 1934 Röhm and several other SA leaders were suddenly arrested and executed. This event was later justified in Nazi propaganda, mainly by the alleged corruption and scheming with foreign powers, but also citing Röhm's homosexuality and the fact one of the victims of the purge, Edmund Heines, had allegedly been arrested while in bed with another man. Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, leaders of the SS (a rival of Röhm's SA), supported the purge to assert their control over the Nazi police state. Eventually Himmler, who is described by historian Nikolaus Wachsmann as "one of the most obsessive homophobes" in the Nazi government, became commander of the SS, the Gestapo, and the concentration camp system, making him the second-most-powerful man in Nazi Germany. The purge ended the sense of safety many German homosexuals still felt. Some homosexual Nazis ceased participating in the party while others, themselves former perpetrators of violence against Nazi opponents, became victims. Anti-gay repression began immediately after the purge, initially focusing on alleged homosexual cliques in the party and state bureaucracy. In October 1934 Heydrich ordered the police of all large cities to make a list of homosexuals. A separate Gestapo department, the Special Commission for Homosexuality in Berlin, was set up. In late 1934 the Gestapo targeted Berlin and Munich, raiding gay bars and making mass arrests of homosexual men; most of those arrested were not involved in politics. Many men accused of homosexuality would admit to acts that were not punishable under Paragraph 175, expecting to be released; instead, they were mistreated and incarcerated in Columbia-Haus, Lichtenburg, or Dachau concentration camp. By early 1935, 80 percent of the prisoners held in protective custody in the concentration camps were there for alleged homosexuality. To convict these men, it was decided to change the criminal code. Almost exactly a year after Röhm was killed, Paragraph 175 was amended. The changes were demanded, especially by prosecutors and other legal professionals. The new version of the law punished all sexual acts, defined broadly; "objectively when a general sense of shame is harmed and subjectively when there exists the lustful intention to excite either of the two men or a third party". In theory, it became a crime to look at another man with desire. Men were convicted for mutual masturbation or simply embracing each other, and in a few cases when no physical contact had occurred. Under the new law, typically all participants were viewed as equally guilty, whereas under the previous law, the "active" and "passive" participants were differentiated. The new law made it much easier to arrest and convict homosexual men, leading to a large increase in convictions. Under a new section 175a, the law also introduced harsher penalties for male prostitution, sex with a man younger than 21, or sex with a student or employee. The change in the law was not publicized for fear of spreading knowledge of homosexuality. Most Germans were unaware the law had changed and many of those arrested under the new law had no knowledge they were committing a crime. The law was also applied retroactively. ### Peak of persecution (1936–1939) From 1936 to 1939, German police focused on homosexuality as a top priority. In 1936 the Special Commission for Homosexuality in Berlin became the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion, working with Gestapo Special Bureau II S. The new office organized conferences and issued directives to increase the effectiveness of anti-homosexual persecution. During the first years of Nazi rule, regional differences in the prosecution of homosexuals reflected pre-Nazi trends in policing but in 1936, the police launched a nationwide campaign against homosexual meeting places. This campaign was less effective in rural than urban areas, which saw a greater number of prosecutions. If the Gestapo believed there were not enough charges for homosexuality being brought in a certain area, they would send in a special unit to train and encourage local criminal police. In March 1937, Himmler ordered police departments to make lists of suspected homosexuals and oblige them to register changes of address, and to monitor suspected homosexual meeting places, hotels, and personal ads in newspapers. The assigning of responsibility for carrying out the anti-homosexuality campaign to police and courts, which were not given any additional personnel or resources, caused serious operational difficulties. Besides the significant increase in the number of criminal cases to be prosecuted, cases of homosexuality demanded more time and attention because of the difficulty of proving private conduct. Because of the difficulty in identifying homosexuals, some police departments resorted to calling in entire classes of teenage boys and asking them about their sexual experiences. In this manner, it was possible to increase the number of charges of homosexuality brought; by 1939, such youthful relationships were the basis of 23.9 percent of charges. Himmler approved of such methods, arguing that without them, homosexuality would spread unchecked in all-male Nazi institutions. Between 1937 and 1939 nearly 95,000 men were arrested for homosexuality – more than 600 per week – representing a major investment from the Nazi police state. From 1936 to 1939, nearly 30,000 men were convicted under Paragraph 175. Unlike in the past, these men were virtually guaranteed to receive a jail sentence. The length of sentences increased; many men were sentenced to years in jail. Prosecutors, judges, and others involved in the cases increasingly cited Nazi ideology to justify harsh punishment, adopting the regime's rhetoric of "stamping out the plague of homosexuality". The use of concentration camp imprisonment increased; after 1937, those considered to have seduced others into homosexuality were confined to concentration camps. ### World War II From 1939 to 1940, the number of men sentenced in civil courts under Paragraph 175 fell from 7,614 to 3,773. More men were subject to military jurisdiction and, with the onset of war, homosexuality was no longer the top priority of the security police. In anticipation of the outbreak of war, at the end of August 1939, Heydrich ordered the Gestapo to transfer most homosexual cases to the Kriminalpolizei (criminal police or Kripo) to free up resources for the persecution of opposition groups. It is unknown how many Paragraph 175 cases were handled by the special courts. An estimated 6,400 to 7,000 men were convicted by the military courts in Nazi Germany [de] under Paragraph 175. The military considered homosexuals to be predators who disrupted morale and unit cohesion. Prior to the war, homosexuals were offered re-education and if this failed, they could be dismissed and incarcerated in a concentration camp for the duration of their compulsory military service. Under the manpower requirements of war, it was felt necessary to recruit all available men; it was also a concern that rejecting homosexuals from military service could open a loophole for draft evaders. Men considered sex offenders, including homosexuals, rapists, and child molesters, could serve in the German military assuming they were willing to bear arms and remain celibate during their military service. Known homosexuals and some former concentration camp prisoners were conscripted. Even castrated homosexual men could be drafted. Military courts were generally more lenient than civilian courts with cases involving consensual sex but harsher in cases falling under 175a. Although military courts followed the 1935 version of Paragraph 175, they generally issued a conviction only when there was attempted or actual contact with another man's genitals. More than 90 percent of those convicted were reintegrated into the military. Although innate homosexuals were considered dangerous to the military, the German military assumed that most cases of homosexuality were situational. Younger men, often seen as the victims of homosexual seducers, and one-time offenders were shown leniency. On average, soldiers convicted of homosexuality were sentenced to one-year prison sentences but served only a fraction of this before being paroled to the front. The length of time served decreased because of the increasing manpower shortage. In 1943 Himmler, who believed that the military was not hard enough on homosexuality, demanded a classification system that would see "incorrigible" homosexual offenders sent to concentration camps. The military attempted to ensure as many men as possible were retained under military jurisdiction to preserve vital manpower but cooperated with the Gestapo to rid itself of a few men who were seen as a threat to the military. Beginning in 1944 some homosexual concentration camp prisoners were forcibly enlisted in the army, which continued until a week before the unconditional surrender of Germany. These men were typically recruited into penal battalions, especially the Dirlewanger Brigade. ### Annexed territories The persecution of homosexuals was extended to the annexed territories but not to the rest of German-occupied Europe; the Nazis were mostly uninterested in punishing homosexuals who were not considered ethnically German. Criminal prosecutions of men for homosexuality in Austria almost doubled under Nazi rule. Both regular and special courts applied draconian punishments, including the death penalty. German law was applied in the Sudetenland after its annexation in late 1938 and, in the case of homosexuals, applied retroactively. German law was imposed in Alsace–Lorraine in January 1942; homosexuals there soon faced a harsh legal crackdown, including retroactive application of the law. In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, German law applied to ethnic Germans and the old Austrian criminal code, which imposed lower penalties for male homosexuality, applied to non-Germans. Czech men were not deported to concentration camps solely because of conviction for homosexuality, but sometimes they were deported in combination with other reasons, such as anti-Nazi activity. Although prosecutions increased dramatically during the German occupation, the police focused their efforts on breaking up male prostitution rings rather than homosexual relationships between Czechs. In 1945 Edvard Beneš, president of Czechoslovakia, offered an amnesty to those convicted for homosexuality during the occupation, although the law remained in effect. ## Nazi views of homosexuality The Nazis were influenced by earlier ideas conflating homosexuality, child molestation, and the "seduction of youth". Before the Nazis' rise to power, there was a widespread belief among Germans that homosexuality is not inborn but instead could be acquired and spread. The Nazis were particularly concerned that their all-male organizations such as the Hitler Youth, SS, and SA must not be seen as hotbeds of homosexual "recruitment". Based on the theories of Karl Bonhoeffer and Emil Kraepelin, the Nazis believed homosexuals seduced young men and infected them with homosexuality, permanently changing their sexual orientation. Rhetoric described homosexuality as a contagious disease but not in the medical sense. Rather, homosexuality was a disease of the Volkskörper (national body), a metaphor for the desired national or racial community (Volksgemeinschaft). The Nazis, especially Himmler, held conspiratorial beliefs about homosexuals, believing they were more loyal to each other than to the Nazi Party and Germany. After the Röhm purge, he told Gestapo personnel they had narrowly avoided the capture of the state by homosexuals. In 1937 a headline in the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps declared homosexuals "enemies of the state", explaining they must be eradicated because "... they form a state within a state, a secret organization that runs counter to the interests of the people." The newspaper argued only two percent of those who engaged in homosexual acts were committed homosexuals and the rest could be turned away from homosexuality. Forty thousand homosexuals were considered capable of "poisoning" two million men if left to roam free. Homosexual men were also considered to be shirking their duty to repopulate the German nation after World War I and create sons who could be drafted into the military to fight Hitler's planned wars of aggression. On 18 February 1937 Himmler gave a speech about homosexuality in Bad Tölz that was based on the 1927 book Eroticism and Race by Herwig Hartner, which claimed homosexuality was a Jewish plot against Germany. According to Himmler, homosexuality could lead to the end of Germany and cause depopulation by reducing the number of men who were available for reproduction. The Nazis distinguished between congenital homosexuals who would require permanent imprisonment and others who had engaged in homosexuality but were thought to be curable with a short stay in a concentration camp or psychiatric treatment. Distinguishing between these categories was a difficulty that preoccupied the Nazis, especially after many cases of homosexuality surfaced in the supposedly racially pure SS. Succumbing to a homosexual act once, especially when drunk, was not necessarily considered evidence of homosexual inclination. The Göring Institute offered treatment to homosexuals referred by the Hitler Youth and other Nazi organizations; by 1938 it claimed to have changed the sexual orientation in 341 of 510 patients and by 1944, it claimed to have eliminated homosexuality in more than 500 men. The institute intervened to reduce sentences in some cases. The converse of the Nazis' persecution of homosexuality was their encouragement of heterosexual relations, including extramarital sex, for racially desirable people. After 1934, homophobia became a regular theme in Nazi propaganda; most Germans came into contact with this homophobic propaganda. Although one of the Nazi regime's goals was to eliminate all manifestations of homosexuality in Germany, there was never a Nazi policy of exterminating all homosexuals in the way the Final Solution targeted Jews. ## Methods ### Identification and arrest Homosexuals were more difficult to round up than other groups the Nazis targeted. Police were given detailed instructions on spotting homosexuals; they were instructed to look for flamboyant men, those who avoided women or were seen walking arm-in-arm with other men, and anyone who rented a double room at a hotel. Hairdressers, bathhouse attendants, hotel receptionists, railway station porters, and others were asked to report suspicious behavior. Complicating the Nazis' efforts, many homosexual men did not fit these stereotypes and many effeminate men were not homosexual. According to one estimate, denunciations resulted in 35 percent of arrests of homosexuals. Men were denounced by neighbors, relatives, coworkers, students, employees, or even ex-boyfriends seeking to settle grievances, passers-by who overheard suspicious conversation, and Hitler Youth and other Nazi supporters who voluntarily acted as the morality police. State employees working in youth welfare and rail stations, Nazi functionaries in the German Labor Front (DAF), the SA, the SS, and the Hitler Youth brought cases to the attention of the authorities. A disproportionate number of denunciations concerned child abuse or "youth seduction" because there was an injured party to complain. Some men were falsely denounced as homosexual by other Germans. The snowball method involved arresting one man, interrogating him, and searching his belongings to find additional suspects; this method accounted for thirty percent of arrests. Some men were observed before their arrests or temporarily released in hopes they would lead the police to additional suspects. Some were shown photograph albums of other suspected homosexuals; male prostitutes were often willing to identify other homosexuals this way. Another ten percent of victims were arrested in police raids, which were often conducted in parks, public toilets, and areas frequented by male prostitutes. In Hamburg the police watched restaurants that served a mixed heterosexual and homosexual clientele as well as the most-trafficked public toilets. Entrapment was also used to ensnare homosexuals. Charges of homosexuality were sometimes deployed against people who were not guilty. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels commented: "When Himmler wants to get rid of someone, he just throws §175 at him." About 250 Catholic clergy were charged with same-sex activity [de] in the mid-1930s. Many of the charges, which included sexual abuse of minors and consensual homosexual sex, were true, but others were probably invented. The trials were of limited efficacy in their intended purpose of discrediting the Catholic Church. Catholic authorities alternated between reprimanding the guilty and covering up the scandal. ### Regional and class-based targeting Active policing tactics were mainly limited to the larger cities; in rural areas, the police relied on denunciation. The difference in policing strategy, and likely over-representation and greater visibility of homosexuals in urban areas, led to vastly different conviction rates in different parts of Germany. Convictions in Bavaria and Mecklenburg were below the national average while in Rhine Province, Hamburg, and Berlin, they exceeded the average. Within states, urban areas had more cases than rural areas. Because of the reliance on denunciation in rural areas, a disproportionate number of cases involved child abuse or "youth seduction". Young and working-class men, who may have been less able to evade the authorities, were over-represented among those who were arrested and prosecuted. Half of the suspects were working-class men and another third came from the lower middle class. In Austria, where working-class homosexuals were traditional targets of criminalization, arrests were extended to the middle class but more egregious behavior was required for a higher-class man to be punished for homosexuality. The first homosexuals to be targeted by the Nazis, prior to the Röhm purge, were also Jewish and left-wing political activists. A considerable number of those persecuted for homosexuality were also targeted for other reasons, for example being Romani, disabled, a sex worker, accused of other criminal offenses, a political opponent of the Nazis, or a deserter. ### Interrogation and trial After arresting a man, he was presumed to be guilty, especially if there was a history of homosexual acts or a previous conviction. Police would tell his family the reason for his arrest. With a conviction, the victim could expect a complete life breakdown, often including loss of home and job, expulsion from professional organizations, and revocation of awards and doctorates. Harsh interrogations were aimed at forcing the victim to confess to the acts the police believed him guilty of. Austere cells of temporary detention facilities were sufficient to obtain confessions in some cases. Other suspects would crumple in the face of "screams, curses, threats, and endless questions", and some were beaten. Some men were held for weeks with nothing to do but await interrogation, and suffered mental breakdowns. Some men were sent to concentration camps under protective custody to encourage them to confess or to incarcerate them when there was not enough evidence to obtain a conviction. The police would tell suspects they would get a lighter punishment if they confessed, and indefinite detention in a concentration camp if they did not. Both the Gestapo and the Kripo targeted homosexuals, a rivalry that may have encouraged the latter to adopt the more-brutal tactics of the former. Torture was regularly used to extract confessions and the use of "enhanced interrogation" (verschärfte Vernehmung) was explicitly approved of by Josef Meisinger, head of the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. After 1936, cases were processed more quickly and the accused rarely had a legal defense. Most had already confessed, guaranteeing a guilty verdict. An unknown number of men who were found unfit to stand trial were confined to psychiatric hospitals. ### Prisons Most men who were persecuted for homosexuality were convicted in the civil legal system and imprisoned. In Germany, it had long been the practice to isolate homosexual prisoners in individual cells but because of the vast increase in arrests, this proved to be impractical. In addition, the economic exploitation of prisoner labor meant many prisoners were held in labor camps and housed in barracks. While some officials built tiny, one-man cells to keep homosexual prisoners isolated, other officials distributed homosexuals among the general prison population and encouraged "brutal homophobia" to isolate homosexuals. Homosexual prisoners did not have to wear a badge but could be identified by red underlining on their name tags. Before 1933 prison sex had been common but its prevention and punishment became much more important under Nazi rule. Any prisoner who tried to initiate a same-sex relationship, even if it did not result in any physical contact, could expect harsh punishment. The wardens relied on informers among the inmates to deter same-sex activity. Despite facing discrimination, however, homosexual prisoners were much better off in the prisons than in concentration camps. #### Castration In June 1935 the Sterilization Law [de] was amended to allow individual convicted criminals to be "voluntarily" sterilized to eliminate their "degenerate sex drive". During the Nazi era, the regime considered extending the policy of involuntary castration that was previously applied to child molesters and other sex offenders to homosexuals but such a law was never passed. In 1943 Gestapo chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner advocated for a law for involuntary castration of homosexuals and sex offenders but withdrew this request because he believed the Gestapo could ensure castrations were carried out where it desired. Although the fiction of voluntary castration was maintained, some homosexuals were subject to severe pressure and coercion to agree to castration. There was no age limit; some boys as young as 16 were castrated. Those who agreed to castration were exempted from being transferred to a concentration camp after completing their legal sentence, a threat which was leveraged to encourage men to "volunteer" for the procedure. An estimated 400 to 800 men were castrated in this manner. ### Concentration camps Unlike the legal punishment system, prisoners in concentration camps were held in indefinite detention at the mercy of the SS and Gestapo. The use of concentration camp detention for homosexuals began in 1934 and 1935; it was initially seen as a temporary re-education measure. In May 1935, the Prussian police detained 513 accused homosexuals in protective custody. Himmler did not consider a time-limited prison sentence was sufficient to eliminate homosexuality. After 1939, it was a policy to send men who were convicted of multiple homosexual acts to a concentration camp after they served their prison sentences. On 12 July 1940 the Reich Security Main Office formalized this policy, decreeing "in future, all homosexuals who seduced more than one partner shall be taken into preventive custody by the police after their release from prison". According to research in some parts of Germany, non-aggravated homosexuality, as a rule, was not punished with concentration camp imprisonment, which was mostly reserved for those who were considered "youth seducers", or had been convicted of male prostitution or child molestation. In other cases, men who were convicted with homosexuality combined with other criminal offenses or political opposition could be transferred to a concentration camp. Historian Clayton J. Whisnant states homosexual concentration camp prisoners "experienced some of the worst conditions that humans have ever been forced to endure". In the prewar camps, Jewish and homosexual prisoners ranked at the bottom of the prisoner hierarchy, and homosexual Jews fared the worst. Along with Jews, homosexuals were often assigned to segregated labor details and had to perform especially dirty and backbreaking work, and endured worse conditions than the rest of the camp. Homosexual prisoners rarely benefited from solidarity from other prisoners, even Jews, because of widespread homophobia. Surviving the camps often required either building social networks with other prisoners or being promoted to a position of authority. Homosexuals were disadvantaged in both of these aspects; some younger, more attractive men could obtain advantages from a sexual relationship with a kapo (prison functionary) or SS guard. After 1942, conditions improved because of the need for forced labor, and some homosexual prisoners were promoted because of the influx of non-German prisoners who were ineligible for kapo positions. About 5,000 to 6,000 homosexual men were imprisoned in the concentration camps. Sociologist Rüdiger Lautmann examined 2,542 known cases of homosexual concentration camp prisoners and determined their death rate was 60 percent, compared with 42 percent of political prisoners and 35 percent of Jehovah's Witnesses. Assuming a death rate of between 53 and 60 percent, at least 3,100 to 3,600 men died in the camps. SS guards murdered homosexual prisoners out of cruelty or during sadistic games, disguising the deaths as natural causes. At camps like Mauthausen and Flossenbürg, it was standard practice to work homosexual prisoners to death. In mid-1942 almost all the homosexual prisoners at Sachsenhausen (at least two hundred) were executed. Many homosexual prisoners at Ravensbrück died at the same time. The chances of survival depended on which camp the men were incarcerated in; Neuengamme was considered less harsh for homosexual prisoners than Buchenwald, Dachau, or Sachsenhausen. Initially, homosexuals were differentiated from other prisoners with a badge bearing capital letter "A" that was used at Lichtenberg. The standardized Nazi concentration camp badges that included a pink triangle for homosexual prisoners were adopted in 1938. Homosexual prisoners were a preferred target of Nazi human experimentation during the last years of Nazi rule. The best-known experiments involving homosexual men were attempts by endocrinologist Carl Vaernet to change prisoners' sexual orientations by implanting a pellet that released testosterone. Most of the victims, non-consenting prisoners at Buchenwald, died shortly thereafter. Homosexual and Jewish prisoners were also given experimental treatments for typhus at Buchenwald, for phosphorus burns at Sachsenhausen, and were used for testing opiates and Pervitin. Some homosexual prisoners were castrated. ### Death penalty In a 1937 speech Himmler argued SS men who had served sentences for homosexuality should be transferred to a concentration camp and "shot while trying to escape". This policy was never implemented, although a few death sentences against SS men for homosexual acts were pronounced between 1937 and 1940. In a speech on 18 August 1941 Hitler argued homosexuality in the Hitler Youth should be punished by death. After learning of Hitler's remark, Himmler drafted a decree mandating the death penalty to any member of the SS or police who was found guilty of engaging in a homosexual act. Hitler, who was worried the decree might encourage left-wing propaganda that homosexuality was especially prevalent in Germany, signed the decree on 15 November 1941 on the condition there was no publicity. After the decree, only a few death sentences were pronounced. Himmler often commuted the sentence, especially if he thought the accused was not a committed homosexual. Many of those whose sentences were commuted were sent to serve in the Dirlewanger Brigade, where most were killed. After late 1943, because of military losses, it was policy to send SS men who were convicted of homosexuality into the army. The 1933 law on habitual criminals allowed for execution after the third conviction. On 4 September 1941 a new law allowed the execution of dangerous sex offenders and habitual criminals when "the protection of the Volksgemeinschaft or the need for just atonement require it". This law enabled authorities to pronounce death sentences against homosexuals and is known to have been employed in four cases in Austria. In 1943 Wilhelm Keitel authorized the death penalty for German soldiers who were convicted of homosexuality in "particularly serious cases". Only a few such executions are known to have occurred, mostly in conjunction with other charges – especially desertion. Some homosexuals were executed at Nazi euthanasia centers such as Bernburg and Meseritz-Obrawalde. It is difficult to estimate the number of homosexual men who were directly killed during the Nazi era. ## Continued existence Historian Alexander Zinn [de] estimates about one quarter of German homosexual men were investigated during the Nazi era, and that up to one tenth of those were imprisoned. According to Zinn, this rate is evidence of indifference among the general German population towards homosexuality; denunciation of consensual homosexual relations was less common. Zinn said that while all homosexuals in Nazi Germany suffered from the indirect effects of criminalization, their lives cannot be reduced to fear of arrest, and they retained a limited degree of personal freedom. Even before 1933, many homosexual men married women, and the Nazis' rise to power provided an added incentive, although such marriages were usually unhappy. Homosexual desires did not go away; some men sought homosexual contact outside of marriage, risking denunciation by an unhappy wife. Some men organized lavender marriages with lesbians they had known before 1933. Although nearly all homosexuals tried to avoid the attention of the authorities, men continued to find sexual partners at Kreuzberg bathhouses and Münzstrasse [de] movie theaters, and by cruising in places such as Alexanderplatz and the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. Many suffered from disrupted relationships, loneliness, or loss of self-esteem. A significant number of homosexual and bisexual men, including 25 percent of those persecuted in Hamburg, committed suicide. According to historian Manfred Herzer [de], homosexual men and women who avoided persecution "belonged to the willing subjects and beneficiaries of the Nazi state just like other German men and women". The likelihood of being persecuted was lower for those who suppressed their sex lives or served the higher goals of Nazism. Some German homosexuals joined the Nazi Party or fought for Germany during World War II. War and armed service provided an opportunity for sexual encounters with other men, both civilians and members of the armed services. There were also opportunities for non-consensual sex with other soldiers, subordinates, people from occupied countries, and prisoners. Both types of sex might be practiced by men who did not identify as homosexual. During the last years of the war, there were increased opportunities for sexual encounters in bombed-out cities. In October 1937, Himmler ordered that actors and artists should only be detained for homosexual acts with his authorization, unless they were caught in the act. ## Aftermath Nazi Germany's persecution of homosexuals is considered to be the most-severe episode in a longer history of discrimination and violence against homosexuals; never before or since have so many homosexuals been sentenced to prison in such a short period, even disregarding concentration camp imprisonment. An estimated 100,000 men were arrested and of these, half spent time in prison. Post-war attitudes towards homosexuality were influenced by Nazi propaganda associating homosexuality with criminality and medical illness. Because the various Allied countries considered homosexuality a crime, those prisoners who had not finished serving their sentence under Paragraph 175 had to do so, but those who had never been convicted or who had already served the full time were released. Arrest and incarceration of men for consensual homosexual acts continued to be commonplace in West Germany and Austria through the 1960s; between 1945 and 1969, West Germany convicted about 50,000 men; the same number of men as the Nazis had convicted during their twelve-year rule. The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 – one of the few Nazi-era laws that remained in force and unaltered in West Germany – was upheld by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1957 and remained in force until 1969, when homosexuality was partially decriminalized. In 1962 historian Hans-Joachim Schoeps commented; "For the homosexuals the Third Reich has not yet ended." Although not entirely accurate, this statement captured the view of many West German homosexuals. In East Germany, homosexuality was rarely prosecuted after 1957 and was decriminalized in 1968; the number of convictions there was much lower. The decriminalization did not result in widespread social acceptance, and Paragraph 175 was not repealed until 1994. ### Recognition as victims of National Socialism Homosexual concentration camp prisoners were not recognized as victims of National Socialism. Just as there was a hierarchy among prisoners in the concentration camps, there was a hierarchy among survivors. Reparations and state pensions available to other groups were refused to gay men, who were still classified as criminals. Political prisoners and persecuted Jews could be disqualified from victim status if they were discovered to be homosexual. In the 1950s Rudolf Klimmer unsuccessfully petitioned the East German government to recognize homosexuals as victims of Nazism and offer them compensation in line with that for other victims. In West Germany in the 1970s activists made similar demands, but these were rejected. In 1985 the Nazi persecution of homosexuals was officially recognized for the first time in a speech [de] by West German president Richard von Weizsäcker. In 2002, Germany annulled the Nazi-era judgements under Paragraph 175, and in 2017, victims were offered compensation. The 2017 annulment of judgements and compensation extended to men who were convicted after 1945, making this the only case in which the German state offered reparations for acts not considered "typical Nazi injustice" that would not be possible in a democratic state. ## Legacy Before 1970, there were hardly any references to the persecution of homosexuals. This changed in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots and the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in Germany that triggered the era of gay liberation. The memory of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals came to the attention of the LGBT community in the 1970s as large-scale LGBT rights movements developed. The awareness of homosexuals as a separate category of Nazi victims began in the United States and was later adopted by German homosexual activists. The term "Homocaust" came into use shortly after "Holocaust"; activists claimed there had been 250,000 deaths but historical research soon refuted this number. Martin Sherman's 1979 play Bent brought additional attention of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals in English-speaking countries. The pink triangle became one of the most-prominent symbols of gay liberation in the United States. Activists use the symbol to connect Nazi persecution to present-day discrimination and violence against LGBT people, and to mobilize opposition against it. The practice of laying memorial wreaths in concentration camps in memory of homosexual victims began in the 1970s. Permanent memorials were added to several concentration camps, including Mauthausen (1984), Sachsenhausen (1992), Dachau (1995), and Buchenwald (2002). This memorialization encountered strong resistance from established survivor associations. Memorials have also been constructed in several German cities, such as Frankfurt (1994), Cologne (1995), Berlin (2008), and Lübeck [de] (2016). Memorials to Nazi persecution of homosexuals have also been constructed in Amsterdam, Bologna, Turin, Barcelona, San Francisco, New York, Montevideo, Sydney, and Tel Aviv [he]. Hundreds of Stolpersteine have been installed to commemorate individual victims of the Nazis' anti-homosexual persecution. In the United States there was less emphasis on memorialization and more explicit comparisons between the Jewish Holocaust and persecution of homosexuals. German gay activists tended to see a close parallel to the Nazi persecution of communists and socialists. Sources attesting to the Nazi persecution of homosexuals are scarce. Most homosexuals, especially those who avoided arrest, never spoke about their experiences. The Nazis destroyed a great number of records, including the archive of the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. Remaining sources are mainly in the form of police and court records. In 1972 concentration camp survivor Josef Kohout published his memoir, The Men With the Pink Triangle, which is one of few accounts from a pink-triangle prisoner. The first historical research appeared at the end of the 1970s. ## See also - Lesbians in Nazi Germany - Transgender people in Nazi Germany
24,481,226	Olive Morris	1,169,193,469	Jamaican-born British community leader and activist (1952–1979)	[ "1952 births", "1979 deaths", "20th-century squatters", "Alumni of the Victoria University of Manchester", "Black British activists", "Black British history", "Black feminism", "British anti-racism activists", "British feminists", "DIY culture", "Deaths from cancer in England", "Deaths from non-Hodgkin lymphoma", "English activists", "English women activists", "Jamaican emigrants to the United Kingdom", "People from Brixton", "People from Saint Catherine Parish" ]	Olive Elaine Morris (26 June 1952 – 12 July 1979) was a Jamaican-born British-based community leader and activist in the feminist, black nationalist, and squatters' rights campaigns of the 1970s. At the age of 17, she claimed she was assaulted by Metropolitan Police officers following an incident involving a Nigerian diplomat in Brixton, South London. She joined the British Black Panthers, becoming a Marxist–Leninist communist and a radical feminist. She squatted buildings on Railton Road in Brixton; one hosted Sabarr Books and later became the 121 Centre, another was used as offices by the Race Today collective. Morris became a key organiser in the Black Women's Movement in the United Kingdom, co-founding the Brixton Black Women's Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent in London. When she studied at the Victoria University of Manchester, her activism continued. She was involved in the Manchester Black Women's Co-operative and travelled to China with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding. After graduating, Morris returned to Brixton and worked at the Brixton Community Law Centre. She became ill and received a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. She died at the age of 27. Her life and work have been commemorated both by official organisations – Lambeth Council named a building after her – and by the activist group the Remembering Olive Collective (ROC). Friends and comrades recalled her as fearless and dedicated to fighting oppression on all levels. She was depicted on the B£1 note of the Brixton Pound and has featured on lists of inspirational black British women. ## Early life Olive Morris was born on 26 June 1952 in Harewood, St Catherine, Jamaica. Her parents were Vincent Nathaniel Morris and Doris Lowena (née Moseley), and she had five siblings. When her parents moved to England, she lived with her grandmother and then followed them to South London at the age of nine. Her father was employed as a forklift driver and her mother worked in factories. Morris went to Heathbrook Primary School, Lavender Hill Girls' Secondary School, and Dick Sheppard School in Tulse Hill, leaving without qualifications. She later studied for O-Levels and A-levels, and attended a class at the London College of Printing (now named the London College of Communication). ## Adult life and activism In the late 1960s and early 1970s, black British activists embraced the multi-ethnic political discussions concerning black nationalism, classism and imperialism in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, as well as in the United Kingdom. Their overriding goals were to find their identity, cultural expression and political autonomy by helping their own communities, and others with similar struggles. Despite the passage of the Race Relations Act 1965, Afro-Caribbean people (alongside other minority groups) continued to experience racism; access to housing and employment was restricted in discriminatory ways and black communities were put under pressure by both the police and fascist groups such as the National Front. To combat these issues, black Britons used anti-colonial strategies and adopted African-inspired forms of cultural expression, drawing on black power movements, or black liberation movements in Angola, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Similarly, black British activists challenged ideas of respectability by the choices they made for their adornment, clothing, and hair styles. They listened to reggae and soca from the Caribbean and soul from the United States, and displayed images of internationally known revolutionary figures, such as Che Guevara and Angela Davis. Their fashion sense was also influenced by the civil rights movement. Morris was drawn into this movement because it allowed her to affirm her Caribbean roots and blackness, while also providing a means for her to fight against problems affecting her community. Just over five feet tall, she gained a reputation as a fierce activist. She was described by other activists as fearless and dedicated, refusing to stand by and allow injustice to occur. Oumou Longley, a gender studies and black history researcher, notes that Morris's identity was complex: "A Jamaican-born woman who grew up in Britain, a squatter with a degree from Manchester University, a woman with a long-term white-skinned partner and a woman who during this time had intimate relationships with other men and women". She deliberately appeared androgynous, adopting a "queer revolutionary soul sister look". Morris smoked, preferred jeans and T-shirts, either went bare-footed or wore comfortable shoes, and wore her hair in a short-cropped Afro. Her personal style choices challenged not only notions of what it meant to be British, but also Caribbean. African-American scholar Tanisha C. Ford observes that Morris was gender-nonconforming in the same way as the activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the US, who cut their hair short and switched from wearing dresses and pearls to overalls. ### Mistreatment following the Gomwalk incident On 15 November 1969, Nigerian diplomat Clement Gomwalk was confronted by Metropolitan Police officers while parked outside Desmond's Hip City, the first black record shop in Brixton. The Mercedes-Benz car he was driving bore a different number on the licence plate to that on the licence disc; police officers pulled him from the car and questioned him under the "sus law" (a stop and search power), disputing that he was a diplomat. A crowd formed around them and then a physical altercation took place. Local journalist Ayo Martin Tajo wrote up an account of the events a decade later which stated that Morris pushed through the crowd and attempted to stop the police hitting the diplomat; this led to the police assaulting her and several others. On Morris's own account as published in the Black People's News Service (the newsletter of the British Black Panthers), she arrived after Gomwalk had been arrested and taken away in a police van. The situation with the police officers escalated after the crowd began to confront them about their brutal treatment of Gomwalk. Morris recalled her friend being dragged away by police, shouting "I've done nothing" as his arm was broken. She did not relate exactly how she became involved, but did record that she was arrested and later beaten in police custody. Since she was dressed in men's clothing and had very short hair, the police believed she was a young man, one of them saying "She ain't no girl". According to Morris' account, she was forced to strip and threatened with rape: "They all made me take off my jumper and my bra in front of them to show I was a girl. A male cop holding a billy club said, 'Now prove you're a real woman.'" Referencing his club (truncheon or baton), he stated: "Look it's the right colour and the right size for you. Black cunt!" Morris's brother Basil described her injuries from the incident, saying that he "could hardly recognize her face, they beat her so badly". She was fined £10 and given a three-year suspended sentence of three months in prison for assaulting a police officer; the term was later reduced to one year. This was a formative experience for Morris, who became a Marxist–Leninist communist and a radical feminist. Her politics were intersectional, focusing on racism worldwide whilst aware of the connections to colonialism, sexism and class discrimination. ### British Black Panthers Morris decided to campaign against police harassment and joined the youth section of the British Black Panthers at the beginning of the 1970s. The group was not affiliated with the Black Panther Movement in the United States, but shared its focus on improving local communities. The British Panthers promoted Black Power and were pan-African, black nationalist and Marxist-Leninist. Morris was introduced to Altheia Jones-LeCointe, Farrukh Dhondy and Linton Kwesi Johnson and in August 1972, she attempted to meet Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the US movement, in Algeria; travelling with her friend Liz Obi, she only made it as far as Morocco. They ran out of money and had to ask at the British consulate in Tangier for help to return home. In the early 1970s, there were many court cases involving black activists on trumped up charges. At the trial of the Mangrove Nine, the Black Panthers organised solidarity pickets; the accused were eventually found not guilty, the judge acknowledging that officers of the Metropolitan Police were racially prejudiced. During the trial of the Oval Four, Morris was arrested after a scuffle with police officers outside the Old Bailey alongside Darcus Howe and another person. The three were charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm and took a political approach to their subsequent trial, requesting that members of the jury were either black, working-class or both. They researched the background of the judge, John Fitzgerald Marnan, and discovered that as Crown counsel in Kenya he had prosecuted participants in the anti-colonial Mau Mau Uprising. When the case came to trial in October 1972, the nine police officers gave contradictory evidence, including about the footwear Morris had been wearing, a crucial point since she was accused of kicking an officer. The jury acquitted her and the other defendants. Upon the demise of the British Black Panthers, Morris founded the Brixton Black Women's Group with Obi and Beverley Bryan in 1973. The collective explored the experience of women in the Black Panther Party and aimed to provide a space for Asian and black women to discuss political and cultural matters more generally. It was critical of white feminism, finding that issues such as abortion and wages for housework were not central to the black experience, since participants were more concerned about childcare and getting paid for their cleaning jobs. The group was organised non-hierarchically; it published the newsletter Speak Out and produced The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain, which was published by Virago Press in 1985. Three women from the collective were credited as authors because the publisher refused to use a collective name. Dedicated to Morris, the book was republished by Verso Books in 2018. ### Squatting in Brixton Having begun to squat buildings in Brixton on account of housing need, Morris came to see occupation as a means to establish political projects. Squatting provided a way for the Brixton Black Women's Group to remain autonomous from the broader women's liberation movement in England. In 1973, Morris squatted 121 Railton Road with Liz Obi. When workers broke in and took away their belongings, Morris and Obi quickly re-squatted the house and made a deal with the estate agent. Speaking to the London daily newspaper The Evening Standard, Morris said "the prices for flats and bedsits are too high for me". The Advisory Service for Squatters used a photograph of Morris climbing up the back wall of the squat on the cover of its 1979 Squatters Handbook. The building became a hub of political activism, hosting community groups such as Black People against State Harassment and the Brixton Black Women's Group. Sabarr Bookshop was set up by a group of local black men and women that included Morris and through it, activists were able to work with schools to provide black history reading materials for a more diverse curriculum. Morris and Obi then moved on to another squat at 65 Railton Road. The 121 squat later became an anarchist self-managed social centre known as the 121 Centre, which existed until 1999. Anthropologist Faye V. Harrison lived with Morris and her sister in the mid-1970s; she later recalled that Morris saw housing as a human right and squatting as direct action to provide shelter, so she was keen to encourage other people to squat. Morris was also involved with the Race Today collective, which featured Farrukh Dhondy, Leila Hassan, Darcus Howe and Gus John. When it split from the Institute of Race Relations in 1974, she helped it find a base in the squats of Brixton. The offices were eventually located at 165–167 Railton Road, where the collective produced the magazine and held discussion sessions in the basement. C. L. R. James lived on the top floor of the building. The offices later became the Brixton Advice Centre. ### Manchester Morris studied economics and social science at the Victoria University of Manchester from 1975 until 1978. She quickly integrated with grassroots political organisations in Moss Side, co-founding the Black Women's Mutual Aid Group and meeting local activists such as Kath Locke and Elouise Edwards. Locke had set up the Manchester Black Women's Co-operative (MBWC) in 1975 with Coca Clarke and Ada Phillips; Morris got involved and members later recalled her vigour. She also campaigned against the university's plans to increase tuition fees for overseas students. After her death, the MWBC folded due to financial mismanagement and reformed as the Abasindi Women's Co-operative; from its base in the Moss Side People's Centre, Abasindi organised educational, cultural and political activities without any public funding. Morris helped to establish a supplementary school after campaigning with local black parents for better education provision for their children, and a black bookshop. As part of her internationalist perspective she participated in the National Co-ordinating Committee of Overseas Students and travelled to Italy and Northern Ireland. In 1977, she travelled to China with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding and wrote "A Sister’s Visit to China" for the newsletter of the Brixton Black Women's Group. The article analysed anti-imperialist praxis and community organisation in China. ### Return to Brixton After graduating in 1978, Morris returned to Brixton and worked at the Brixton Community Law Centre. With her partner Mike McColgan she wrote "Has the Anti-Nazi League got it right on racism?" for the Brixton Ad-Hoc Committee against Police Repression. The pamphlet questioned whether the Anti-Nazi League was correct to fight fascism whilst ignoring institutional racism. With educationalists Beverley Bryan and Stella Dadzie, plus other women, Morris set up the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in London. It held its first conference at the Abeng Centre in Brixton, which Morris had helped to found. Bryan later remembered Morris as a "strong personality". At the conference, 300 African, Asian and Caribbean women from cities including Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Leeds, London, Manchester and Sheffield came together to discuss issues that concerned them, such as housing, employment, health and education. OWAAD aimed to be an umbrella group linking struggles and empowering women, whilst also opposing racism, sexism and other forms of oppression. Alongside the Brixton Black Women's Group, OWAAD was one of the first organisations for black women in the United Kingdom. Morris edited FOWAD!, the group's newsletter, which continued to publish after her death. ## Death Whilst on a cycling trip in Spain with McColgan in 1978, Morris began to feel ill. Upon her return to London, she went to King's College Hospital and was sent away with tablets for flatulence, only to later receive a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in September. The cancer treatment was unsuccessful and she died on 12 July 1979 at St Thomas' Hospital, Lambeth, at the age of 27. Her grave is at Streatham Vale Cemetery. ## Recognition and legacy Alongside other women such as Liz Obi, Morris played an important part in the creation of a feminist Black Power movement in the UK and anthropologist Tracy Fisher describes her contributions as "immeasurable". The Brixton Black Women's Group published an obituary in the third issue of its newsletter praising Morris for her "total dedication to the struggles for liberation, democracy and socialism". In his 1980 poetry collection Inglan Is A Bitch, Linton Kwesi Johnson published "Jamaica Lullaby" in memory of Morris. Lambeth Council named its new building at 18 Brixton Hill after her in 1986, following a campaign by the Brixton Black Women's Group. The local housing benefit office was based there; Morris had demonstrated outside the office for better housing rights. The naming of the building followed the 1985 Brixton riot, which had been triggered by the police shooting of Cherry Groce; it was demolished in 2020. A playground was also named after Morris in Myatt's Fields. In 2000, Obi put on an exhibition about Morris at Brixton Library. Ana Laura López de la Torre launched the "Remember Olive Morris" blog in 2007 to commemorate Morris' legacy and the following year the Remembering Olive Collective (ROC) was launched, with members including Ford and Obi. It commemorated the life of Morris, collating information and situating her experiences within a broader history of black Brixton; the pamphlet Do You Remember Olive Morris? was published in 2010 and distributed to local schools in Lambeth. ROC set up the Olive Morris Memorial Awards in 2011, in order to offer financial support to women of African or Asian descent aged between 16 and 27. In 2019, the collective was re-launched as ROC 2.0 since the council building bearing Morris's name was scheduled for demolition and the group wanted to ensure that she would continue to be remembered. Ford sees ROC as driven by community historians, who in the UK are often behind projects such as the Black Cultural Archives, the Feminist Library and the George Padmore Institute. De la Torre and Obi deposited the materials they had collected into the Olive Morris Collection at the Lambeth Archives. The archives were based at the Minet Library until it was announced in 2020 that they would move to the new Olive Morris House, which would be constructed on the site of the old building as part of the Your New Town Hall housing project. Morris is depicted on the B£1 note of the Brixton Pound, a local currency. In 2017, a mural entitled "SAY IT LOUD" was painted in the Blenheim Gardens housing estate in Brixton, as part of the Watch This Space initiative. It was painted by the South African artist Breeze Yoko and draws on his character "Boniswa", while also paying homage to Morris. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of most women gaining the right to vote in 2018, The Voice listed eight black women who have contributed to the development of Britain: Morris, Kathleen Wrasama, Connie Mark, Fanny Eaton, Diane Abbott, Lilian Bader, Margaret Busby, and Mary Seacole. Morris was also named by the Evening Standard on a list of 14 "Inspirational Black British Women Throughout History" alongside Seacole, Mark, Busby, Abbott, Claudia Jones, Adelaide Hall, Joan Armatrading, Tessa Sanderson, Doreen Lawrence, Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Sharon White, Malorie Blackman, and Zadie Smith. Morris was recognised with a Google Doodle in the UK on 26 June 2020 to mark what would have been her 68th birthday. Morris's life and activism was dramatised in the BAFTA nominated 2023 short film The Ballad of Olive Morris. In 2021 Olive Morris Court opened in Tottenham, on the site of a former storage yard. The project included 33 modular-homes designed to support people experiencing homelessness and rough-sleeping .
12,171,307	Great Western Railway War Memorial	1,149,004,381	Railway company war memorial in London, England	[ "1922 establishments in England", "1922 sculptures", "British railway war memorials", "Bronze sculptures in the City of Westminster", "Great Western Railway", "Military memorials in London", "Paddington", "Sculptures by Charles Sargeant Jagger", "Sculptures of men in the United Kingdom", "Statues in London", "World War I memorials in England", "World War II memorials in England" ]	The Great Western Railway War Memorial is a First World War memorial by Charles Sargeant Jagger and Thomas S. Tait. It stands on platform 1 at London Paddington station, commemorating the 2,500 employees of the Great Western Railway (GWR) who were killed in the conflict. One-third of the GWR's workforce of almost 80,000 left to fight in the First World War, the company guaranteeing their jobs, and the GWR gave over its workshops for munitions manufacturing as well as devoting its network to transporting soldiers and military equipment. The company considered several schemes for a war memorial before approaching Jagger to design a statue. Some officials continued to push for an alternate design, to the point that Jagger threatened to resign. Jagger was working on several other war memorial commissions at the same time as the GWR's, including his most famous, the Royal Artillery Memorial. The memorial consists of a bronze statue of a soldier, dressed in heavy winter clothing, reading a letter from home. The statue stands on platform 1 of Paddington station, on a polished granite plinth within a white stone surround. The names of the dead were recorded on a roll that was buried underneath the plinth. Viscount Churchill, the company chairman, unveiled the memorial on 11 November 1922, in front of the Archbishop of Canterbury, GWR officials, and more than 6,000 relatives of the dead. Such was the expected size of the crowd that the GWR built viewing stands across two platforms and the tracks in between them. Jagger's statue was the model for a memorial to commemorate the British Army's postal service, unveiled in 1981, and for a scheme in 2014 encouraging people to write a letter as part of the First World War centenary. During the COVID-19 pandemic, local communities on the GWR network laid wreaths on trains that carried them to Paddington to be laid at the memorial for Armistice Day. ## Background ### Great Western Railway The Great Western Railway (GWR) was one of Britain's largest railway companies at the start of the 20th century. Its network, radiating from London Paddington station, covered much of the south and west of England and South Wales, and reached into the Midlands. At the outbreak of the First World War, all railways were taken under government control. In the early stages of the war, the railway was concentrated on moving military personnel and supplies to ports for shipping to France and to military establishments in Britain, especially Plymouth Dockyard and the multiple army bases around Salisbury Plain. As with other major employers, many of the GWR's employees left to join the armed forces; this contribution to the war effort was a source of pride for the GWR and there was considerable competition between the railway companies over the number of troops each provided. The GWR offered a guarantee that it would re-employ all those who left to fight, once the war was over. In August 1914, the month the war began, over 4,000 GWR employees (mainly reservists), were called up, a number which increased to almost 8,500 by the end of October. In December 1914, the GWR published its first casualty figures—58 men were reported killed and 200 had been wounded or taken prisoner. By June 1916, over 23,000 GWR employees had enlisted and the railway was forced to implement controls to ensure it was able to continue its operations. New volunteers required management approval to enlist, and workers in some essential jobs were not released. The GWR had a workforce of 78,000 people in 1914, of whom roughly one third—24,000 men—joined the armed forces. Of those, 1,902 had been reported killed by the end of November 1918; the final figure, used for the memorial, was 2,524. As well as manpower, the GWR gave up the majority of its ships for military use. Its other war-related endeavours included running ambulance trains and producing munitions in its workshops. ### Artists In the aftermath of the war, memorials were built across Britain, including many by private companies in honour of their employees. Charles Sargeant Jagger (1885–1934) was a sculptor who joined the army at the outbreak of the war. He was wounded several times and awarded the Military Cross for gallantry. He later built his artistic reputation on his designs for war memorials. His first memorial commission was the Hoylake and West Kirby War Memorial. The expressive figures he sculpted for that memorial were highly praised, leading to commissions for war memorials across England and several battlefield memorials abroad. Although memorialisation of the First World War was largely the preserve of architects, Jagger enjoyed more success as a designer of war memorials than any other British sculptor, receiving several high-profile commissions. He was working on several commissions at around the same time as the GWR's memorial, including Portsmouth War Memorial and the Royal Artillery Memorial, his most famous work. All feature Jagger's characteristic "Tommy", a soldier in action, rather than the spiritual figures more commonly found on war monuments. Thomas Smith Tait (1882–1954) was an architect educated at the Glasgow School of Art. He enlisted in the army under the Derby Scheme and spent most of the war as a draughtsman at the Royal Artillery Barracks, Woolwich. After the end of hostilities, he developed a reputation as a designer of war memorials, which included several collaborations with Jagger. ## Commissioning The GWR established a war memorial committee to explore option for commemorations. Among the options it rejected were a triumphal arch on the approach to Paddington station (which would have been in keeping with the London and South Western Railway's memorial at Waterloo station), a mural on a wall at Paddington, a series of tablets at stations on the GWR network, or an engraving on Paddington's pedestrian footbridge. Eventually the committee decided to commission a statuary memorial. The railway company authorised £5,625, though the completed memorial came in around £1,000 under budget. The GWR chose Jagger to design its memorial. Sir Reginald Blomfield had recommended him to the government, and this recommendation appears to have been passed to a member of the GWR's board. The committee also sought recommendations from several established sculptors, and George Frampton recommended him to Sir Ernest Palmer, the chairman of the committee. The relationship between sculptor and client was not always smooth—the company closely monitored Jagger's progress, much to his annoyance. He submitted multiple designs which did not meet with the committee's approval. At one point, Jagger wrote a letter of resignation after members of the war memorial committee continued to push for a bas-relief sculpture rather than the statue specified. The letter prompted a personal visit from the GWR's chief engineer, followed by a letter from the board expressing their desire that Jagger should complete the work as previously agreed. ## Design The GWR began commemorations for its war dead from December 1915, when it first published its casualty statistics, starting with a paper roll of honour held in a custom-made wooden case and displayed on platform 1 at Paddington station. Copies were later made, which were displayed at other principal stations on the GWR network. The memorial, also placed on platform 1, consists of an over-life-size bronze statue of a soldier by Jagger, cast by the Thames Ditton Foundry in Surrey. The soldier is dressed in his greatcoat, sheepskin jerkin (a sleeveless undercoat), and scarf, with his helmet pushed back and resting on his shoulders, and reading a letter from home. The sculpture stands on a decorative plinth (pedestal), backed by a screen, which features the badges of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force in relief carving. The plinth is in polished Belgian granite except for a band of darker Aberdeen granite, contrasting with the white Portland stone of the screen behind. The stonework was designed by Tait. A sealed casket, made at the GWR's Swindon Works and bearing the names of the dead, was buried in the plinth. This was in contrast to the approach taken at other war memorials, including the Great Eastern Railway War Memorial at Liverpool Street station across London, where the names are on display on the wall. As part of the war memorial scheme, Tait redesigned the windows and doors in the wall behind the memorial with oak panelling. Jagger carved the GWR's company arms and the royal arms into the wood above the royal waiting room (now the first class lounge). The main inscription on the memorial, below the soldier's feet, reads: > IN HONOUR OF THOSE WHO SERVED IN THE GREAT WAR / 1914–1918 / 25,479 MEN OF THE GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY JOINED HIS MAJESTY'S FORCES / 2,524 GAVE THEIR LIVES. Below the original dedication, at the base of the plinth, a second inscription reads: > IN HONOUR OF THOSE WHO SERVED IN THE WORLD WARS / 1914 † 1918 / 1939 † 1945 / 3,312 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR KING AND COUNTRY This was added after the Second World War to commemorate the railway's casualties from that conflict. Anthony Lambert, writing for Historic England, described the statue as an "intensely felt and moving sculpture". Lambert attributed the figure's realism to Jagger's war experience, a conclusion with which academics Gill Abousnnouga and David Machin concurred in a book about war memorials. The pair described the scene of the soldier reading a letter as poignant, but go on to suggest that the stature of the figure—with his heavy coat resting on his shoulders—along with the weight of the bronze projects a sense of strength. Joe Whitlock Blundell and Roger Hudson, in their study of London's statuary, The Immortals, also note the influence of his military service on Jagger's sculpture, writing that he "knew whereof he spoke". Alan Borg, an art historian and former director of the Imperial War Museum compared the statue favourably to Jagger's more famous Royal Artillery Memorial: he felt that the quality and power of the GWR was equal to that of the Royal Artillery's, which he described as "one of the outstanding examples of 20th-century British art". According to the art historian Geoff Archer, Jagger's statue lacks any overt emotion but still "hints at underlying feelings". Archer imagined that the soldier's home-knitted scarf was a gift from the writer of the letter, possibly a wife or a mother. ## History The memorial was unveiled on 11 November 1922. Over 6,000 people gathered in the station to watch the ceremony, mostly invited guests who included GWR employees and relatives of those killed in the war, several of whom were brought in on special trains. To give such a large crowd a good view of the unveiling, the railway company built a stand on platforms 2 and 3 and across wagons moved into the tracks between the platforms. The ceremony began at 10:45 with an introduction from the rural dean of Paddington and hymns (including "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past"). The memorial was then unveiled by Victor Spencer, 1st Viscount Churchill, the GWR company chairman, who was accompanied by Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and multiple company officials. Two minutes' silence was observed at 11:00. After the silence, the archbishop led prayers and the GWR officials gave speeches praising the workforce's efforts during the war. Churchill expressed his hope that the statue, reading a letter rather than bearing arms, would bring solace to people who had written to their loved ones who were fighting in the war. The ceremony concluded with the singing of the national anthem, "God Save the King", after which the GWR's general manager, Felix Pole, laid a floral tribute on behalf of the staff, and relatives of the dead were given time to view the memorial up close and lay their own tributes in front of it. On 11 November 1949 the memorial was rededicated to commemorate the railway's casualties from World War II and the second inscription was added to the monument. Sir James Milne, the GWR's general manager throughout the Second World War, performed the ceremony. In 1982, a close replica of Jagger's statue was unveiled outside the post office at Inglis Barracks in London to commemorate the centenary of the founding of the Army Post Office Corps (now the British Forces Post Office). The statue, by Jill Tweed, was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II and moved to RAF Northolt in 2007 when the army unit responsible for it relocated. Conservation work was undertaken on the metalwork of the memorial in 2001 to repair damage caused by environmental factors including carbon deposits from diesel trains. During the centenary of the First World War, the novelists Neil Bartlett and Kate Pullinger invited the public to write a letter to an unknown soldier, a project inspired by Jagger's statue. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic when public gatherings were restricted and public transport use was diminished, the modern successor to the GWR carried poppy wreaths from across its network on trains to Paddington for Armistice Day (11 November). Local communities, representatives of the armed forces, and veterans' organisations laid wreaths on a train on its journey to London, symbolising the starting point of many soldiers' journeys in the First World War. Over 100 wreaths were laid from 60 stations, which were then laid by the memorial. The scheme was repeated in 2021. As the memorial is indoors, it cannot be a listed building in its own right as is the case with many war memorials, but it is explicitly included in the grade I listing for Paddington station. ## See also - Statue of Paddington Bear, another monument in Paddington station
673,671	1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens	1,173,466,778	Major volcanic eruption in Skamania County, Washington, U.S.	[ "1980 in Idaho", "1980 in Montana", "1980 in Oregon", "1980 in Washington (state)", "1980 natural disasters in the United States", "20th-century volcanic events", "Cascade Volcanoes", "Gifford Pinchot National Forest", "Landslides in 1980", "May 1980 events in the United States", "Megatsunamis", "Mount St. Helens", "Natural disasters in Washington (state)", "Peléan eruptions", "Phreatic eruptions", "Plinian eruptions", "VEI-5 eruptions", "Volcanic eruptions in the United States", "Volcanic tsunamis", "Volcanism of Washington (state)" ]	On March 27, 1980, a series of volcanic explosions and pyroclastic flows began at Mount St. Helens in Skamania County, Washington, United States. A series of phreatic blasts occurred from the summit and escalated until a major explosive eruption took place on May 18, 1980, at 8:32 am. The eruption, which had a Volcanic Explosivity Index of 5, was the most significant to occur in the contiguous United States since the much smaller 1915 eruption of Lassen Peak in California. It has often been declared the most disastrous volcanic eruption in U.S. history. The eruption was preceded by a two-month series of earthquakes and steam-venting episodes caused by an injection of magma at shallow depth below the volcano that created a large bulge and a fracture system on the mountain's north slope. An earthquake at 8:32:11 am PDT (UTC−7) on Sunday, May 18, 1980, caused the entire weakened north face to slide away, a sector collapse which was the largest subaerial landslide in recorded history. This allowed the partly molten rock, rich in high-pressure gas and steam, to suddenly explode northward toward Spirit Lake in a hot mix of lava and pulverized older rock, overtaking the landslide. An eruption column rose 80,000 feet (24 km; 15 mi) into the atmosphere and deposited ash in 11 U.S. states and various Canadian provinces. At the same time, snow, ice, and several entire glaciers on the volcano melted, forming a series of large lahars (volcanic mudslides) that reached as far as the Columbia River, nearly 50 miles (80 km) to the southwest. Less severe outbursts continued into the next day, only to be followed by other large, but not as destructive, eruptions later that year. Thermal energy released during the eruption was equal to 26 megatons of TNT. About 57 people were killed, including innkeeper and World War I veteran Harry R. Truman, photographers Reid Blackburn and Robert Landsburg, and volcanologist David A. Johnston. Hundreds of square miles were reduced to wasteland, causing over \$1 billion in damage (equivalent to \$ billion in ), thousands of animals were killed, and Mount St. Helens was left with a crater on its north side. At the time of the eruption, the summit of the volcano was owned by the Burlington Northern Railroad, but afterward, the railroad donated the land to the United States Forest Service. The area was later preserved in the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. ## Build-up to the eruption Mount St. Helens remained dormant from its last period of activity in the 1840s and 1850s until March 1980. Several small earthquakes, beginning on March 15, indicated that magma might have begun moving below the volcano. On March 20, at 3:45 pm Pacific Standard Time, a shallow, magnitude-4.2 earthquake centered below the volcano's north flank, signaled the volcano's return from 123 years of hibernation. A gradually building earthquake swarm saturated area seismographs and started to climax at about noon on March 25, reaching peak levels in the next two days, including an earthquake registering 5.1 on the Richter scale. A total of 174 shocks of magnitude 2.6 or greater was recorded during those two days. Shocks of magnitude 3.2 or greater occurred at a slightly increasing rate during April and May, with five earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above per day in early April, and eight per day the week before May 18. Initially, no direct sign of eruption was seen, but small earthquake-induced avalanches of snow and ice were reported from aerial observations. At 12:36 pm on March 27, phreatic eruptions (explosions of steam caused by magma suddenly heating groundwater) ejected and smashed rock from within the old summit crater, excavating a new crater 250 feet (75 m) wide, and sending an ash column about 7,000 feet (2.1 km) into the air. By this date, a 16,000-foot-long (4.9 km) eastward-trending fracture system had also developed across the summit area. This was followed by more earthquake swarms and a series of steam explosions that sent ash 10,000 to 11,000 feet (3,000 to 3,400 m) above their vent. Most of this ash fell between 3 and 12 mi (5 and 19 km) from its vent, but some was carried 150 mi (240 km) south to Bend, Oregon, or 285 mi (460 km) east to Spokane, Washington. A second, new crater and a blue flame were observed on March 29. The flame was visibly emitted from both craters and was probably created by burning gases. Static electricity generated from ash clouds rolling down the volcano sent out lightning bolts that were up to 2 mi (3 km) long. Ninety-three separate outbursts were reported on March 30, and increasingly strong harmonic tremors were first detected on April 1, alarming geologists and prompting Governor Dixy Lee Ray to declare a state of emergency on April 3. Governor Ray issued an executive order on April 30 creating a "red zone" around the volcano; anyone caught in this zone without a pass faced a \$500 fine () or six months in jail. This precluded many cabin owners from visiting their property. By April 7, the combined crater was 1,700 by 1,200 ft (520 by 370 m) and 500 ft (150 m) deep. A USGS team determined in the last week of April that a 1.5 mi-diameter (2.4 km) section of St. Helens' north face was displaced outward by at least 270 ft (82 m). For the rest of April and early May, this bulge grew by 5 to 6 ft (1.5 to 1.8 m) per day, and by mid-May, it extended more than 400 ft (120 m) north. As the bulge moved northward, the summit area behind it progressively sank, forming a complex, down-dropped block called a graben. Geologists announced on April 30 that sliding of the bulge area was the greatest immediate danger and that such a landslide might spark an eruption. These changes in the volcano's shape were related to the overall deformation that increased the volume of the volcano by 0.03 cu mi (0.13 km<sup>3</sup>) by mid-May. This volume increase presumably corresponded to the volume of magma that pushed into the volcano and deformed its surface. Because the intruding magma remained below ground and was not directly visible, it was called a cryptodome, in contrast to a true lava dome exposed at the surface. On May 7, eruptions similar to those in March and April resumed, and over the following days, the bulge approached its maximum size. All activity had been confined to the 350-year-old summit dome and did not involve any new magma. About 10,000 earthquakes were recorded before the May 18 event, with most concentrated in a small zone less than 1.6 mi (2.6 km) directly below the bulge. Visible eruptions ceased on May 16, reducing public interest and consequently the number of spectators in the area. Mounting public pressure then forced officials to allow 50 carloads of property owners to enter the danger zone on Saturday, May 17, to gather whatever property they could carry. Another trip was scheduled for 10 am the next day, and because that was Sunday, more than 300 loggers who would normally be working in the area were not there. By the time of the climactic eruption, dacite magma intruding into the volcano had forced the north flank outward nearly 500 ft (150 m) and heated the volcano's groundwater system, causing many steam-driven explosions (phreatic eruptions). ## Landslide and climactic phase As May 18 dawned, Mount St. Helens' activity did not show any change from the pattern of the preceding month. The rates of bulge movement and sulfur dioxide emission, and ground temperature readings did not reveal any changes indicating a catastrophic eruption. USGS volcanologist David A. Johnston was on duty at an observation post around 6 mi (10 km) north of the volcano: as of 6:00 am, Johnston's measurements did not indicate any unusual activity. At 8:32 am, a magnitude-5.1 earthquake centered directly below the north slope triggered that part of the volcano to slide, approximately 7–20 seconds after the shock, followed a few seconds later by the main volcanic blast. The landslide, the largest subaerial landslide in recorded history, traveled at 110 to 155 mph (177 to 249 km/h) and moved across Spirit Lake's west arm. Part of it hit a 1,150 ft-high (350 m) ridge about 6 mi (10 km) north. Some of the slide spilled over the ridge, but most of it moved 13 mi (21 km) down the North Fork Toutle River, filling its valley up to 600 feet (180 m) deep with avalanche debris. An area of about 24 sq mi (62 km<sup>2</sup>) was covered, and the total volume of the deposit was about 0.7 cu mi (2.9 km<sup>3</sup>). Scientists were able to reconstruct the motion of the landslide from a series of rapid photographs by Gary Rosenquist, who was camping 11 mi (18 km) away from the blast . Rosenquist, his party, and his photographs survived because the blast was deflected by local topography 1 mi (1.6 km) short of his location. Most of St. Helens' former north side became a rubble deposit 17 mi (27 km) long, averaging 150 ft (46 m) thick; the slide was thickest at 1 mi (1.6 km) below Spirit Lake and thinnest at its western margin. The landslide temporarily displaced the waters of Spirit Lake to the ridge north of the lake, in a giant wave about 600 ft (180 m) high. This, in turn, created a 295 ft (90 m) avalanche of debris consisting of the returning waters and thousands of uprooted trees and stumps. Some of these remained intact with roots, but most had been sheared off at the stump seconds earlier by the blast of superheated volcanic gas and ash that had immediately followed and overtaken the initial landslide. The debris was transported along with the water as it returned to its basin, raising the surface level of Spirit Lake by about 200 ft (61 m). Four decades after the eruption, floating log mats persist on Spirit Lake and nearby St. Helens Lake, changing position with the wind. The rest of the trees, especially those that were not completely detached from their roots, were turned upright by their own weight and became waterlogged, sinking into the muddy sediments at the bottom where they are in the process of becoming petrified in the anaerobic and mineral-rich waters. This provides insight into other sites with a similar fossil record. ## Pyroclastic flows ### Initial lateral blast The landslide exposed the dacite magma in St. Helens' neck to much lower pressure, causing the gas-charged, partially molten rock and high-pressure steam above it to explode a few seconds after the landslide started. Explosions burst through the trailing part of the landslide, blasting rock debris northward. The resulting blast directed the pyroclastic flow laterally. It consisted of very hot volcanic gases, ash, and pumice formed from new lava, as well as pulverized old rock, which hugged the ground. Initially moving about 220 mph (350 km/h), the blast quickly accelerated to around 670 mph (1,080 km/h), and it may have briefly passed the speed of sound. Pyroclastic flow material passed over the moving avalanche and spread outward, devastating a fan-shaped area 23 miles across by 19 miles long (37 km × 31 km). In total, about 230 sq mi (600 km<sup>2</sup>) of forest were knocked down, and extreme heat killed trees miles beyond the blow-down zone. At its vent, the lateral blast probably did not last longer than about 30 seconds, but the northward-radiating and expanding blast cloud continued for about another minute. Superheated flow material flashed water in Spirit Lake and North Fork Toutle River to steam, creating a larger, secondary explosion that was heard as far away as British Columbia, Montana, Idaho, and Northern California, yet many areas closer to the eruption (Portland, Oregon, for example) did not hear the blast. This so-called "quiet zone" extended radially a few tens of miles from the volcano and was created by the complex response of the eruption's sound waves to differences in temperature and air motion of the atmospheric layers, and to a lesser extent, local topography. Later studies indicated that one-third of the 0.045 cu mi (0.19 km<sup>3</sup>) of material in the flow was new lava, and the rest was fragmented, older rock. ### Lateral blast result The huge ensuing ash cloud sent skyward from St. Helens' northern foot was visible throughout the quiet zone. The near-supersonic lateral blast, loaded with volcanic debris, caused devastation as far as 19 mi (31 km) from the volcano. The area affected by the blast can be subdivided into roughly concentric zones: 1. Direct blast zone, the innermost zone, averaged about 8 mi (13 km) in radius, an area in which virtually everything, natural or artificial, was obliterated or carried away. For this reason, this zone also has been called the "tree-removal zone". The flow of the material carried by the blast was not deflected by topographic features in this zone. The blast released energy equal to 24 megatonnes of TNT (100 petajoules). 2. Channelized blast zone, an intermediate zone, extended out to distances as far as 19 mi (31 km) from the volcano, an area in which the flow flattened everything in its path and was channeled to some extent by topography. In this zone, the forces and direction of the blast are strikingly demonstrated by the parallel alignment of toppled large trees, broken off at the base of the trunk as if they were blades of grass mown by a scythe. This zone was also known as the "tree-down zone". Channeling and deflection of the blast caused strikingly varied local effects that still remained conspicuous after some decades. Where the blast struck open land directly, it scoured it, breaking trees off short and stripping vegetation and even topsoil, thereby delaying revegetation for many years. Where the blast was deflected so as to pass overhead by several metres, it left the topsoil and the seeds it contained, permitting faster revegetation with scrub and herbaceous plants, and later with saplings. Trees in the path of such higher-level blasts were broken off wholesale at various heights, whereas nearby stands in more sheltered positions recovered comparatively rapidly without conspicuous long-term harm. 3. Seared zone, also called the "standing dead" zone, the outermost fringe of the impacted area, is a zone in which trees remained standing, but were singed brown by the hot gases of the blast. By the time this pyroclastic flow hit its first human victims, it was still as hot as 680 °F (360 °C) and filled with suffocating gas and flying debris. Most of the 57 people known to have died in that day's eruption succumbed to asphyxiation, while several died from burns. Lodge owner Harry R. Truman was buried under hundreds of feet of avalanche material . Volcanologist David A. Johnston, who was stationed at Observation post Coldwater II , located just 6 miles (10 km) north of the mountain, was one of those killed , as was Reid Blackburn , a National Geographic photographer who was situated near Coldwater Creek , 8 miles (13 km) from the volcano, on the day of the eruption. Robert Landsburg, another photographer, who was within a few miles of the summit , was killed by the ash cloud. He was able to protect his film with his body, and the surviving photos provided geologists with valuable documentation of the historic eruption. Another eruption victim, amateur radio operator Gerry Martin, located near the Coldwater peak and farther north of Johnston's position , reporting his sighting of the eruption enveloping the Coldwater II observation post. As the blast overwhelmed Johnston's post, Martin declared solemnly: "Gentlemen, the camper and car that's sitting over to the south of me is covered. It's going to hit me, too." before his radio went silent. ### Later flows Subsequent outpourings of pyroclastic material from the breach left by the landslide consisted mainly of new magmatic debris rather than fragments of pre-existing volcanic rocks. The resulting deposits formed a fan-like pattern of overlapping sheets, tongues, and lobes. At least 17 separate pyroclastic flows occurred during the May 18 eruption, and their aggregate volume was about 0.05 cu mi (0.21 km<sup>3</sup>). The flow deposits were still at about 570 to 790 °F (300 to 420 °C) two weeks after they erupted. Secondary steam-blast eruptions fed by this heat created pits on the northern margin of the pyroclastic-flow deposits, at the south shore of Spirit Lake, and along the upper part of the North Fork Toutle River. These steam-blast explosions continued sporadically for weeks or months after the emplacement of pyroclastic flows, and at least one occurred a year later, on May 16, 1981. ## Ash column As the avalanche and initial pyroclastic flow were still advancing, a huge ash column grew to a height of 12 mi (19 km) above the expanding crater in less than 10 minutes and spread tephra into the stratosphere for 10 straight hours. Near the volcano, the swirling ash particles in the atmosphere generated lightning, which in turn started many forest fires. During this time, parts of the mushroom-shaped ash-cloud column collapsed, and fell back upon the earth. This fallout, mixed with magma, mud, and steam, sent additional pyroclastic flows speeding down St. Helens' flanks. Later, slower flows came directly from the new north-facing crater and consisted of glowing pumice bombs and very hot pumiceous ash. Some of these hot flows covered ice or water, which flashed to steam, creating craters up to 65 ft (20 m) in diameter and sending ash as much as 6,500 ft (2,000 m) into the air. Strong, high-altitude wind carried much of this material east-northeasterly from the volcano at an average speed around 60 miles per hour (100 km/h). By 9:45 am, it had reached Yakima, Washington, 90 mi (140 km) away, and by 11:45 am, it was over Spokane, Washington. A total of 4 to 5 in (100 to 130 mm) of ash fell on Yakima, and areas as far east as Spokane were plunged into darkness by noon, where visibility was reduced to 10 ft (3 m) and 0.5 in (13 mm) of ash fell. Continuing eastward, St. Helens' ash fell in the western part of Yellowstone National Park by 10:15 pm, and was seen on the ground in Denver the next day. In time, ash fall from this eruption was reported as far away as Minnesota and Oklahoma, and some of the ash drifted around the globe within about 2 weeks. During the nine hours of vigorous eruptive activity, about 540,000,000 tons (540×10^<sup>6</sup> short tons or 490×10^<sup>6</sup> t) of ash fell over an area of more than 22,000 sq mi (57,000 km<sup>2</sup>). The total volume of the ash before its compaction by rainfall was about 0.3 cu mi (1.3 km<sup>3</sup>). The volume of the uncompacted ash is equivalent to about 0.05 cu mi (0.21 km<sup>3</sup>) of solid rock, or about 7% of the amount of material that slid off in the debris avalanche. By around 5:30 pm on May 18, the vertical ash column declined in stature, but less severe outbursts continued through the next several days. ## Ash properties Generally, given that the way airborne ash is deposited after an eruption is strongly influenced by the meteorological conditions, a certain variation of the ash type will occur, as a function of distance to the volcano or time elapsed from eruption. The ash from Mount St. Helens is no exception, hence the ash properties have large variations. ### Chemical composition The bulk chemical composition of the ash has been found to be about 65% silicon dioxide, 18% aluminum oxide, 5% ferric oxide, 4% each calcium oxide and sodium oxide, and 2% magnesium oxide. Trace elements were also detected, their concentrations varying as 0.05–0.09% chlorine, 0.02–0.03% fluorine, and 0.09–0.3% sulfur. ### Index of refraction The index of refraction, a measure used in physics to describe how light propagates through a particular substance, is an important property of volcanic ash. This number is complex, having both real and imaginary parts, the real part indicating how light disperses and the imaginary part indicating how light is absorbed by the substance. The silicate particles are known to have a real index of refraction ranging between 1.5 and 1.6 for visible light. However, a spectrum of colors is associated with samples of volcanic ash, from very light to dark gray. This makes for variations in the measured imaginary refractive index under visible light. In the case of Mount St. Helens, the ash settled in three main layers on the ground: - The bottom layer was dark gray and was found to be abundant in older rocks and crystal fragments. - The middle layer consisted of a mixture of glass shards and pumice. - The top layer was ash consisting of very fine particles. For example, when comparing the imaginary part of the refractive index k of stratospheric ash from 9.3 and 11.2 mi (15 and 18 km) from the volcano, they have similar values around 700 nm (around 0.009), while they differ significantly around 300 nm. Here, the 11.2 mi (18 km) sample (k was found to be around 0.009) was much more absorbent than the 9.3 mi (15 km) sample (k was found to be around 0.002). ## Mudslides flow downstream The hot, exploding material also broke apart and melted nearly all of the mountain's glaciers, along with most of the overlying snow. As in many previous St. Helens' eruptions, this created huge lahars (volcanic mudflows) and muddy floods that affected three of the four stream drainage systems on the mountain, and which started to move as early as 8:50 am. Lahars travelled as fast as 90 mph (140 km/h) while still high on the volcano, but progressively slowed to about 3 mph (4.8 km/h) on the flatter and wider parts of rivers. Mudflows from the southern and eastern flanks had the consistency of wet concrete as they raced down Muddy River, Pine Creek, and Smith Creek to their confluence at the Lewis River. Bridges were taken out at the mouth of Pine Creek and the head of Swift Reservoir, which rose 2.6 ft (0.79 m) by noon to accommodate the nearly 18,000,000 cu yd (14,000,000 m<sup>3</sup>) of additional water, mud, and debris. Glacier and snowmelt mixed with tephra on the volcano's northeast slope to create much larger lahars. These mudflows traveled down the north and south forks of the Toutle River and joined at the confluence of the Toutle forks and the Cowlitz River near Castle Rock, Washington, at 1:00 pm. Ninety minutes after the eruption, the first mudflow had moved 27 mi (43 km) upstream, where observers at Weyerhaeuser's Camp Baker saw a 12 ft-high (4 m) wall of muddy water and debris pass. Near the confluence of the Toutle's north and south forks at Silver Lake, a record flood stage of 23.5 ft (7.2 m) was recorded. A large but slower-moving mudflow with a mortar-like consistency was mobilized in early afternoon at the head of the Toutle River north fork. By 2:30 pm, the massive mudflow had destroyed Camp Baker, and in the following hours, seven bridges were carried away. Part of the flow backed up for 2.5 mi (4.0 km) soon after entering the Cowlitz River, but most continued downstream. After traveling 17 mi (27 km) further, an estimated 3,900,000 cu yd (3,000,000 m<sup>3</sup>) of material were injected into the Columbia River, reducing the river's depth by 25 ft (8 m) for a 4 mi (6 km) stretch. The resulting 13 ft (4.0 m) river depth temporarily closed the busy channel to ocean-going freighters, costing Portland, Oregon, an estimated \$5 million (equivalent to \$ million ). Ultimately, more than 65×10^<sup>6</sup> cu yd (50×10^<sup>6</sup> m<sup>3</sup>; 1.8×10^<sup>9</sup> cu ft) of sediment were dumped along the lower Cowlitz and Columbia Rivers. ## Aftermath ### Direct results The May 18, 1980, event was the most deadly and economically destructive volcanic eruption in the history of the contiguous United States. About 57 people were killed directly from the blast, and 200 houses, 47 bridges, 15 mi (24 km) of railways, and 185 mi (298 km) of highway were destroyed; two people were killed indirectly in accidents that resulted from poor visibility, and two more suffered fatal heart attacks from shoveling ash. U.S. President Jimmy Carter surveyed the damage, and said it looked more desolate than a moonscape. A film crew was dropped by helicopter on Mount St. Helens on May 23 to document the destruction, but their compasses spun in circles and they quickly became lost. A second eruption occurred the next day (see below), but the crew survived and was rescued two days after that. The eruption ejected more than 1 cu mi (4.2 km<sup>3</sup>) of material. A quarter of that volume was fresh lava in the form of ash, pumice, and volcanic bombs, while the rest was fragmented, older rock. The removal of the north side of the mountain (13% of the cone's volume) reduced Mount St. Helens' height by about 1,300 ft (400 m) and left a crater 1 to 2 mi (1.6 to 3.2 km) wide and 2,100 ft (640 m) deep with its north end open in a huge breach. More than 4,000,000,000 board feet (9,400,000 m<sup>3</sup>) of timber were damaged or destroyed, mainly by the lateral blast. At least 25% of the destroyed timber was salvaged after September 1980. Downwind of the volcano, in areas of thick ash accumulation, many agricultural crops, such as wheat, apples, potatoes, and alfalfa, were destroyed. As many as 1,500 elk and 5,000 deer were killed, and an estimated 12 million Chinook and Coho salmon fingerlings died when their hatcheries were destroyed. Another estimated 40,000 young salmon were lost when they swam through turbine blades of hydroelectric generators after reservoir levels were lowered along the Lewis River to accommodate possible mudflows and flood waters. In total, Mount St. Helens released 24 megatons TNT of thermal energy, seven of which were a direct result of the blast. This is equivalent to 1,600 times the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. #### Disputed death toll The death toll most commonly cited is 57, but two points of dispute remain. The first point regards two officially listed victims, Paul Hiatt and Dale Thayer. They were reported missing after the explosion. In the aftermath, investigators were able to locate individuals named Paul Hiatt and Dale Thayer who were alive and well. However, they were unable to determine who reported Hiatt missing, and the person who was listed as reporting Thayer missing claimed she was not the one who had done so. Since the investigators could not thus verify that they were the same Hiatt and Thayer who were reported missing, the names remain listed among the presumed dead. The second point regards three missing people who are not officially listed as victims: Robert Ruffle, Steven Whitsett, and Mark Melanson. Cowlitz County Emergency Services Management lists them as "Possibly Missing — Not on [the official] List". According to Melanson's brother, in October 1983, Cowlitz County officials told his family that Melanson "is believed [...] a victim of the May 18, 1980, eruption" and that after years of searching, the family eventually decided "he's buried in the ash". Taking these two points of dispute into consideration, the direct death toll could be as low as 55 or as high as 60. When combined with the four indirect victims (two dying from vehicle accidents due to poor visibility, and two dying from heart attacks triggered by shovelling ash) those numbers range from 59 to 64. ### Ash damage and removal The ash fall created some temporary major problems with transportation, sewage disposal, and water treatment systems. Visibility was greatly decreased during the ash fall, closing many highways and roads. Interstate 90 from Seattle to Spokane was closed for a week and a half. Air travel was disrupted for between a few days and two weeks, as several airports in eastern Washington shut down because of ash accumulation and poor visibility. Over a thousand commercial flights were cancelled following airport closures. Fine-grained, gritty ash caused substantial problems for internal combustion engines and other mechanical and electrical equipment. The ash contaminated oil systems, clogged air filters, and scratched moving surfaces. Fine ash caused short circuits in electrical transformers, which in turn caused power blackouts. Removing and disposing of the ash was a monumental task for some Eastern Washington communities. State and federal agencies estimated that over 2,400,000 cu yd (1,800,000 m<sup>3</sup>) of ash, equivalent to about 900,000 tons in weight, were removed from highways and airports in Washington. The ash removal cost \$2.2 million and took 10 weeks in Yakima. The need to remove ash quickly from transport routes and civil works dictated the selection of some disposal sites. Some cities used old quarries and existing sanitary landfills; others created dump sites wherever expedient. To minimize wind reworking of ash dumps, the surfaces of some disposal sites were covered with topsoil and seeded with grass. In Portland, the mayor eventually threatened businesses with fines if they failed to remove the ash from their parking lots. ### Cost A refined estimate of \$1.1 billion (\$ billion in ) was determined in a study by the International Trade Commission at the request of the United States Congress. A supplemental appropriation of \$951 million for disaster relief was voted by Congress, of which the largest share went to the Small Business Administration, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Also, indirect and intangible costs of the eruption were incurred. Unemployment in the immediate region of Mount St. Helens rose 10-fold in the weeks immediately following the eruption, and then returned to near-normal levels once timber-salvaging and ash-cleanup operations were underway. Only a small percentage of residents left the region because of lost jobs owing to the eruption. Several months after May 18, a few residents reported suffering stress and emotional problems, though they had coped successfully during the crisis. Counties in the region requested funding for mental-health programs to assist such people. Initial public reaction to the May 18 eruption dealt a nearly crippling blow to tourism, an important industry in Washington. Not only was tourism down in the Mount St. Helens–Gifford Pinchot National Forest area, but conventions, meetings and social gatherings also were cancelled or postponed at cities and resorts elsewhere in Washington and neighboring Oregon not affected by the eruption. The adverse effect on tourism and conventioneering, however, proved only temporary. Mount St. Helens, perhaps because of its reawakening, has regained its appeal for tourists. The U.S. Forest Service and the State of Washington opened visitor centers and provided access for people to view the volcano's devastation. ## Later eruptions St. Helens produced an additional five explosive eruptions between May and October 1980. Through early 1990, at least 21 periods of eruptive activity had occurred. The volcano remains active, with smaller, dome-building eruptions continuing into 2008. ### 1980–1991 An eruption occurred on May 25, 1980, at 2:30 am that sent an ash column 9 mi (48,000 ft; 14 km) into the atmosphere. The eruption was preceded by a sudden increase in earthquake activity, and occurred during a rainstorm. Erratic wind from the storm carried ash from the eruption to the south and west, lightly dusting large parts of western Washington and Oregon. Pyroclastic flows exited the northern breach and covered avalanche debris, lahars, and other pyroclastic flows deposited by the May 18 eruption. At 7:05 pm on June 12, a plume of ash billowed 2.5 mi (4.0 km) above the volcano. At 9:09 pm, a much stronger explosion sent an ash column about 10 mi (16 km) skyward. This event caused the Portland area, previously spared by wind direction, to be thinly coated with ash in the middle of the annual Rose Festival. A dacite dome then oozed into existence on the crater floor, growing to a height of 200 ft (61 m) and a width of 1,200 ft (370 m) within a week. A series of large explosions on July 22 broke more than a month of relative quiet. The July eruptive episode was preceded by several days of measurable expansion of the summit area, heightened earthquake activity, and changed emission rates of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. The first hit at 5:14 pm as an ash column shot 10 mi (16 km) and was followed by a faster blast at 6:25 pm that pushed the ash column above its previous maximum height in just 7.5 minutes. The final explosion started at 7:01 pm, and continued over two hours. When the relatively small amount of ash settled over eastern Washington, the dome built in June was gone. Seismic activity and gas emission steadily increased in early August, and on August 7 at 4:26 pm, an ash cloud slowly expanded 8 mi (13 km) into the sky. Small pyroclastic flows came through the northern breach and a weaker outpouring of ash rose from the crater. This continued until 10:32 pm, when a second large blast sent ash high into the air, proceeding due north. A second dacite dome filled this vent a few days later. Two months of repose were ended by an eruption lasting from October 16 to 18. This event obliterated the second dome, sent ash 10 mi in the air and created small, red-hot pyroclastic flows. A third dome began to form within 30 minutes after the final explosion on October 18, and within a few days, it was about 900 ft (270 m) wide and 130 ft (40 m) high. In spite of the dome growth next to it, a new glacier formed rapidly inside the crater. All of the post-1980 eruptions were quiet dome-building events, beginning with the December 27, 1980, to January 3, 1981, episode. By 1987, the third dome had grown to be more than 3,000 ft (910 m) wide and 800 ft (240 m) high. Further eruptions occurred over a few months between 1989 and 1991. ### 2004–2008 The 2004–2008 volcanic activity of Mount St. Helens has been documented as a continuous eruption with a gradual extrusion of magma at the Mount St. Helens volcano. Starting in October 2004, a gradual building of a new lava dome happened. The new dome did not rise above the crater created by the 1980 eruption. This activity lasted until January 2008. ## Summary table ## See also - Cascade Volcanoes – High Cascades - The Eruption of Mount St. Helens! (1980 film) – documentary movie about the eruption - St. Helens (1981 film) - television movie about the eruption - Geology of the Pacific Northwest - Helenite – An artificial glass marketed as a gemstone, made by fusing the volcanic dust from Mount St. Helens' May 1980 eruption - List of Cascade volcanoes - List of volcanoes in the United States - Pacific Ring of Fire
22,571,800	SMS Niobe	1,170,129,211	Light cruiser of the German Imperial Navy	[ "1899 ships", "Cruisers of the Kriegsmarine", "Cruisers of the Royal Yugoslav Navy", "Gazelle-class cruisers", "Maritime incidents in December 1943", "Naval ships of Italy captured by Germany during World War II", "Naval ships of Yugoslavia captured by Italy during World War II", "Ships built in Bremen (state)", "World War I cruisers of Germany", "World War II cruisers of Germany", "World War II shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea" ]	SMS Niobe was the second member of the ten-ship Gazelle class of light cruisers that were built for the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) in the late 1890s and early 1900s. The Gazelle class was the culmination of earlier unprotected cruiser and aviso designs, combining the best aspects of both types in what became the progenitor of all future light cruisers of the Imperial fleet. Built to be able to serve with the main German fleet and as a colonial cruiser, she was armed with a battery of ten 10.5 cm (4.1 in) guns and a top speed of 21.5 knots (39.8 km/h; 24.7 mph). The ship had a long career, serving in all three German navies, along with the Yugoslav and Italian fleets over the span of more than forty years. Niobe served in both home and overseas waters in the Imperial Navy, serving in a variety of roles, including as a flotilla leader for torpedo boats, as a scout for the main fleet, and as a station ship with the East Asia Squadron. After the outbreak of World War I, the ship joined the vessels tasked with defending Germany's North Sea coast. By late 1915, she was withdrawn from active service and used as a headquarters ship for various commands. She was disarmed in 1917, but as one of the cruisers permitted to the postwar Reichsmarine (Navy of the Realm) by the Treaty of Versailles, she was modernized and rearmed in the early 1920s. The ship saw no active service with the Reichsmarine and, in 1925, Germany sold the ship to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). There, she was renamed Dalmacija and served in the Royal Yugoslav Navy until April 1941, when she was captured by the Italians during the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia. Renamed Cattaro, she served in the Italian Regia Marina (Royal Navy) until the Italian surrender in September 1943. She was then seized by the German occupiers of Italy, who restored her original name. She was used in the Adriatic Sea briefly until December 1943, when she ran aground on the island of Silba, and was subsequently destroyed by British motor torpedo boats. The wreck was ultimately salvaged and broken up for scrap between 1947 and 1952. ## Design Following the construction of the unprotected cruisers of the Bussard class and the aviso Hela for the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy), the Construction Department of the Reichsmarineamt (Imperial Navy Office) prepared a design for a new small cruiser that combined the best attributes of both types of vessels. The designers had to design a small cruiser with armor protection that had an optimal combination of speed, armament, and stability necessary for fleet operations, along with the endurance to operate on foreign stations in the German colonial empire. The resulting Gazelle design provided the basis for all of the light cruisers built by the German fleet to the last official designs prepared in 1914. After construction of Gazelle had begun, the German Navy secured the passing of the Naval Law of 1898; this act authorized a total cruiser strength of thirty small cruisers. Two were ordered immediately, the second of which became Niobe. Both of these new ships differed in minor details from Gazelle, Niobe being fitted with more powerful Thornycroft boilers, which significantly increased the power of the ship's propulsion system and thus top speed compared to Gazelle. Niobe was 105 m (344 ft 6 in) long overall, with a beam of 12.2 m (40 ft) and a draft of 5.03 m (16 ft 6 in) forward. She displaced 2,643 t (2,601 long tons) normally and up to 2,963 t (2,916 long tons) at full combat load. Her propulsion system consisted of two four-cylinder triple-expansion steam engines manufactured by AG Germania in Tegel. They were designed to give 8,000 metric horsepower (7,900 ihp), for a top speed of 21.5 knots (39.8 km/h; 24.7 mph). The engines were powered by eight coal-fired Thornycroft water-tube boilers. Niobe carried 500 t (490 long tons) of coal, which gave her a range of 3,570 nautical miles (6,610 km; 4,110 mi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph). She had a crew of 14 officers and 243 enlisted men. The ship was armed with ten 10.5 cm (4.1 in) SK L/40 guns in single mounts protected by gun shields. Two were placed side by side forward on the forecastle, six were located amidships, three on either side, and two were placed side by side aft. The guns could engage targets out to 12,200 m (13,300 yd). They were supplied with 1,000 rounds of ammunition, for 100 shells per gun. She was also equipped with two 45 cm (17.7 in) torpedo tubes with five torpedoes. They were submerged in the hull on the broadside. She was protected by an armored deck that was 20 to 25 mm (0.79 to 0.98 in) thick. The conning tower had 80 mm (3.1 in) thick sides, and the gun shields were 50 mm (2 in) thick. ## Service history ### Construction and early career Niobe was ordered under the contract name "B" and was laid down at the AG Weser shipyard in Bremen on 30 August 1898 and launched on 18 July 1899, after which fitting-out work commenced. Named after Niobe, a figure from Greek mythology, she was commissioned on 25 June 1900 to begin sea trials, which lasted until 22 August. She was thereafter placed in reserve. On 11 April 1901, the ship returned to service and was assigned as the flagship of I Torpedo-boat Flotilla on the 18th, replacing the elderly aviso Blitz, which was by then worn out. Niobe served in this position until 26 June, and during this period, took part in training exercises in the Baltic Sea and the Kattegat. On 28 June, she left I Flotilla and escorted the imperial yacht Hohenzollern on a trip to Norway. The visit was cut short following the death of Kaiser Wilhelm II's mother, Victoria. Niobe then joined I Squadron for the annual fleet exercises in late August and early September. At the conclusion of the maneuvers, the Germans held a naval review for the visit of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia; Niobe was again tasked with escorting Wilhelm II in Hohenzollern while he met with Nicholas from 11 to 13 September. Niobe then returned to Wilhelmshaven, where she went into drydock for alterations that lasted from 1 October to 1 April 1902. After Niobe returned to active service in April 1902, she resumed operations with I Torpedo-boat Flotilla, and was stationed in the Baltic. On 2 July, she was transferred back to I Squadron for the annual training exercises and a winter cruise toward the end of the year. During this period, Korvettenkapitän (Corvette Captain) Franz von Hipper served as the ship's commander. In early 1903, she again returned to the I Torpedo-boat Flotilla, her last stint as the flotilla flagship. The Navy initially planned on sending Niobe to reinforce the squadron participating in the naval blockade of Venezuela of 1902–1903, but the incident concluded before she could be sent. Instead, on 1 March, she joined the cruisers of I Scouting Group for her second trip to Norway. She remained in I Scouting Group for the annual maneuvers that followed later in the year, and through 1904 as well. Following the fleet maneuvers in August and September 1904, Niobe was decommissioned on 29 September. She spent the following two years out of service, during which time she underwent a major overhaul. On 19 June 1906, Niobe was recommissioned for an overseas deployment as part of the East Asia Squadron. She left Wilhelmshaven on 9 July and rendezvoused with the squadron, the flagship of which was the armored cruiser Fürst Bismarck, on 8 September. The ship cruised Chinese and Japanese waters for the next three years; her time in the East Asia Squadron was uneventful. On 31 January 1909, Niobe steamed out of the main German port in the region, Qingdao, and made the return voyage to Germany. She reached Kiel on 21 March, and having become badly worn out during her three years abroad, she was decommissioned ten days later. ### World War I After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Niobe was recommissioned for coastal defense, stationed in the German Bight. Between 28 August to 2 September, and from 23 December, Niobe's commander also served as the commander of the torpedo-boat flotillas defending the Jade Bight and the mouth of the Weser River. She was removed from front-line service on 5 September 1915, and her crew was reduced four days later. The commander of the torpedo-boat flotillas returned to Niobe on 14 January 1916, as his previous flagship, the old coastal defense ship Siegfried, was decommissioned. Niobe nevertheless remained in service with a reduced crew. Kommodore (Commodore) Ludwig von Reuter, the commander of the IV Scouting Group, and his staff briefly used Niobe as a headquarters ship, from 6 June to 3 July. Starting on 20 August, she became the headquarters ship for now-Konteradmiral (Rear Admiral) von Hipper, the commander of the I Scouting Group. During this period, Hipper organized the office of Befehlshabers der Sicherung der Nordsee (BSN—Commander of the Defense of the North Sea), which was also stationed on Niobe. In 1917, she was disarmed so her guns could be used to reinforce the defenses of Wilhelmshaven. In October that year, Konteradmiral Friedrich Boedicker, then the commander of the I Squadron, came aboard Niobe; the bulk of the High Seas Fleet had gone into the Baltic to launch Operation Albion, and Boedicker temporarily took control of the BSN. Hipper and his staff left Niobe on 11 August 1918, having been promoted to command of the High Seas Fleet. The BSN remained aboard Niobe until January 1919, two months after the war ended with the Armistice; it was then transferred to the old pre-dreadnought battleship Kaiser Wilhelm II, also in use as a headquarters ship. Niobe was then decommissioned on 3 February. Niobe was among the ships permitted by the Treaty of Versailles after the end of the war, and so she continued on in service with the newly reorganized Reichsmarine. During this period, she was significantly modernized; her old ram bow was replaced with a clipper bow. Her old 10.5 cm SK L/40 guns were replaced with newer SK L/45 guns in U-boat mountings and two 50 cm (20 in) torpedo tubes in deck-mounted launchers were installed. On 24 June 1925, Niobe was stricken from the naval register and sold to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). ### Yugoslav service The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (KSCS) had initially been given the ships of the old Austro-Hungarian Navy after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the closing days of World War I, but the Allied powers quickly seized the majority of the ships and allocated them to the various Allied countries. Left with only twelve modern torpedo boats, the new country sought more powerful vessels. It therefore purchased Niobe when Germany placed her for sale in 1925. The copper sheathing of her hull was a significant factor in the purchase, as naval infrastructure in the new state was very limited, and it was not expected that she could be dry docked regularly. Since Germany was forbidden from exporting armed warships, Niobe was taken to the Deutsche Werke shipyard in Kiel and disarmed. She also had her conning tower removed. On 7 August 1926, she began sea trials before being transferred to her new owners. Niobe was taken to the Tivat arsenal in the Bay of Kotor, arriving on 3 September 1927. There, she was rebuilt as a training cruiser, based on a design developed by a KSCS naval commission, with the work supervised by the Dutch Piet van Wienen Company, which had also been responsible for the negotiating the purchase contract. The rebuild included shortening the masts and funnels, a crow's nest was placed atop the foremast, and a radio shack was built in place of the conning tower. She was renamed Dalmacija (Dalmatia), and also received her new armament before she entered Royal Yugoslav Navy service, though the details are uncertain. According to Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships, she was equipped with six Škoda 8.5 cm (3.35 in) L/55 quick-firing guns, and initially four and later six 2 cm (0.79 in) anti-aircraft (AA) guns were added. The naval historian Henry Lenton states that the main battery caliber was 8.6 cm (3.4 in), states that they were dual-purpose guns, and specifies four 2 cm single-mount AA guns. But naval historian Milan Vego states that she carried six 8.3 cm (3.27 in) L/35 anti-aircraft guns, four 47 mm (1.9 in) guns, and six machine guns. The historian Aidan Dodson concurs with Vego that the ship received six 8.3 cm guns, but instead states that they were 55-caliber guns of the Skoda M27 type. Dodson also agrees that she had four 47 mm guns but states her armament was rounded out by two 15 mm (0.59 in) Zbrojovka ZB-60 anti-aircraft machine-guns. According to the naval historian Zvonimir Freivogel, six Škoda M27 8.35 cm (3.29 in) L/55 anti-aircraft guns were ordered in Czechoslovakia and fitted by the arsenal in Tivat. Freivogel goes on to state that the M27 was an improved model of the M22/24 gun. Single guns were mounted forward and aft, with the remaining four guns mounted amidships, two on each side fore and aft of the second funnel. These open sponson mounts were below main deck level and had an outward folding plate that allowed the crew to serve the gun from all sides. With a muzzle velocity of 800 m (2,600 ft) per second, the guns could engage targets out to 18,000 m (20,000 yd) and to a vertical range of 11,000 m (12,000 yd), with a shell weighing 10 kg (22 lb). They were supplied with a total of 1,500 shells, for 250 shells per gun. After entering service, Dalmacija was employed as a gunnery training ship. In May and June 1929, Dalmacija, the submarines Hrabri and Nebojša, the submarine tender Hvar and six torpedo boats went on a cruise to Malta, the Greek island of Corfu in the Ionian Sea, and Bizerte in the French protectorate of Tunisia. According to the British naval attaché, the ships and crews made a very good impression while visiting Malta. In 1930, the ship underwent a minor refit and her foremast was modified, including by the addition of supporting struts that converted it into a tripod mast. Throughout the 1930s, the ship went on several training cruises in the Mediterranean Sea, and during this period she served as a flagship on a number of occasions. #### World War II In April 1941, during the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, Dalmacija remained in Kotor and did not see action. Some forty years old by that time, the ship was kept in port as a harbor defense vessel, since her relatively heavy anti-aircraft armament could be used to defend against air attacks. She had the Yugoslav fleet headquarters embarked. Following the Yugoslav surrender, the ship was captured by the Italians in Kotor on 25 April. Renamed Cattaro, the ship was placed in service with the Regia Marina as a gunboat and gunnery training ship, based in Pola. On 31 July 1942, the cruiser was attacked by the British submarine HMS Traveller south of the village of Premantura on the Istrian coast, but all of the torpedoes missed. The ship's fate is somewhat unclear; according to Hildebrand et al., Cattaro was later transferred to the Navy of the Independent State of Croatia, where she was commissioned as a training ship under the name Znaim. She returned to German service in September 1943 after Italy surrendered to the Allies, which significantly reduced the warships operating in the Adriatic Sea. A German and Croatian crew operated the ship, once again named Niobe, under the German flag. According to Twardowski, however, the ship remained in Italian hands until Germany seized it in September 1943, thereafter turning her over to the Independent State of Croatia as Znaim before retaking the ship and restoring her original name at some point thereafter. Aidan Dodson concurs that the ship remained in Italian hands until their surrender, and states that she was undergoing boiler repairs at Pola at the time. After falling into German hands, there was some debate as to what her name should be, with consideration given to Zenta or Novara in honor of Austro-Hungarian cruisers, but the Germans eventually settled on reverting to her original name. According to Freivogel, the reported names Znajm, Zniam, and Znijam do not mean anything in Croatian language, and there was probably a confusion with the minelayer Zmaj or Zenta. Nevertheless, after leaving Italian service the ship's armament was six 8.4 cm (3.3 in) AA guns, four 47 mm AA guns, four 20 mm Oerlikon AA guns, and twenty-six 20 mm Breda AA guns, and she was commissioned on 8 November. On the night of 21/22 September, while she was still refitting, two British motor torpedo boats—MTB 226 and MTB 228—attacked the ship to the northwest of Zara without success. Niobe began escorting convoys in the Adriatic, the first taking place on 13 November, in support of Operation Herbstgewitter. This convoy consisted of several transports carrying units from the 71st Infantry Division to the islands of Cres, Krk, and Lussino. On 19 December, Niobe ran aground on the island of Silba at around 18:00 as a result of a navigational error. The crew requested tugboats from Pola, but they were unable to pull the ship free. Local Partisans informed the British about the ship's location, and three days later, the British motor torpedo boats MTB 276 and MTB 298 attacked the ship and hit her with two torpedoes, and the tug Parenzo, which had been moored alongside to assist the salvage effort, was hit by a third torpedo and sunk. Nineteen men were killed in the attack. The Germans then abandoned the wreck, apart from a small group tasked with removing or destroying weapons and other equipment. The wreck was then damaged further by the Germans before they abandoned it, and it was later cannibalized for spare parts by the Partisans. The wreck remained on Silba until 1947, when salvage operations began. She was raised and broken up for scrap by 1952.
52,756	Final Fantasy VII	1,172,988,704	null	[ "1997 video games", "Android (operating system) games", "Cancelled Nintendo 64 games", "Cancelled Super Nintendo Entertainment System games", "Cyberpunk video games", "D.I.C.E. Award for Adventure Game of the Year winners", "D.I.C.E. Award for Role-Playing Game of the Year winners", "Dotemu games", "Dystopian video games", "Eco-terrorism in fiction", "Eidos Interactive games", "Environmental mass media", "Final Fantasy VII", "Final Fantasy video games", "Human experimentation in fiction", "IOS games", "Japanese role-playing video games", "Nintendo Switch games", "Origins Award winners", "PlayStation (console) games", "PlayStation 4 games", "PlayStation Network games", "Role-playing video games", "Science fantasy video games", "Single-player video games", "Sony Interactive Entertainment games", "Terrorism in fiction", "Turn-based role-playing video games", "Urban fantasy video games", "Video games about amnesia", "Video games about genetic engineering", "Video games about impact events", "Video games about mental health", "Video games adapted into films", "Video games developed in Japan", "Video games scored by Nobuo Uematsu", "Windows games", "World Video Game Hall of Fame", "Xbox One games" ]	is a 1997 role-playing video game developed by Square for the PlayStation console. It is the seventh main installment in the Final Fantasy series. Published in Japan by Square, it was released in other regions by Sony Computer Entertainment and became the first in the main series to see a PAL release. The game's story follows Cloud Strife, a mercenary who joins an eco-terrorist organization to stop a world-controlling megacorporation from using the planet's life essence as an energy source. Events send Cloud and his allies in pursuit of Sephiroth, a superhuman who seeks to wound the planet and harness its healing power in order to be reborn as a demigod. During the journey, Cloud builds close friendships with his party members, including Aerith Gainsborough, who holds the secret to saving their world. Development began in 1994, originally for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. After delays and technical difficulties from experimenting on several platforms, most notably the Nintendo 64, Square moved production to the PlayStation, largely due to the advantages of the CD-ROM format. Veteran Final Fantasy staff returned, including series creator and producer Hironobu Sakaguchi, director Yoshinori Kitase, and composer Nobuo Uematsu. The title became the first in the series to use full motion video and 3D computer graphics, which featured 3D character models superimposed over 2D pre-rendered backgrounds. Although the gameplay systems remained mostly unchanged from previous entries, Final Fantasy VII introduced more widespread science fiction elements and a more realistic presentation. The combined development and marketing budget was around 80 million. Final Fantasy VII received widespread commercial and critical success and remains widely regarded as a landmark title and one of the greatest video games of all time. The title won numerous Game of the Year awards and was acknowledged for boosting the sales of the PlayStation and popularizing Japanese role-playing games worldwide. Critics praised its graphics, gameplay, music, and story, although some criticism was directed towards its original English localization. Its success has led to enhanced ports on various platforms, a multimedia subseries called the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, and a high definition remake trilogy, with its first entry releasing in 2020. ## Gameplay The gameplay of Final Fantasy VII is mostly comparable to earlier Final Fantasy titles and Japanese role-playing games. The game features three modes of play: the world map, the field, and the battle screen. At its grandest scale, players explore the entire world of Final Fantasy VII on a 3D world map. The world map is littered with representations of areas for the player to enter, including towns, environments, and ruins. Natural barriers—such as mountains, deserts, and bodies of water—block access by foot to some areas; as the game progresses, the player receives vehicles that help traverse these obstacles. Chocobos can be found in certain spots on the map, and if caught, can be ridden to areas inaccessible by foot or vehicle. In field mode, the player navigates fully scaled versions of the areas represented on the world map. For the first time in the series, this mode is represented in three-dimensional space. The player can explore the environment, talk with characters, advance the story, and initiate event games in this mode. Event games are short minigames that use special control functions and are often tied into the story. While in field mode, the player may also find shops and inns. Shops provide an opportunity to buy and sell items that can aid Cloud and his party, such as weapons, armor, and accessories. If the characters rest at an inn, their hit points and mana points will be restored, along with any abnormalities contracted during battles. At random intervals on the world map and in field mode, and at specific moments in the story, the game will enter the battle screen. This screen places the player characters on one side, the enemies on the other, and employs an "Active Time Battle" (ATB) system in which the characters exchange moves until one side is defeated. The damage (or healing) dealt by either side is quantified on screen. Characters have many statistics that determine their effectiveness in battle; for example, hit points determine how much damage they can take, and magic determines how much damage they can inflict with spells. Each character on the screen has a time gauge; when a character's gauge is full, the player can input a command for that character. The commands change as the game progresses, and are dependent on the characters in the player's party and their equipment. Commands may include attacking with a weapon, casting magic, using items, summoning monsters, and other actions that either damage the enemy or aid the player characters. Final Fantasy VII also features powerful, character-specific commands called Limit Breaks, which can be used only after a special gauge is charged by enemy attacks. After being attacked, characters may be afflicted by one or more abnormal "statuses", such as poison or paralysis. These statuses and their adverse effects can be removed by special items or abilities. When all the enemies are defeated, the battle ends and the player may be rewarded with money, items, and experience points. If the player is defeated, it is game over and the game must be loaded to the last save point. When not in battle, the player can use the menu screen. On this screen, the player can review each character's status and statistics, use items and abilities, change equipment, save the game (when on the world map or at a save point), and manage orbs called Materia. The main method of customizing characters in Final Fantasy VII, Materia may be added to equipment to provide characters with new magic spells, monsters to summon, commands, statistical upgrades, and other benefits. Materia levels up with their own experience point system and can be combined to create different effects. ## Synopsis ### Setting and characters Final Fantasy VII takes place on a world referred to in-game as the "Planet", though it has been retroactively named "Gaia". The planet's lifeforce, called the Lifestream, is a flow of spiritual energy that gives life to everything on the Planet. Its processed form is known as "Mako". On a societal and technological level, the game has been defined as an industrial or post-industrial science fiction milieu. During Final Fantasy VII, the Planet's Lifestream is being drained for energy by the Shinra Electric Power Company, a world-dominating megacorporation headquartered in the city of Midgar. Shinra's actions are weakening the Planet, threatening its existence and all life. Significant factions within the game include AVALANCHE, an eco-terrorist group seeking Shinra's downfall so the Planet can recover; the Turks, a covert branch of Shinra's security forces; SOLDIER, an elite Shinra fighting force created by enhancing humans with Mako; and the Cetra, a near-extinct human tribe which maintains a strong connection to the Planet and the Lifestream. The central protagonist is Cloud Strife, an unsociable mercenary who claims to be a former 1st Class SOLDIER. Early on, he works with two members of AVALANCHE: Barret Wallace, its brazen but fatherly leader; and Tifa Lockhart, a shy yet nurturing martial artist and childhood friend of Cloud. On their journey, they meet Aerith Gainsborough, a carefree flower merchant and one of the last surviving Cetra; Red XIII, an intelligent quadruped from a tribe that protects the planet; Cait Sith, a fortune-telling robotic cat controlled by repentant Shinra staff member Reeve; and Cid Highwind, a pilot whose dream of being the first human in outer space was not realized. The group can also recruit Yuffie Kisaragi, a young ninja and skilled Materia thief; and Vincent Valentine, a former Turk, and victim of Shinra experiments. The game's main antagonists are Rufus Shinra, son of President Shinra and later leader of the Shinra Corporation; Sephiroth, a former SOLDIER who reappears several years after he was thought dead; and Jenova, a hostile extraterrestrial life-form imprisoned by the Cetra 2000 years before. A key character in Cloud's backstory is Zack Fair, a member of SOLDIER and Aerith's first love. ### Plot AVALANCHE destroys a Shinra Mako reactor in Midgar; an attack on another reactor goes wrong, and Cloud falls into the city slums. There, he meets Aerith and protects her from Shinra. Meanwhile, Shinra finds AVALANCHE and collapses part of the upper city, killing most of AVALANCHE along with the slum population below. Aerith is also captured; as a Cetra, she can potentially reveal the "Promised Land", which Shinra believes is overflowing with exploitable Lifestream energy. Cloud, Barret, and Tifa rescue Aerith; during their escape from Midgar, they discover that President Shinra was murdered by Sephiroth, who was presumed dead five years earlier. The party pursues Sephiroth across the Planet, with now-President Rufus on their trail; they are soon joined by the rest of the playable characters. At a Cetra temple, Sephiroth reveals his intentions to use the Black Materia to summon "Meteor", a spell that will hit the Planet with a devastating impact. Sephiroth will absorb the Lifestream as it attempts to heal the wound, becoming a god-like being. The party retrieves the Black Materia, but Sephiroth manipulates Cloud into surrendering it. Aerith departs alone to stop Sephiroth, following him to an abandoned Cetra city. During Aerith's prayer to the Planet for help, Sephiroth attempts to force Cloud to kill her; failing, he kills her himself before fleeing and leaving the Black Materia behind. The party then learns of Jenova, a hostile alien lifeform whose remains were unearthed by Shinra scientists decades earlier; at Nibelheim, Jenova's cells were used to create Sephiroth. Five years before the game, Sephiroth and Cloud visited Nibelheim, where Sephiroth learned of his origins. Driven insane by this, he murdered the townspeople, then vanished when confronted by Cloud. At the Northern Crater, the party learns that the "Sephiroths" they have encountered are Jenova clones created by the insane Shinra scientist Hojo. Confronting the real Sephiroth as he is killing his clones to reunite Jenova's cells, Cloud is again manipulated into delivering the Black Materia. Sephiroth then taunts Cloud by showing another SOLDIER in Cloud's place in his memories of Nibelheim, suggesting that Cloud is a failed Sephiroth clone. Sephiroth summons Meteor and seals the Crater; Cloud falls into the Lifestream and the party is captured by Rufus. Escaping Shinra, the party discovers Cloud at an island hospital in a catatonic state from Mako poisoning; Tifa stays as his caretaker. When the island is attacked by a planetary defense force called Weapon, the two fall into the Lifestream, where Tifa helps Cloud reconstruct his memories. Cloud was a mere infantryman who was never accepted into SOLDIER; the SOLDIER in his memories was his friend Zack. At Nibelheim, Cloud surprised and wounded Sephiroth after the latter's mental breakdown, but Jenova preserved Sephiroth's life. Hojo experimented on Cloud and Zack for four years, injecting them with Jenova's cells and Mako; they escaped, but Zack was eventually killed. The combined trauma of these events triggered an identity crisis in Cloud; he constructed a false persona around Zack's stories and his own fantasies. Cloud accepts his past and reunites with the party, who learn that Aerith's prayer to the Planet had been successful: the Planet had attempted to summon Holy to prevent Meteor's impact, but Sephiroth blocked Holy. Shinra fails to destroy Meteor but manages to defeat a Weapon and puncture the Northern Crater, costing the lives of Rufus and other personnel. After killing Hojo, who is revealed to be Sephiroth's biological father, the party descends to the Planet's core through the opening in the Northern Crater and defeats both Jenova and Sephiroth. The party escapes and Holy is summoned, which destroys Meteor with the help of the Lifestream. Five hundred years later, Red XIII is seen with two cubs looking out over the ruins of Midgar, which are now covered in greenery, showing the planet has healed. ## Development Initial concept talks for Final Fantasy VII began in 1994 at Square studio, following the completion of Final Fantasy VI. As with the previous installment, series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi reduced his role to producer and granted others a more active role in development: these included Yoshinori Kitase, one of the directors of FFVI. The next installment was planned as a 2D game for Nintendo's Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super NES). After creating an early 2D prototype of it, the team postponed development to help finish Chrono Trigger. Once Chrono Trigger was completed, the team resumed discussions for Final Fantasy VII in 1995. The team discussed continuing the 2D strategy, which would have been the safe and immediate path just prior to the imminent industry shift toward 3D gaming; such a change would require radical new development models. The team decided to take the riskier option and make a 3D game on new generation hardware but had yet to choose between the cartridge-based Nintendo 64 or the CD-ROM-based PlayStation from Sony Computer Entertainment. The team also considered the Sega Saturn console and Microsoft Windows. Their decision was influenced by two factors: a highly successful tech demo based on Final Fantasy VI using the new Softimage 3D software, and the escalating price of cartridge-based games, which was limiting Square's audience. Tests were made for a Nintendo 64 version, which would use the planned 64DD peripheral despite the lack of 64DD development kits and the prototype device's changing hardware specifications. This version was discarded during early testing, as the 2000 polygons needed to render the Behemoth monster placed excessive strain on the Nintendo 64 hardware, causing a low frame rate. It would have required an estimated thirty 64DD discs to run Final Fantasy VII properly with the data compression methods of the day. Faced with both technical and economic issues on Nintendo's current hardware, and impressed by the increased storage capacity of CD-ROM when compared to the Nintendo 64 cartridge, Square shifted development of Final Fantasy VII, and all other planned projects, onto the PlayStation. In contrast to the visuals and audio, the overall gameplay system remained mostly unchanged from Final Fantasy V and VI, but with an emphasis on player control. The initial decision was for battles to feature shifting camera angles. Battle arenas had a lower polygon count than field areas, which made creating distinctive features more difficult. The summon sequences benefited strongly from the switch to the cinematic style, as the team had struggled to portray their scale using 2D graphics. In his role as producer, Sakaguchi placed much of his effort into developing the battle system. He proposed the Materia system as a way to provide more character customization than previous Final Fantasy games: battles no longer revolved around characters with innate skills and roles in battle, as Materia could be reconfigured between battles. Artist Tetsuya Nomura also contributed to the gameplay; he designed the Limit Break system as an evolution of the Desperation Attacks used in Final Fantasy VI. The Limit Breaks served a purpose in gameplay while also evoking each character's personality in battle. Square retained the passion-based game development approach from their earlier projects, but now had the resources and ambition to create the game they wanted. This was because they had extensive capital from their earlier commercial successes, which meant they could focus on quality and scale rather than obsessing over and working around their budget. Final Fantasy VII was at the time one of the most expensive video game projects ever, costing an estimated 40 million, which adjusted for inflation came to \$61 million in 2017. Development of the final version took a staff of between 100 and 150 people just over a year to complete. As video game development teams were usually only 20 people, the game had what was described as the largest development team of any game up to that point. The development team was split between both Square's Japanese offices and its new American office in Los Angeles; the American team worked primarily on city backgrounds. ### Art design The game's art director was Yusuke Naora, who had previously worked as a designer for Final Fantasy VI. With the switch into 3D, Naora realized that he needed to relearn drawing, as 3D visuals require a very different approach than 2D. With the massive scale and scope of the project, Naora was granted a team devoted entirely to the game's visual design. The department's duties included illustration, modeling of 3D characters, texturing, the creation of environments, visual effects, and animation. Naora later defined the art style of Final Fantasy VII as "dark" and "weird". The Shinra logo, which incorporated a kanji symbol, was drawn by Naora personally. Promotional artwork, in addition to the logo artwork, was created by Yoshitaka Amano, an artist whose association with the series went back to its inception. While he had taken a prominent role in earlier entries, Amano was unable to do so for Final Fantasy VII, due to commitments at overseas exhibitions. His logo artwork was based on Meteor: when he saw images of Meteor, he was not sure how to turn it into suitable artwork. In the end, he created multiple variations of the image and asked staff to choose which they preferred. The green coloring represents the predominant lighting in Midgar and the color of the Lifestream, while the blue reflected the ecological themes present in the story. Its coloring directly influenced the general coloring of the game's environments. Another prominent artist was Nomura. Having impressed Sakaguchi with his proposed ideas, which were handwritten and illustrated rather than simply typed on a PC, Nomura was brought on as main character designer. Nomura stated that when he was brought on, the main scenario had not been completed, but he "went along like, 'I guess first off you need a hero and a heroine', and from there drew the designs while thinking up details about the characters. After [he'd] done the hero and heroine, [he] carried on drawing by thinking what kind of characters would be interesting to have. When [he] handed over the designs [he'd] tell people the character details [he'd] thought up, or write them down on a separate sheet of paper". Something that could not be carried over from earlier titles was the chibi sprite art, as that would not fit with the new graphical direction. Naora, in his role as an assistant character designer and art director, helped adjust each character's appearance so the actions they performed were believable. When designing Cloud and Sephiroth, Nomura was influenced by his view of their rivalry mirroring the legendary animosity between Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojirō, with Cloud and Sephiroth being Musashi and Kojirō respectively. Sephiroth's look was defined as "kakkoii", a Japanese term combining good looks with coolness. Several of Nomura's designs evolved substantially during development. Cloud's original design of slicked-back black hair with no spikes was intended to save polygons and contrast with Sephiroth's long, flowing silver hair. However, Nomura feared that such masculinity could prove unpopular with fans, so he redesigned Cloud to feature a shock of spiky, bright blond hair. Vincent's occupation changed from researcher to detective to chemist, and finally to a former Turk with a tragic past. ### Scenario Sakaguchi was responsible for writing the initial plot, which was substantially different from the final version. In this draft for the planned SNES version, the game's setting was envisioned as New York City in 1999. Similar to the final story, the main characters were part of an organization trying to destroy Mako reactors, but they were pursued by a hot-blooded detective named Joe. The main characters would eventually blow up the city. An early version of the Lifestream concept was present at this stage. According to Sakaguchi, his mother had died while Final Fantasy III was being developed, and choosing life as a theme helped him cope with her passing in a rational and analytical manner. Square eventually used the New York setting in Parasite Eve (1998). While the planned concept was dropped, Final Fantasy VII still marked a drastic shift in setting from previous entries, dropping the Medieval fantasy elements in favor of a world that was "ambiguously futuristic". When Kitase was put in charge of Final Fantasy VII, he and Nomura reworked the entire initial plot. Scenario writer Kazushige Nojima joined the team after finishing work on Bahamut Lagoon. While Final Fantasy VI featured an ensemble cast of numerous playable characters that were equally important, the team soon decided to develop a central protagonist for FFVII. The pursuit of Sephiroth that comprised most of the main narrative was suggested by Nomura, as nothing similar had been done in the series before. Kitase and Nojima conceived AVALANCHE and Shinra as opposing organizations and created Cloud's backstory as well as his relationship to Sephiroth. Among Nojima's biggest contributions to the plot were Cloud's memories and split personality; this included the eventual conclusion involving his newly created character of Zack. The crew helped Kitase adjust the specifics of Sakaguchi's original Lifestream concept. Regarding the overall theme of the game, Sakaguchi said it was "not enough to make 'life' the theme, you need to depict living and dying. In any event, you need to portray death". Consequently, Nomura proposed killing off the heroine. Aerith had been the only heroine, but the death of a female protagonist would necessitate a second; this led to the creation of Tifa. The developers decided to kill Aerith, as her death would be the most devastating and consequential. Kitase wanted to depict it as very sudden and unexpected, leaving "not a dramatic feeling but great emptiness", "feelings of reality and not Hollywood". The script for the scene was written by Nojima. Kitase and Nojima then planned that most of the main cast would die shortly before the final battle; Nomura vetoed the idea because he felt it would undermine the impact of Aerith's death. Several character relations and statuses underwent changes during development. Aerith was to be Sephiroth's sister, which influenced the design of her hair. The team then made Sephiroth a previous love interest of hers to deepen her backstory, but later swapped him with Zack. Vincent and Yuffie were to be part of the main narrative, but due to time constraints, they were nearly cut and eventually relegated to being optional characters. Nojima was charged with writing the scenario and unifying the team's ideas into a cohesive narrative, as Kitase was impressed with his earlier work on the mystery-like Heracles no Eikō III: Kamigami no Chinmoku, an entry in the Glory of Heracles series. To make the characters more realistic, Nojima wrote scenes in which they would occasionally argue and raise objections: while this inevitably slowed down the pace of the story, it added depth to the characters. The graphical improvements allowed even relatively bland lines of dialogue to be enhanced with reactions and poses from the 3D character models. Voice acting would have led to significant load times, so it was omitted. Masato Kato wrote several late-game scenes, including the Lifestream sequence and Cloud and Tifa's conversation before the final battle. Initially unaffiliated with the project, Kato was called on to help flesh out less important story scenes. He wrote his scenes to his own tastes without outside consultation, something he later regretted. ### Graphics With the shift from the SNES to the next generation consoles, Final Fantasy VII became the first project in the series to use 3D computer graphics. Developers initially considered overlaying 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds but decided to forgo pixel art entirely in favor of polygonal models. Aside from the story, Final Fantasy VI had many details undecided when development began; most design elements were hashed out along the way. In contrast, with Final Fantasy VII, the developers knew from the outset it was going to be "a real 3D game", so from the earliest planning stage, detailed designs were in existence. The script was also finalized, and the image for the graphics had been fleshed out. This meant that when actual development work began, storyboards for the game were already in place. The shift from cartridge ROM to CD-ROM posed some problems: according to lead programmer Ken Narita, the CD-ROM had a slower access speed, delaying some actions during the game, so the team needed to overcome this issue. Certain tricks were used to conceal load times, such as offering animations to keep players from getting bored. When it was decided to use 3D graphics, there was a discussion among the staff whether to use sprite-based character models or 3D polygonal models. While sprites proved more popular with the staff, the polygon models were chosen as they could better express emotion. This decision was influenced by the team's exposure to the 3D character models used in Alone in the Dark. Sakaguchi decided to use deformed models for field navigation and real-time event scenes, for better expression of emotion, while realistically proportioned models would be used in battles. The team purchased Silicon Graphics Onyx supercomputers and related workstations, and accompanying software including Softimage 3D, PowerAnimator, and N-World for an estimated total of \$21 million. Many team members had never seen the technology before. The transition from 2D graphics to 3D environments overlaid on pre-rendered backgrounds was accompanied by a focus on a more realistic presentation. In previous entries, the sizes for characters and environments were fixed, and the player saw things from a scrolling perspective. This changed with Final Fantasy VII; environments shifted with camera angles, and character model sizes shifted depending on both their place in the environment and their distance from the camera, giving a sense of scale. The choice of this highly cinematic style of storytelling, contrasting directly with Square's previous games, was attributed to Kitase, who was a fan of films and had an interest in the parallels between film and video game narrative. Character movement during in-game events was done by the character designers in the planning group. While designers normally cooperate with a motion specialist for such animations, the designers taught themselves motion work, resulting in each character's movements differing depending on their creators—some designers liked exaggerated movements, while others went for subtlety. Much of the time was spent on each character's day-to-day, routine animations. Motion specialists were brought in for the game's battle animations. The first characters the team worked with were Cloud and Barret. Some of the real-time effects, such as an explosion near the opening, were hand-drawn rather than computer-animated. The main creative force behind the overall 3D presentation was Kazuyuki Hashimoto, the general supervisor for these sequences. Being experienced in the new technology the team had brought on board, he accepted the post at Square as the team aligned with his own creative spirit. One of the major events in development was when the real-time graphics were synchronized to computer-generated full motion video (FMV) cutscenes for some story sequences, notably an early sequence where a real-time model of Cloud jumps onto an FMV-rendered moving train. The backgrounds were created by overlaying two 2D graphic layers and changing the motion speed of each to simulate depth perception. While this was not a new technique, the increased power of the PlayStation enabled a more elaborate version of this effect. The biggest issue with the 3D graphics was the large memory storage gap between the development hardware and the console: while the early 3D tech demo had been developed on a machine with over 400 megabytes of total memory, the PlayStation only had two megabytes of system memory and 500 kilobytes for texture memory. The team needed to figure out how to shrink the amount of data while preserving the desired effects. This was aided with reluctant help from Sony, who had hoped to keep Square's direct involvement limited to a standard API package, but they eventually relented and allowed the team direct access to the hardware specifications. Final Fantasy VII features two types of cutscenes: real-time cutscenes featuring polygon models on pre-rendered backgrounds, and FMV cutscenes. The game's computer-generated imagery (CGI) FMVs were produced by Visual Works, a then-new subsidiary of Square that specialized in computer graphics and FMVs creation. Visual Works had created the initial movie concept for a 3D game project. The FMVs were created by an international team, covering both Japan and North America and involving talent from the gaming and film industry; Western contributors included artists and staff who had worked on the Star Wars film series, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and True Lies. The team tried to create additional optional CGI content which would bring optional characters Vincent and Yuffie into the ending. As this would have further increased the number of discs the game needed, the idea was discarded. Kazuyuki Ikumori, a future key figure at Visual Works, helped with the creation of the CGI cutscenes, in addition to general background design. The CGI FMV sequences total around 40 minutes of footage, something only possible with the PlayStation's extra memory space and graphical power. This innovation brought with it the added difficulty of ensuring that the inferiority of the in-game graphics in comparison to the FMV sequences was not too obvious. Kitase has described the process of making the in-game environments as detailed as possible to be "a daunting task". ### Music The musical score of Final Fantasy VII was composed, arranged, and produced by Nobuo Uematsu, who had served as the sole composer for the six previous Final Fantasy games. Originally, Uematsu had planned to use CD quality music with vocal performances to take advantage of the console's audio capabilities but found that it resulted in the game having much longer loading times for each area. Uematsu then decided that the higher quality audio was not worth the trade-off with performance, and opted instead to use MIDI-like sounds produced by the console's internal sound sequencer, similar to how his soundtracks for the previous games in the series on the Super NES were implemented. While the Super NES only had eight sound channels to work with, the PlayStation had twenty-four. Eight were reserved for sound effects, leaving sixteen available for the music. Uematsu's approach to composing the game's music was to treat it like a film soundtrack and compose music that reflected the mood of the scenes, rather than trying to make strong melodies to "define the game", as he felt that approach would come across too strong when placed alongside the game's new 3D visuals. As an example, he composed the track intended for the scene in the game where Aerith Gainsborough is killed to be "sad but beautiful", rather than more overtly emotional, creating what he felt was a more understated feeling. Uematsu additionally said that the soundtrack had a feel of "realism", which also prevented him from using "exorbitant, crazy music". The first piece that Uematsu composed for the game was the opening theme; game director Yoshinori Kitase showed him the opening cinematic and asked him to begin the project there. The track was well received in the company, which gave Uematsu "a sense that it was going to be a really good project". Final Fantasy VII was the first game in the series to include a track with high-quality digitized vocals, "One-Winged Angel", which accompanies a section of the final battle of the game. The track has been called Uematsu's "most recognizable contribution" to the music of the Final Fantasy series, which Uematsu agrees with. Inspired by The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky to make a more "classical" track, and by rock and roll music from the late 1960s and early 1970s to make an orchestral track with a "destructive impact", he spent two weeks composing short unconnected musical phrases, and then arranged them together into "One-Winged Angel", an approach he had never used before. Music from the game has been released in several albums. Square released the main soundtrack album, Final Fantasy VII Original Soundtrack, on four Compact Discs through its DigiCube subsidiary in 1997. A limited edition release was also produced, containing illustrated liner notes. The regular edition of the album reached third on the Japan Oricon charts, while the limited edition reached \#19. Overall, the album had sold nearly 150,000 copies by January 2010. A single-disc album of selected tracks from the original soundtrack, along with three arranged pieces, titled Final Fantasy VII Reunion Tracks, was also released by DigiCube in 1997, reaching \#20 on the Japan Oricon charts. A third album, Piano Collections Final Fantasy VII, was released by DigiCube in 2003, and contains one disc of piano arrangements of tracks from the game. It was arranged by Shirō Hamaguchi and performed by Seiji Honda, and reached \#228 on the Oricon charts. ## Release Final Fantasy VII was announced in February 1996. Square president and chief executive officer Tomoyuki Takechi were fairly confident about Japanese players making the game a commercial success despite it being on a new platform. A playable demo was included on a disc giveaway at the 1996 Tokyo Game Show, dubbed Square's Preview Extra: Final Fantasy VII & Siggraph '95 Works. The disc also included the early test footage Square created using characters from Final Fantasy VI. The initial release date was at some point in 1996, but to properly realize their vision, Square postponed the release date almost a full year. Final Fantasy VII was released on January 31, 1997. It was published in Japan by Square. A re-release of the game based on its Western version, titled Final Fantasy VII International, was released on October 2 the same year. This improved International version would kickstart the trend for Square to create an updated version for the Japanese release, based on the enhanced Western versions. The International version was re-released as a physical disc as part of the Final Fantasy 25th Anniversary Ultimate Box Japanese package on December 18, 2012. While its success in Japan had been taken for granted by Square executives, North America and Europe were another matter, as up to that time the Japanese role-playing genre was still a niche market in Western territories. Sony, due to the PlayStation's struggles against Nintendo and Sega's home consoles, lobbied for the publishing rights in North America and Europe following Final Fantasy VII's transfer to PlayStation—to further persuade Square, Sony offered a lucrative royalties deal with profits potentially equaling those Square would get by self-publishing the game. Square accepted Sony's offer as Square itself lacked Western publishing experience. Square was uncertain about the game's success, as other JRPGs including Final Fantasy VI had met with poor sales outside Japan. To help with promoting the title overseas, Square dissolved their original Washington offices and hired new staff for fresh offices in Costa Mesa. It was first exhibited to the Western public at Electronic Entertainment Expo 1996 (E3). To promote the game overseas, Square and Sony launched a widespread three-month advertising campaign in August 1997. Beginning with a television commercial that ran alongside popular shows such as Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons by TBWA\Chiat\Day, the campaign included numerous articles in both gaming and general interest magazines, advertisements in comics from publishers such as DC Comics and Marvel Comics, a special collaboration with Pepsi, media events, sample discs, and merchandise. According to estimations by Takechi, the total worldwide marketing budget came to 40 million; \$10 million had been spent in Japan, \$10 million in Europe, and \$20 million in North America. Unlike its predecessors, Final Fantasy VII did not have its numeral adjusted to account for the lack of a Western release for Final Fantasy II, III, and V — while only the fourth Final Fantasy released outside Japan, its Japanese title was retained. It was released in North America on September 7, 1997. The game was released in Europe on November 17, becoming the first Final Fantasy game to be released in Europe. The Western version included additional elements and alterations, such as streamlining of the menu and Materia system, reducing the health of enemies, new visual cues to help with navigation across the world map, and additional cutscenes relating to Cloud's past. ### PC version A version for PC was developed by Square's Costa Mesa offices. Square invested in a PC version to reach as wide a player base as possible; many Western consumers did not own a PlayStation, and Square's deal with Sony did not prohibit such a port. Having never released a title for PC, Square decided to treat the port as a sales experiment. The port was handled by a team of 15 to 20 people, mostly from Costa Mesa but with help from Tokyo. Square did not begin the port until the console version was finished. The team needed to rewrite an estimated 80% of the game's code, due to the need to unify what had been a custom build for a console written by multiple staff members. Consequently, programmers faced problems such as having to unify the original PlayStation version's five different game engines, leading to delays. The PC version came with a license for Yamaha Corporation's software synthesizer S-YXG70, allowing high-quality sequenced music despite varying sound hardware setups on different user computers. The conversion of the nearly 100 original musical pieces to XG format files was done by Yamaha. To maximize their chances of success, Square searched for a Western company to assist with releasing the PC version. Eidos Interactive, whose release of Tomb Raider had turned them into a publishing giant, agreed to market and publish the port. The port was announced in December 1997, along with Eidos' exclusivity deal for North America and Europe at the time, though the port was rumored to happen as early as December 1996, prior to the PlayStation version's release. To help the product stand out in stores, Eidos chose a trapezoidal shape for the cover and box. They agreed on a contract price of \$1.8 million, making initial sales forecasts of 100,000 units based on that outlay. The PC version was released in North America and Europe on June 25, 1998; the port was not released in Japan. Within one month, sales of the port exceeded the initial forecasts. The PC version would end up providing the source code for subsequent ports. ### Localization Localization of Final Fantasy VII was handled internally by Square. The English localization, led by Seth Luisi, was completed by a team of about fifty people and faced a variety of problems. According to Luisi, the biggest hurdle was making "the direct Japanese-to-English text translation read correctly in English. The sentence structure and grammar rules for the Japanese language is very different from English", making it difficult for the translation to read like native English without distorting the meaning. Michael Basket was the sole translator for the project, though he received the help of native Japanese speakers from the Tokyo office. The localization was taxing for the team due to their inexperience, lack of professional editors, and poor communication between the North American and Japanese offices. A result of this disconnect was the original localization of Aerith's name—which was intended as a conflation of "air" and "earth"—as "Aeris" due to a lack of communication between localization staff and the QA team. The team also faced several technical issues due to programming practices which took little account of subsequent localization, such as dealing with a fixed-width font and having to insert kanji through language input keys to add special characters (for example, vowels with diacritics) to keep the code working. Consequently, the text was still read as Japanese by the word processor; the computer's spellcheck could not be used, and mistakes had to be caught manually. The code used obscure kanji to refer to main character's names, which made unintuitive for the translators to identify characters. Translated text usually takes up more space than the Japanese text, though still had to fit to the screen appropriately without overusing page breaks (for example, item names, which are written in kanji in Japanese language, could overflow message windows in translated text); to mitigate this problem, a proportional typeface was implemented into the source code to fit more text into the screen. Swear words were used frequently in the localization to help convey the original Japanese meaning, though most profanities were censored in a manner described by Square employee Richard Honeywood as the "old comic book '@#\$%!'-type replacement". The European release was described as being in a worse condition, as the translations into multiple European languages were outsourced by Sony to another company, further hindering communication. For the PC port, Square attempted to fix translation and grammar mistakes for the North American and European versions but did not have the time and budget to retranslate all the text. According to Honeywood, the success of Final Fantasy VII in the West encouraged Square to focus more on localization quality; on future games, Square hired additional translators and editors, while also streamlining communication between the development and localization teams. Some months prior to the game's North American release, Sony publicly stated that it was considering cutting the scene at the Honey Bee Inn due to the salacious content, prompting numerous online petitions and letters of protest from RPG fans. Square subsequently stated that it would never allow Sony to localize the game in any way. In addition to translating the text, the North American localization team made tweaks to the gameplay, including reducing the enemy encounter rate, simplifying the Materia menu, and adding new boss fights. ### Later releases The International version of Final Fantasy VII was released on PlayStation Network (PSN) as a PSOne Classic in Japan on April 10, 2009. This version was compatible with both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable with support for PlayStation Vita and PlayStation TV coming later. Final Fantasy VII was later released as a PSOne Classic in North America, Europe, and Australia on June 2. The PC version was updated by DotEmu for use on modern operating systems and released via Square Enix's North American and European online stores on August 14, 2012. It included high-resolution support, cloud saves, achievements and a character booster. It would later be released via Steam on July 4, 2013, replacing the version available on Square Enix's North American and European online stores. The PC version would be released in Japan for the first time on May 16, 2013, exclusively via Square Enix's Japanese online store with the International version title. It has features unavailable in the western version including high-speed mode, no random encounters mode, and a max stats command. A release for iOS, based on the PC version and adjusted for mobile devices by D4 Enterprise, was released on August 19, 2015, with an auto-save feature. The PC version was released for PlayStation 4 on December 5, 2015. DotEmu developed the PS4 version. The game was also released for Android on July 7, 2016, for the PlayStation Classic on December 3, 2018, and for the Nintendo Switch and Xbox One worldwide on March 26, 2019. ## Reception and sales Within three days of its release in Japan, Final Fantasy VII sold over two million copies. This popularity inspired thousands of retailers in North America to break street dates in September to meet public demand for the title. In the game's debut weekend in North America, it sold 330,000 copies, and had reached sales of 500,000 copies in less than three weeks. The momentum established in the game's opening weeks continued for several months; Sony announced the game had sold one million copies in North America by early December, prompting business analyst Edward Williams from Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. to comment that "Sony redefined the role-playing game (RPG) category and expanded the conventional audience with the launch of Final Fantasy VII". According to Weekly Famitsu, Final Fantasy VII sold 3.27 million units in Japan by the end of 1997. By the end of 2005, the PlayStation version had sold 9.8 million copies including 4 million sales in Japan, making it the highest-selling game in the Final Fantasy series. By the end of 2006, The Best, the bargain reissue of the game, had sold over 158,000 copies in Japan. By May 2010, it had sold over 10 million copies worldwide, making it the most popular title in the series in terms of units sold. The original PC version surpassed Eidos' expectations: while initially forecast to sell 100,000 units, it quickly exceeded sales of one million units, garnering royalties of over \$2 million for Square. By August 2015, the PlayStation and PC versions had sold over 11 million units worldwide. Steam Spy estimated the game to have sold over 1.2 million downloads on Steam as of April 2018, with a later Steam leak estimating it had 1.14 million players on the platform as of July 2018. As of June 2020, the game has sold more than 13.3 million units worldwide. As of January 2023, the game has sold over 14.1 million units to date. The game received widespread acclaim from critics upon release. It was referred to by GameFan as "quite possibly the greatest game ever made", a quote selected for the back cover of the game's jewel case. GameSpot commented that "never before have technology, playability, and narrative combined as well as in Final Fantasy VII", expressing particular favor toward the game's graphics, audio, and story. The four reviewers of Electronic Gaming Monthly unanimously gave it a 9.5 out of 10 and their "Game of the Month" award, lauding its rendered backgrounds, use of FMV, battles, and especially the story line, though they expressed disappointment that the ending didn't resolve all of the loose ends. They also considered the North American localization a dramatic improvement over the original Japanese version. GamePro gave it a perfect 5.0 out of 5 in all four categories (graphics, sound, control, and fun factor), calling the storytelling "dramatic, sentimental, and touching in a way that draws you into the characters", who "come alive thanks to sweetly subtle body movements". Both GamePro and Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine (OPM) said the ATB system gives battles a tension and urgency not usually seen in RPGs. IGN's Jay Boor insisted the game's graphics were "light years beyond anything ever seen on the PlayStation", and regarded its battle system as its strongest point. Computer and Video Games's Alex C praised the dramatic story and well-developed characters. In addition to calling the graphics "bar none the best the PlayStation has ever seen", Next Generation said of the story that "while FFVII may take a bit to get going, as in every entry in the series, moments of high melodrama are blended with scenes of sheer poetry and vision". Edge noted that Final Fantasy VII had come close to being an interactive movie in playable form, praising its combination of a complex story that went against Western graphic adventures trends and "excellently orchestrated chip music". RPGamer praised the game's soundtrack, both in variety and sheer volume, stating that "Uematsu has done his work exceptionally well" and saying that it was potentially his best work. Final Fantasy VII has received some negative criticism. OPM and GameSpot questioned the game's linear progression. OPM considered the game's translation "a bit muddy" and felt the summon animations were "absolutely awe-inspiring". RPGamer cited its translation as "packed with typos and other errors which further obscure what is already a very confusing plot". GamePro also considered the Japanese-to-English translation a significant weakness in the game, and IGN regarded the ability to use only three characters at a time as "the game's only shortcoming". Reviewers gave similar praise to the PC version but criticized its various technical faults. Computer Games Magazine said that no other recent game had the same "tendency to fail to work in any capacity on multiple [computers]". Computer Gaming World complained that the music quality suffered on PC sound cards, and Next Generation Magazine found the game's pre-rendered backgrounds significantly less impressive than those of the PlayStation version. However, the latter magazine found the higher-resolution battle visuals "absolutely stunning", and Computer Games Magazine said that they showed off the potential graphical power of PCs. All three magazines concluded by praising the game despite its technical flaws, and PC Gamer summarized that, while "Square apparently did only what was required to get its PlayStation game running under Windows", Final Fantasy VII is "still a winner on the PC". ### Awards Final Fantasy VII was given numerous Game of the Year awards in 1997. At the second CESA Awards, it won the Grand Prize, Scenario Award and Sound Award. During the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences' inaugural Interactive Achievement Awards, Final Fantasy VII won in the categories of "Console Adventure Game of the Year" and "Console Role-Playing Game of the Year"; it also received nominations for "Interactive Title of the Year", "Console Game of the Year", "Outstanding Achievement in Art/Graphics", and "Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Design". In the Origins Awards, it won in the category "Best Roleplaying Computer Game of 1997". Final Fantasy VII was awarded Game of the Year by magazines including Game Informer, GamePro, and Hyper. It was also awarded the "Readers' Choice All Systems Game of the Year", "Readers' Choice PlayStation Game of the Year" and "Readers' Choice Role-Playing Game of the Year" by Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM), which gave it Editors' Choice Awards for "Role-Playing Game of the Year" and "Best Graphics" (plus a runner-up slot for "Game of the Year"), and also gave it awards for "Hottest Video Game Babe" (for Tifa Lockhart), "Most Hype for a Game", "Best Ending", and "Best Print Ad". Since 1997, it has been selected by many game magazines as one of the top video games of all time, listed as 91st in EGM's 2001 "100 Best Games of All Time", and as fourth in Retro Gamer's "Top 100 Games" in 2004. In 2018, it was ranked 99th in IGN's "Top 100 Games of All Time" and as third in PALGN's "The Greatest 100 Games Ever". Final Fantasy VII was included in "The Greatest Games of All Time" list by GameSpot in 2006, and ranked as second in Empire'''s 2006 "100 Greatest Games of All Time", as third in Stuff's "100 Greatest Games" in 2008 and as 15th in Game Informer's 2009 "Top 200 Games of All Time" (down five places from its previous best games of all-time list). GameSpot placed it as the second most influential game ever made in 2002; in 2007, GamePro ranked it 14th on the list of the most important games of all time, and in 2009 it finished in the same place on their list of the most innovative games of all time. In 2012, Time named it one of their "All-Time 100 Video Games". In March 2018, Game Informers "Readers Choice Top 300 Games of All Time", Final Fantasy VII ranked in 7th place. In March 2018, GamesRadar+ rated "The 25 best PS1 games of all time", Final Fantasy VII was ranked in 12th place. It has also appeared in numerous other greatest game lists. In 2007, Dengeki PlayStation gave it the "Best Story", "Best RPG" and "Best Overall Game" retrospective awards for games on the original PlayStation. GamePro named it the best RPG title of all time in 2008, and featured it in their 2010 article "The 30 Best PSN Games". In 2012, GamesRadar also ranked it as the sixth saddest game ever. On the other hand, GameSpy ranked it seventh on their 2003 list of the most overrated games. Final Fantasy VII has often placed at or near the top of many reader polls of all-time best games. It was voted the "Reader's Choice Game of the Century" in an IGN poll in 2000, and placed second in the "Top 100 Favorite Games of All Time" by Japanese magazine Famitsu in 2006 (it was also voted as ninth in Famitsu's 2011 poll of most tear-inducing games of all time). Users of GameFAQs voted it the "Best Game Ever" in 2004 and in 2005, and placed it second in 2009. In 2008, readers of Dengeki magazine voted it the best game ever made, as well as the ninth most tear-inducing game of all time. ## Legacy The game inspired an unofficial version for the NES by Chinese company Shenzhen Nanjing Technology. This port features the Final Fantasy VII game scaled back to 2D, with some of the side quests removed. The game's popularity and open-ended nature also led director Kitase and scenario writer Nojima to establish a plot-related connection between Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy X-2. The character Shinra from X-2 proposes the concept of extracting the life energy from within the planet Spira. Nojima has stated that Shinra and his proposal are a deliberate nod to the Shinra Company and that he envisioned the events of Final Fantasy X-2 as a prequel to those in VII. The advances in technology used to create the FMV sequences and computer graphics for Final Fantasy VII allowed Sakaguchi to begin production on the first Final Fantasy film, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The game introduced a particular aesthetic to the series—fantasy suffused with modern-to-advanced technology—that was explored further in Final Fantasy VIII, The Spirits Within, and XV. Re-releases of Square games in Japan with bonus features would occur frequently after the release of Final Fantasy VII International. Later titles that would be re-released as international versions include Final Fantasy X and other follow-ups from the franchise, as well as the Kingdom Hearts series. Final Fantasy VII is credited as having the largest impact of the Final Fantasy series, and with allowing console role-playing games to gain mass-market appeal outside of Japan. Aerith's death in the game has often been referred to as one of the most significant moments from any video game. In addition, Final Fantasy VII is also noted for its use of the unreliable narrator literary concept, drawing comparisons to films such as Fight Club (1999), The Sixth Sense (1999), American Psycho (2000) and Memento (2000). Patrick Holleman and Jeremy Parish argue that the game takes the unreliable narrator concept a step further, with its interactivity establishing a connection between the player and the protagonist Cloud, setting Final Fantasy VII apart from films as well as other video games. According to Holleman, "no RPG has ever deliberately betrayed the connection between protagonist and player like FFVII does". Harry Mackin writing for Paste Magazine called the game "a subversion that deconstructs and comments meaningfully on how we think about heroism, masculinity and identity in videogame storytelling". Ric Manning of The Courier-Journal noted elements of psychoanalysis in the game. The game is also noted for its cyberpunk themes; GamesRadar+ called it one of the best games of the genre, and Paste Magazine compared its cyberpunk city of Midgar to Akira and Blade Runner. According to Comic Book Resources, the game's climate change theme is more meaningful in 2019 than it was in 1997. Several characters from Final Fantasy VII have made cameo appearances in other Square Enix titles, most notably the fighting game Ehrgeiz and the popular Final-Fantasy-to-Disney crossover series Kingdom Hearts. Additionally, fighting video game Dissidia Final Fantasy includes Final Fantasy VII characters such as Cloud and Sephiroth, and allows players to fight with characters from throughout the Final Fantasy series, and its follow-up, Dissidia 012, included Tifa as well. Cloud is also a playable character in Final Fantasy Tactics. In December 2015, Cloud was released as a downloadable content character for the Nintendo crossover fighting game Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, along with a stage based on Midgar. He returned in the 2018 sequel, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, along with Sephiroth being added as downloadable content in December 2020. ### Related media and merchandise The world of Final Fantasy VII is explored further in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, a series of games, animated features, and short stories. The first title in the Compilation is the mobile game Before Crisis, a prequel focusing on the Turks' activities six years before the original game. The CGI film sequel Advent Children, set two years after the game, was the first title announced but the second to be released. Special DVD editions of the film included Last Order, an original video animation that recounts the destruction of Nibelheim. Dirge of Cerberus and its mobile phone counterpart, Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode: Final Fantasy VII, are third-person shooters set one year after Advent Children. Dirge focuses on the backstory of Vincent Valentine, whose history was left mostly untold in Final Fantasy VII. The most recent title is the PlayStation Portable game Crisis Core, an action role-playing game that centers on Zack's past. Releases not under the Compilation label include Maiden Who Travels the Planet, which follows Aerith's journey in the Lifestream after her death, taking place concurrently with the second half of the original game. In 1998, the Official Final Fantasy VII Strategy Guide was licensed by Square Soft and published by Brady Games. Final Fantasy VII Snowboarding is a mobile port of the snowboard minigame featured in the original game, featuring different courses for the player to tackle. The game is downloadable on V Cast-compatible mobile phones and was first made available in 2005 in Japan and North America. Final Fantasy VII G-Bike is a mobile game released for iOS and Android in December 2014, based on the motorbike minigame featured in the original game. In September 2007, Square Enix published "Final Fantasy VII 10th Anniversary Ultimania". This book is an in-depth compilation of FFVII story-line and artwork. The Universal Studios Theme Park in Japan is developing a Final Fantasy VII themed virtual reality attraction. ### Remake With the announcement and development of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, speculation spread that a remake of the original Final Fantasy VII would be released for the PlayStation 3. This conjecture was sparked by the release of a video featuring the opening sequence of FFVII recreated using the PlayStation 3's graphical capabilities at E3 2005. After a decade of speculation, a remake was announced at E3 2015. The game saw changes made to its story and combat system. The game is planned to be released over three installments, with the first part being released for the PlayStation 4 in 2020. The follow-up, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, is set to be released in early 2024. Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion, a remaster of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, which was released in December 2022, is also considered a prequel to the larger Final Fantasy VII Remake'' project.
169,523	Bids for the 2012 Summer Olympics	1,172,534,892	Bids for hosting the Olympics	[ "2005 in Singapore", "2012 Summer Olympics", "2012 Summer Olympics bids", "Historical events in Singapore", "July 2005 events in Asia", "Summer Olympics bids" ]	Nine cities submitting bids to host the 2012 Summer Olympics and 2012 Summer Paralympics were recognised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The Committee shortlisted five of them—London, Madrid, Moscow, New York City, and Paris—from which London eventually prevailed; thus becoming the first city to host the Olympic Games for a third time. The bidding process for the 2012 Olympics was considered one of the most hotly contested in the history of the IOC. Paris was seen by some as the front-runner for much of the campaign, but skillful lobbying by London's supporters and an inspirational final presentation by Sebastian Coe led to the success of its bid. After a technical evaluation of the nine original bids, the top five were shortlisted on 18 May 2004, becoming official candidates. The remaining applicant cities—Havana, Istanbul, Leipzig and Rio de Janeiro—were eliminated. Four of the five candidate cities were prominent national capitals, which lent an increased competitive interest to the final bidding phase. Paris and Madrid earned the top scores during the application phase, but in early 2005, a more thorough evaluation of the candidates put Paris and London in a close race that became tighter as the final vote approached. On 6 July 2005, in a four-round exhaustive ballot of the IOC (gathered at the 117th IOC Session in Singapore), Moscow, New York City and Madrid were eliminated in the first three rounds. London won the final round by a margin of four votes over Paris and secured the right to host the 2012 Olympics. In the month after the election, members of the Paris 2012 delegation argued that the London delegation had violated IOC rules. The key points in the accusations were London 2012's abortive athlete incentive initiative and lobbying by then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair. A public statement by IOC President Jacques Rogge dismissed these accusations, stating that the competition had been fair. Another controversy occurred during the bidding process when an undercover investigation by British television series Panorama revealed a corruption scandal associated with IOC member Ivan Slavkov and Olympic agents, who offered to deliver votes from IOC members to any 2012 Olympic bid in return for financial favours. Still recovering from the effects of the Salt Lake City scandal, the IOC reacted swiftly and punitively toward the rule-breaking individuals. ## Bidding process The Olympic bidding process begins with the submission of a city's application to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) by its National Olympic Committee (NOC) and ends with the election of the host city by the members of the IOC during an ordinary session. The process is governed by the Olympic Charter, as stated in Chapter 5, Rule 34. Since 1999, the process has consisted of two phases. During the first phase, which begins immediately after the bid submission deadline, the "applicant cities" are required to answer a questionnaire covering themes of importance to a successful Games organisation. This information allows the IOC to analyse the cities' hosting capacities and the strengths and weaknesses of their plans. Following a detailed study of the submitted questionnaires and ensuing reports, the IOC Executive Board selects the cities that are qualified to proceed to the next phase. The second phase is the true candidature stage: the accepted applicant cities (from now on referred to as "candidate cities") are required to submit a second questionnaire in the form of an extended, more detailed, candidature file. These files are carefully studied by the IOC Evaluation Commission, a group composed of IOC members, representatives of international sport federations, NOCs, athletes, the International Paralympic Committee, and international experts in various fields. The members of the Evaluation Commission then make four-day inspection visits to each of the candidate cities, where they check the proposed venues and are briefed about details of the themes covered in the candidature file. The Evaluation Commission communicates the results of its inspections in a report sent to the IOC members up to one month before the electing IOC Session. The IOC Session in which a host city is elected takes place in a country that did not submit an application to stage the Olympics. The election is made by the assembled active IOC members (excluding honorary and honour members), each possessing one vote. Members from countries that have a city taking part in the election cannot vote while the city is in the running. The voting is conducted in a succession of rounds until one bid achieves an absolute majority of votes; if this does not happen in the first round, the bid with the fewest votes is eliminated and another voting round begins. In the case of a tie for the lowest number of votes, a special runoff vote is carried out, with the winner proceeding to the next round. After each round, the eliminated bid is announced. Following the announcement of the host city, the successful bid delegation signs the "Host City Contract" with the IOC, which delegates the responsibilities of the Games organisation to the city and respective NOC. ### Evaluation of applicant cities The deadline to submit applications for the 2012 Summer Olympics was 15 July 2003. The nine cities that submitted bids before that date also met the 15 January 2004 deadline for submission of the first phase questionnaire. Through analysis of the questionnaires, the IOC gave a weighted-average score to each city based on the scores obtained in each of the questionnaire's eleven themes: political and social support, general infrastructure, sports venues, Olympic Village, environment, accommodation, transport, security, past experience, finance, and legacy. If a bid's score was higher than six (IOC's predefined benchmark score), the city was considered highly capable of hosting the Games; otherwise, its chances were very slim. On 18 May 2004, the IOC announced the cities accepted as candidates: - Paris — scored 8.5 (bid details) - Madrid — scored 8.3 (bid details) - London — scored 7.6 (bid details) - New York City — scored 7.5 (bid details) - Moscow — scored 6.5 (bid details) - Leipzig — scored 6.0 - Rio de Janeiro — scored 5.1 - Istanbul — scored 4.8 - Havana — scored 3.7 The five highest-rated applicants progressed to the next phase as official candidate cities. As stipulated, the IOC granted them the right to use the Olympic rings on their candidature emblem, together with a label identifying each as a Candidate City. ### Evaluation of candidate cities By 15 November 2004, all candidates had submitted their candidature files to the IOC. After a period of analysis by the IOC, the cities were visited by the IOC Evaluation Commission, consisting of twelve members and chaired by Moroccan IOC member Nawal El Moutawakel. The four-day visits occurred between 3 February and 17 March 2005: - Madrid — 3–6 February - London — 16–19 February - New York City — 21–24 February - Paris — 9–12 March - Moscow — 14–17 March The Parisian bid suffered two setbacks during the inspection: a number of strikes and demonstrations coincided with the visit, and a report was released stating that Guy Drut, IOC member and one of the key members of Paris's bid team, faced charges over alleged political party financial corruption. On 6 June 2005, the IOC released the inspection team's evaluation reports of the five candidate cities. Although these documents did not contain scores or rankings, the report for Paris was considered the most positive, followed closely by London, which had narrowed most of the gap observed at the time of the first-phase evaluation in 2004. New York City and Madrid also obtained very positive evaluations, while Moscow was considered the weakest bid. On the same day, New York City's bid suffered a major setback following the report that the State of New York refused to fund West Side Stadium, a New York 2012 centrepiece. The New York City campaign devised an alternative plan within a week, but such a major change with only one month remaining before the final vote damaged the city's chances. Throughout the bidding process and leading up to the vote at the 117th IOC Session, Paris was widely seen as the favourite, particularly as its bid was the city's third in recent history (previous bids being for 1992 and 2008). London was originally seen as lagging behind Paris by a considerable margin, but this situation began to reverse with the appointment of Sebastian Coe as the head of London 2012, on 19 May 2004. In late August 2004, reports emerged that predicted a tie between London and Paris. In the final run-up to the 117th IOC Session, London and Paris appeared to be in an increasingly close contest. On 1 July 2005, IOC president Jacques Rogge, when asked who the winner would be, told the assembled press, "I cannot predict it since I don't know how the IOC members will vote. But my gut feeling tells me that it will be very close. Perhaps it will come down to a difference of say ten votes, or maybe less." ### Final selection process The opening ceremony of the 117th IOC Session was held at the Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay in Singapore on 5 July 2005. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was the guest of honour and officially opened the session. Song, dance and martial arts exhibitions with the theme "One Voice, One Rhythm, One World" began the ceremony. On 6 July 2005, the election day, the IOC Session was held at the Raffles City Convention Centre. It began at 1:00 UTC with the one-hour final presentations of the candidate cities, followed by a half-hour press briefing, in the following order: Paris, New York City, Moscow, London and Madrid. The bid presentations ended at 9:00 UTC and a presentation of the Evaluation Commission's final report preceded the election. Of the 116 active IOC members, 17 could not vote in the first round, leaving 99 members able to exert their voting rights. The electronic ballot began at 10:26 UTC, and the first three rounds eliminated Moscow, New York City and Madrid, respectively. After a city was eliminated, members from that city's country were allowed to vote in the following rounds. London and Paris made it to the fourth and final round of voting, which concluded at 10:45 UTC. An hour later, at 11:49 UTC, London was formally announced as the winner by Jacques Rogge. Approximately one billion viewers watched the announcement on live television. After the announcement, the ballot results were published: London gathered more votes in the first, third and final rounds, while Madrid won the second round despite falling short on votes in the third round and being eliminated. The competitiveness of the bids from Paris and London was ultimately demonstrated by a four-vote difference in the final round. ## Candidate cities overview ### Candidate cities ## Controversies ### Tony Blair's Olympic pitch In December 2003, the British prime minister Tony Blair spoke about the London bid during a "sports breakfast" he hosted during a summit in Nigeria. Blair mentioned the bid in context of the positive legacy of the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester: "It was partly the success of the Commonwealth Games that inspired our bid for the Olympics." Since the IOC expressly forbids any international promotion of bids before the final candidature phase, it wrote to leading British officials asking for an explanation concerning the alleged violation. The chairmen of the Commonwealth Games Federation and the British Olympic Association, and spokesmen from Downing Street and London 2012 denied any violation of the IOC's ethical code, insisting that Blair's comments were taken out of context as there was no intention to promote the bid. Nevertheless, to prevent future ethical clashes, barrister Michael Beloff was appointed the ethics commissioner for the London bid two months later. ### Ivan Slavkov corruption scandal On 4 August 2004, BBC's Panorama broadcast the results of a year-long investigation in which the reporters posed as consultants from a fictitious firm "New London Ventures", which was supposed to represent businesses interested in bringing the 2012 Olympics to London. The report unveiled how some Olympic agents could guarantee votes from certain IOC members to the London bid, in exchange for favours or money. The undercover team secretly filmed its encounter with one of these agents, Goran Takac, who presented them to Ivan Slavkov, an IOC member and the Bulgarian Olympic Committee's president. Slavkov stated he was open to negotiation since he had not made up his mind about which 2012 candidate city would get his vote. Takac mentioned that Slavkov's position on the IOC was an advantage to bypass the rigid rules concerning meetings with other members, and that Slavkov's services fee was included on the initial figures given to the reporters. In the days leading to the programme's broadcast, the IOC Ethics Commission launched an enquiry to investigate the accusations made in the documentary. Even though the Panorama reporters clearly stated that the London bid was nowhere associated with the investigation, the bid officials made further statements claiming the team had no knowledge and involvement, hoping to distance themselves from the scandal: "What I have to make clear is that London 2012 knew nothing about this—we have nothing to hide," said Alan Pascoe, a London 2012 vice chairman, committing to "do everything we can to co-operate [with the IOC enquiry] and take this story off the running order". Sebastian Coe, also a vice chairman at the time, reaffirmed Pascoe's words and assured "London 2012 has acted properly and ethically throughout the bidding process." After watching the documentary, IOC members and officials cleared London 2012 of any wrongdoing. Following the broadcast, the IOC provisionally suspended Ivan Slavkov and forbade him from attending the 2004 Summer Olympics. Jacques Rogge claimed he was "an angry man because some people are not playing by the rules," underlining that "Under my leadership, I can stress there is zero tolerance for unethical behaviour". An IOC Ethics Commission report released on 25 October 2004 condemned Slavkov and backed the veracity of the BBC's investigation: "the complete recording of the meeting between Mr Slavkov and the two journalists reveals that: ...at no time and in no way did Mr Slavkov object to this discussion of the terms of a contract to secure a candidate city the votes of IOC members whom he and Mr Takac were likely to be able to influence". Knowing about the accusation, Slavkov argued that he attended the meeting with the purpose of trying to frame the supposed corrupters, however the Ethics Commission report further stated that "at no point does it emerge from the meeting that Mr Slavkov's sole intention was to catch in the act these corrupters of IOC members." It goes on to say that Slavkov received "no mandate to 'find the real roots of corruption'" and that he was to profit monetarily from Takac's services. The report concluded: > "Mr Slavkov tarnished the honour and reputation of the Olympic Movement and the IOC... Indeed, an IOC member's involvement in this 'negotiation' lent credibility to the hypothesis advanced by the journalists that there were within the IOC members and agents who could corrupt other IOC members." On 7 July 2005, during the 117th IOC Session, Ivan Slavkov was expelled from the organisation following an 84–12 voting by the IOC members. ### French recriminations following vote The Paris delegation, led by Bertrand Delanoë, argued that Tony Blair and the London delegation had broken the IOC rules. On 11 July 2005, Delanoë stated: "They have not respected the rules established by the International Olympic Committee. I do not say that they were flirting with the yellow line, I say that they crossed the yellow line". A controversial move by the London bid team was its initiative to offer incentive packages for participating athletes, which included free flights, food, vouchers for long-distance calling and other financial accommodations. Immediately after announcing the initiative, London withdrew it, most likely as a result of Jacques Rogge raising concerns over its potential to start a "bidding war". Paris also claimed that the lobbying by Tony Blair was illegal, an accusation that was strongly denied by Downing Street. It was not until 4 August 2005 that Jacques Rogge suppressed any further controversies by saying in a statement: "I made it very clear that, in my opinion, the competition was fair. It was conducted according to the rules that we have set out". Delanoë's comments were criticised by Parisian political leaders; Claude Goasguen, president of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party of the Council of Paris, stated: "One cannot make such type of accusations without delivering any proof". Even before the election, tensions grew between the French and British delegations, already in Singapore. The Paris bid team considered submitting a complaint against London bid consultants Jim Sloman and Rod Sheard after they stated that the Stade de France was not adequate for athletics, an action that goes against the IOC rules which forbid any bid to make statements about a rival bid. The London team promptly denied that the two men were under contract with the bid at that time, and underlined that their opinions did not reflect the views of the London bid. ### Mistaken voting controversy On 23 December 2005, Alex Gilady, an Israeli IOC member and a member of the IOC's London 2012 Co-ordination Commission, suggested that Madrid should have tied for second spot with Paris in the third round of voting, but did not do so because Greek member Lambis Nikolaou pressed the wrong button. He further postulated that if this had happened, Madrid would have beaten Paris in the resulting runoff ballot for second place, and gone on to beat London in the final round. However, Craig Reedie, a British IOC member, dismissed these words, commenting that a claim "that an unnamed member 'might' have done something which 'might' have brought about something else which 'might' have brought about a different result is 'the kind of tittle-tattle that happens after many an IOC vote'." By the end of 2005, Lambis Nikolaou denied Gilady's claims: "All this speculation surrounding my role in the third round of voting for the 2012 candidates is totally unfounded. I state that I did not vote in the third round as I had announced at the time of the vote." This statement was confirmed by the IOC voting numbers, which demonstrate that, even if Nikolaou had voted for Madrid, the city would have failed to beat Paris in the third voting round. ### Chirac's culinary comments Then-French President Jacques Chirac became the subject of controversy the day before the International Olympic Committee was due to pick a host city. Chirac made comments stating that "the only worse food than British food is Finnish" and "the only thing the British have done for Europe's agriculture is mad cow disease". Not only were Chirac's comments considered unsportsmanlike where the normal etiquette is not to criticize rival cities, there were two IOC members from Finland who would vote in the final ballot. While Paris was widely acknowledged as the front runner, the narrow loss to London led many to believe that Chirac's comments were at fault. ## Potential applicant cities Besides the initial nine applicant cities, other cities also wished to bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics, but the bids were not internally selected by the NOC (in case of more than one bidding city from the same country), were not put forward to the IOC, or were withdrawn before filing the necessary paperwork. The Nigerian capital, Abuja, planned to present a bid to become the first African city to stage the Olympic Games, but ended up not filling its application. In Asia, four cities were interested in holding the Games, but did not officially submit a bid: Hyderabad, New Delhi, Osaka and Tel Aviv. In South America, the Brazilian Olympic Committee chose Rio de Janeiro over São Paulo, and if Rio de Janeiro had been selected by the IOC, it would have been the first Olympiad staged in South America (four years on, Rio de Janeiro did land the 2016 Summer Olympics). In Canada, Toronto initially planned to gain hosting rights for 2012 after losing the 2008 Olympics bidding process, but because Vancouver landed the 2010 Winter Olympics, the Canadian city cancelled these plans. In the United States, the city of New York was picked by the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) over San Francisco, although several other cities submitted candidatures to become the American candidate for the 2012 Olympics; these included Houston, Washington D.C. (in cooperation with nearby Baltimore), Cincinnati, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Seattle and Tampa (in cooperation with nearby Orlando). Several European cities wanted to follow the likes of London, Madrid, Moscow and Paris, and were thus hopeful to gain their NOC's support. Germany chose Leipzig over Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Stuttgart, while in Spain, Seville lost out to Madrid. Other referenced cities were Budapest, Milan, Rome, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö, Oslo and Copenhagen.
1,628,788	SMS Schlesien	1,162,265,899	Battleship of the German Imperial Navy	[ "1906 ships", "Battleships of the Kriegsmarine", "Deutschland-class battleships", "Maritime incidents in May 1945", "Ships built by Schichau", "Ships built in Danzig", "Ships sunk by mines", "World War I battleships of Germany", "World War II battleships of Germany", "World War II shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea" ]	SMS Schlesien was one of five Deutschland-class pre-dreadnought battleships built for the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) between 1904 and 1906. Named after the German province of Silesia, Schlesien was laid down at the Schichau-Werke shipyard in Danzig on 19 November 1904, launched on 28 May 1906, and commissioned on 5 May 1908. She was armed with a battery of four 28 cm (11 in) guns and had a top speed of 18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph). The ships of her class were already outdated by the time they entered service, as they were inferior in size, armor, firepower, and speed to the revolutionary new British battleship HMS Dreadnought. After commissioning, Schlesien was assigned to I Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet, later being transferred to II Battle Squadron. She was primarily occupied with training cruises and fleet maneuvers in her early career. She served with the fleet throughout the first two years of World War I, seeing action at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May – 1 June 1916, where she was briefly actively engaged in combat. After Jutland, the Imperial Navy relegated Schlesien to guard duties before withdrawing her altogether in 1917, when she became a training ship. The Treaty of Versailles permitted the German navy to keep eight obsolete battleships, including Schlesien, to defend the German coast. Initially kept in reserve, she was modernized in the mid-1920s and saw extensive service with the reorganized Reichsmarine. Schlesien saw limited combat during World War II, briefly bombarding Polish forces during the invasion of Poland in September 1939. She escorted minesweepers during Operation Weserübung, the invasion of Norway and Denmark in April 1940. After the operation, she was given secondary duties, primarily serving as a training ship and icebreaker. She ended her career providing fire support in the Baltic coast. While off Swinemünde on 3 May 1945, she struck a mine and was towed into Swinemünde, where she was sunk by her crew in shallow water, though much of her superstructure, including her main battery, remained above water. In the remaining days of the war, Schlesien used her anti-aircraft guns to defend the city from air attack. After the end of the war, she was broken up, though some parts of the ship remained visible until the 1970s. ## Design The passage of the Second Naval Law in 1900 under the direction of Vizeadmiral (VAdm—Vice Admiral) Alfred von Tirpitz secured funding for the construction of twenty new battleships over the next seventeen years. The first group, the five Braunschweig-class battleships, were laid down in the early 1900s, and shortly thereafter design work began on a follow-on design, which became the Deutschland class. The Deutschland-class ships were broadly similar to the Braunschweigs, featuring incremental improvements in armor protection. They also abandoned the gun turrets for the secondary battery guns, moving them back to traditional casemates to save weight. The British battleship HMS Dreadnought—armed with ten 12-inch (30.5 cm) guns—was commissioned in December 1906. Dreadnought's revolutionary design rendered every capital ship of the German navy obsolete, including the Deutschland class. Schlesien was 127.60 m (418 ft 8 in) long, had a beam of 22.20 m (72 ft 10 in), and a draft of 8.21 m (26 ft 11 in). She displaced 13,191 t (12,983 long tons), and had a full-load displacement of 14,218 metric tons (13,993 long tons). She was equipped with three triple expansion engines and twelve coal-fired water-tube boilers that produced a rated 18,664 indicated horsepower (13,918 kW) and a top speed of 18.5 knots (34.3 km/h; 21.3 mph). Although the third-fastest ship of her class, Schlesien was the second-least fuel efficient. At a cruising speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph), she could steam for 4,770 nautical miles (8,830 km; 5,490 mi). She had a standard crew of 35 officers and 708 enlisted men. The ship's primary primary armament of four 28 cm SK L/40 guns in two twin turrets; one turret was placed forward and the other aft. Her offensive armament was rounded out with a secondary battery of fourteen 17 cm (6.7 in) SK L/40 guns mounted individually in casemates. A battery of twenty-two 8.8 cm (3.5 in) SK L/45 guns in single mounts provided defense against torpedo boats. The ship was fitted with six 45 cm (18 in) torpedo tubes, all submerged in the hull. One was in the bow, one in the stern, and four on the broadside. Her armored belt was 240 mm (9.4 in) thick amidships in the citadel and she had a 40 mm-thick (1.6 in) armored deck. The main battery turrets had 280 mm-thick (11 in) sides. ## Service history The contracts for the last two members of the Deutschland class, ordered under the contract names "R" and "Q", were awarded on 11 June 1904. "R" was laid down on 19 November at the Schichau dockyard in Danzig. She was launched on 28 May 1906, at which time Duchess Mathilde of Pless christened her Schlesien, after the province of Silesia. Graf von Zedlitz Trützschler, the Oberpräsident of Silesia, gave a speech at the launching ceremony. A shipyard crew took the ship from Danzig to Kiel in March 1908 for her final fitting-out. Schlesien was commissioned into the fleet on 5 May. She then began sea trials, which were delayed from 6 July to 5 September when the ship was temporarily used as a torpedo testing ship in place of the protected cruiser Vineta, which had to go into drydock for an overhaul. By early September, Vineta had completed her overhaul, allowing Schlesien to join the fleet. She received her full crew on 22 September and thereafter joined I Battle Squadron. The ships of the High Seas Fleet embarked on a cruise into the Atlantic Ocean that lasted from 7 July to 1 August. While on the way back to Germany, they were received by the British Royal Navy in Spithead. In late 1909, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff became the new fleet commander. His tenure as fleet commander was marked by strategic experimentation, due to the threat the latest underwater weapons posed, and the fact that the new Nassau-class battleships were too wide to pass through the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal. Accordingly, the fleet was transferred from Kiel to Wilhelmshaven on 1 April 1910. In May 1910, the fleet conducted training maneuvers in the Kattegat. These were in accordance with Holtzendorff's strategy, which envisioned drawing the Royal Navy into the narrow waters there. The annual summer cruise was to Norway, and was followed by fleet training, during which another fleet review was held in Danzig on 29 August. A training cruise into the Baltic Sea took place at the end of the year. In March 1911, the fleet conducted exercises in the Skagerrak and Kattegat. Schlesien and the rest of the fleet received British and American naval squadrons at Kiel in June and July. The year's autumn maneuvers were confined to the Baltic and the Kattegat, during which another fleet review was held in order to prepare for an Austro-Hungarian delegation that included Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Admiral Rudolf Montecuccoli. On 3 November 1911, Schlesien was transferred to II Battle Squadron with the rest of her sister ships; at this time, she transferred back to Kiel, where II Squadron was based. In mid-1912, due to the Agadir Crisis, the summer cruise was confined to the Baltic, to avoid exposing the fleet during the period of heightened tension with Britain and France. The fleet thereafter held the annual autumn maneuvers in August and September. A winter cruise in the Baltic followed at the end of the year. In 1913 the same uneventful pattern followed. On 14 July 1914, the annual summer cruise to Norway began. The threat of war during the July Crisis forced Kaiser Wilhelm II to end the cruise after only two weeks; by the end of July the fleet was back in port. ### World War I Schlesien served with the High Seas Fleet through the first two years of the war. At the outbreak of the conflict, the ship was deployed to guard the German Bight. She then rejoined the High Seas Fleet to support the battlecruisers that bombarded Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Whitby on 15–16 December 1914. During the operation, the German battle fleet of 12 dreadnoughts and 8 pre-dreadnoughts came to within 10 nmi (19 km; 12 mi) of an isolated squadron of six British battleships. Skirmishes between the rival destroyer screens convinced Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl that he was confronted with the entire Grand Fleet, and so he broke off the engagement and went back home. Two fruitless fleet advances followed on 17–18 and 21–23 April 1915. Another followed on 17–18 May, and another on 23–24 October. In March 1916, Schlesien was employed as a target ship for U-boats. On 24–25 April, Schlesien and her sisters joined the dreadnoughts of the High Seas Fleet to support the battlecruisers of I Scouting Group on a raid of the English coast. While en route to the target, the battlecruiser Seydlitz was damaged by a mine. The remaining battlecruisers conducted a short bombardment of the ports of Yarmouth and Lowestoft. The target's visibility was poor, so the operation was soon called off before the British fleet could intervene. Squadron exercises in the Baltic followed from 11 to 22 May. #### Battle of Jutland Admiral Scheer immediately planned another foray into the North Sea, but the damage to Seydlitz delayed the operation until the end of May. Schlesien was the second ship in IV Division of II Battle Squadron under the command of Rear Admiral Franz Mauve [de], positioned at the rear of the German line. During the ensuing operation, Schlesien was the second to last ship in the German line, followed only by her sister ship Schleswig-Holstein. During the "Run to the North", Admiral Reinhard Scheer, the commander of the fleet, ordered the fleet to pursue the British V Battle Squadron at top speed. The slower Deutschland-class ships could not keep up with the faster dreadnoughts and quickly fell behind. By 19:30, the Grand Fleet had arrived on the scene and confronted Scheer with a large numerical superiority. The German fleet was severely hampered by the presence of the slower Deutschland-class ships; if Scheer ordered an immediate turn towards Germany, he would have to sacrifice the slower ships to make good his escape. Scheer decided to reverse the course of the fleet with the Gefechtskehrtwendung, a maneuver that required every unit in the German line to turn 180° simultaneously. As they had fallen behind, the ships of II Battle Squadron could not conform to the new course following the turn. Schlesien and the other five ships of the squadron were, therefore, located on the disengaged side of the German line. Mauve considered moving his ships to the rear of the line, astern of III Battle Squadron dreadnoughts, but decided against it when he realized the movement would interfere with the maneuvering of Admiral Franz von Hipper's battlecruisers. Instead, he attempted to place his ships at the head of the line. Later on the first day of the battle, the hard-pressed battlecruisers of I Scouting Group were being pursued by their British opponents. Schlesien and the other so-called "five-minute ships" came to their aid by steaming in between the opposing battlecruiser squadrons. Schlesien and her sisters could barely make out a target in the darkness. Owing to the poor visibility their shooting was ineffective. The British battlecruisers scored several hits on the German ships; in the brief melee a near miss from a large-caliber gun sprayed shell splinters onto Schlesien's decks, killing one man and wounding another. Admiral Mauve ordered an 8-point turn to the south, and the British did not follow. Late on the 31st, the fleet organized for the night return to Germany; Schlesien and Schleswig-Holstein fell in behind the mauled battlecruisers Von der Tann and Derfflinger at the rear of the line. British destroyers conducted a series of attacks against the fleet, some of which targeted Schlesien. Regardless, the High Seas Fleet punched through the British destroyer forces and reached Horns Reef by 04:00 on 1 June. The German fleet reached Wilhelmshaven a few hours later, where the undamaged dreadnoughts of the Nassau and Helgoland classes took up defensive positions. #### Later wartime service After Jutland, Schlesien and her three surviving sisters returned to picket duty at the mouth of the Elbe, and in June and July Schlesien again served as a torpedo target ship for U-boats. The experience at Jutland demonstrated that pre-dreadnoughts had no place in a naval battle with dreadnoughts, and they were thus left behind when the High Seas Fleet sortied again on 18 August. From 31 January to 9 February 1917, she served in the Danish straits as a guard ship, and also as an icebreaker, after which she returned to the Elbe. From 2 May to 8 June, she was again used as a target ship in the Baltic. Her guard ship duties in the Elbe ended on 27 July, when she was withdrawn from service and converted into a training ship for engine room personnel and new recruits. She served in this capacity from 20 August to 16 April 1918. In late April, Schlesien was taken into the drydock at the Kaiserliche Werft (Imperial Shipyard) in Wilhelmshaven to be converted into a training ship for naval cadets. The ship's main and secondary battery guns were removed so they could be used ashore, leaving Schlesien equipped with a battery of 10.5 cm (4.1 in) and 8.8 cm (3.5 in) guns. She had made several training cruises in the Baltic by November 1918; she was in Kiel during the Kiel mutiny in the closing days of the war. On 5 November, she left the port still flying the Imperial German flag even after most of the other vessels in the port had hoisted the red flag of revolution. Schlesien initially went to Flensburg, but mutiny had already spread to the port, so on orders from the Reichsmarineamt (Imperial Naval Office) she sailed instead to Swinemünde, where on 10 November her commander, Fregattenkapitän (Frigate Captain) von Waldeye-Hartz hauled down his flag and placed his ship out of service. He and the crew remained aboard, and on 14 November they took the ship back to Kiel, where they were released from service on 20 November. She was used briefly again to train cadets to operate boilers and engines; on 1 December, she was again removed from service. ### Inter-war years Following the German defeat in World War I, the German navy was reorganized as the Reichsmarine according to the Treaty of Versailles. The new navy was permitted to retain eight pre-dreadnought battleships under Article 181—two of which would be in reserve—for coastal defense. Schlesien was one of the vessels retained under the terms of the treaty, but was initially kept in reserve, since she still carried the battery of just 10.5 cm and 8.8 cm guns. By the mid-1920s, two of the battleships still in active service, Braunschweig and Hannover, were becoming worn out and needed replacement. The replacements for the old battleships—the Deutschland-class cruisers—would not be ready for some time, and so the navy decided to rearm and modernize Schlesien in 1926–1927. Her original 28 cm guns were reinstalled, and a new secondary battery of 15 cm (5.9 in) guns were installed in the casemates for the old 17 cm guns. This included removing the fore funnel and ducting those boilers into an enlarged funnel, and installing a new heavy pole mast. The work was completed on 1 March 1927, and she thereafter entered service with the crew from Hannover. On joining the rest of the fleet, Schlesien became the flagship of the Commander of the Naval Forces of the North Sea, Konteradmiral (KAdm—Rear Admiral) Alexander Werth, which was renamed on 1 January 1930 the Commander of Battleships. She was based in Wilhelmshaven. In May 1927, President Paul von Hindenburg came to Wilhelmshaven to visit the fleet. The annual fleet maneuvers were conducted in August and September, as they had been in the prewar years, and they culminated in a naval review on 14 September for Hindenburg. KAdm Wilhelm Prentzel replaced Werth on 29 September and in October 1928 he was in turn replaced by KAdm Walther Franz. In the course of 1928, Schlesien went on a fleet cruise in the Atlantic in July and conducted shooting training in August with the old ironclad, now target ship, Baden. Another Atlantic cruise followed in April and May 1929. In February 1930, Franz, who had by then been promoted to the rank of vizeadmiral, turned command of the unit to KAdm Richard Foerster. From 3 April to 6 June, Schlesien embarked on a major training cruise by herself to the Mediterranean Sea, during which she visited Messina, Sicily, where her senior officers met King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy. In June 1931, Schlesien visited Norway. Kommodore (Commodore) Max Bastian replaced Foerster in September 1932, and at the same time, Kapitän zur See (Captain at Sea) Wilhelm Canaris, who later served as chief of the Abwehr, took command of the ship, a position he would hold for the next two years. Schlesien made another trip into the Atlantic in January 1933, which included a stop in Iceland from 6 to 9 January. On 10 December 1933, the new heavy cruiser Deutschland replaced Schlesien as the flagship of the Commander of Battleships. Schlesien was converted back into a training ship for cadets between 18 February and 8 April 1935, and she was formally removed from the fleet organization on 30 September. Among the modifications were the installation of additional anti-aircraft guns and replacement of the ship's boilers. The newer boilers were more efficient, which allowed fewer of them to be used; the additional space this created was used as crew compartments for the cadets and an instruction room. The crew was also altered; the standard crew had been 35 officers and 708 enlisted men; after the conversion, this was reduced to 29 officers and 559 sailors, supplemented by 214 cadets. Over the course of the following three years, Schlesien embarked on several overseas training cruises as part of the Training Inspectorate. The first lasted from 1 December 1935 to 29 February 1936, and went to Cape Verde in the central Atlantic. More modernization work was done after her return to Germany, and from 12 October 1936 to 22 April 1937, she went on a tour of North, Central, and South America. Further cruises followed in October 1937, April 1938, and March 1939. During this period, her last coal-fired boilers were replaced with oil-fired models. ### World War II After the outbreak of World War II following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, Schlesien initially remained in her training ship role, though from 21 to 27 September she was used to bombard Polish artillery positions around Hel and Jastarnia. After the operation, Schlesien had six of her 15 cm guns removed to arm the new surface raider Pinguin. She then returned to training ship duties, and from January to March 1940 served as an icebreaker to allow U-boats to operate. She then escorted minesweepers in the Little Belt in April during Operation Weserübung, the invasion of Norway and Denmark. She resumed training duties, but crew shortages forced the navy to deactivate the ship on 2 August, leaving only a skeleton crew aboard to maintain the ship's condition. In January 1941, she was reactivated to again serve as an icebreaker in the Baltic until 31 March, when she was again decommissioned in Gotenhafen, thereafter being used as a stationary training hulk with a skeleton crew. As Germany began to prepare for war with the Soviet Union in early 1941, Schlesien was reactivated on 30 April to protect minelayers along with Schleswig-Holstein as they laid a series of minefields in the Baltic to prevent the Soviet Baltic Fleet from attempting to break out to Britain. The Soviet fleet did not attempt to leave port after Germany invaded in June, and so Schlesien was detached from the force guarding the minefields in October. She returned to Gotenhafen and resumed training duties there. Icebreaker service again summoned the vessel to active service from January to April 1942. On 4 April, Schlesien sailed back to Gotenhafen in company with the battleship Gneisenau and the icebreaker Castor. Schlesien thereafter saw limited training duties in the Baltic in 1943 and 1944, owing to the increasingly limited supplies of fuel oil available to Germany by this stage in the war. During this period, her armament was revised several times. In 1943, a pair of twin 37 mm (1.5 in) anti-aircraft guns were installed, one on each side of her bridge. In early 1944, her anti-aircraft armament was strengthened considerably with the addition of two 40 mm guns and twenty 20 mm (0.79 in) guns; these were in two Flakvierling quadruple, and six twin mounts. Further enhancements were made later in the year, including with the installation of four heavy 10.5 cm anti-aircraft guns in place of the old 8.8 cm guns atop her aft superstructure and two more of the guns abreast her bridge, these taking the place of the 37 mm guns, which were removed. The light anti-aircraft battery increased to seven or ten 40 mm guns in single and double mounts and eighteen or twenty-two 20 mm guns in double and quadruple mounts (sources differ on the exact number of guns). Schlesien was also equipped with a FuMO-25 search radar and a FuMB-6 radar detection set, both of which were installed on the foremast. She was moved from Danzig to Gotenhafen and then to Sopot from 15 to 21 March 1945 to provide gunfire support to German forces in the area. She was then used to carry more than 1,000 wounded soldiers from Sopot to Swinemünde, where she also restocked her ammunition. She then remained in the port to shell the advancing Soviet 2nd Shock Army. On 2 May, she was ordered to protect the Peenebrücke Wolgast [de] bridge that connected Wolgast and the island of Usedom. Early on the morning of 3 May, while steaming south of Greifswalder Oie, she struck a British air-dropped naval mine; the explosion killed two men and caused significant flooding. She was taken under tow by the destroyer Z39 back to Swinemünde, where her anti-aircraft guns could be used to help defend the city. The crew scuttled the ship there in shallow water so she could not be sunk by air attack and risk capsizing. Between 1949 and 1956, the wreck was demolished and then scrapped in situ by an East German company. Some remains from the ship were still visible in 1970.
3,538,069	Deepika Padukone	1,169,784,162	Indian actress (born 1986)	[ "1986 births", "21st-century Indian actresses", "Actresses from Bangalore", "Actresses from Copenhagen", "Actresses in Hindi cinema", "Actresses in Kannada cinema", "Actresses in Tamil cinema", "Female models from Bangalore", "Filmfare Awards winners", "Indian Hindus", "Indian expatriate actresses in the United States", "Indian feminists", "Indian film actresses", "Indian women columnists", "Indira Gandhi National Open University alumni", "International Indian Film Academy Awards winners", "Konkani people", "Living people", "Mental health activists", "Mount Carmel College, Bangalore alumni", "Screen Awards winners", "Zee Cine Awards winners" ]	Deepika Padukone ( or ; born 5 January 1986) is an Indian actress who works predominantly in Hindi films. One of the highest-paid actresses in India, her accolades include three Filmfare Awards. She features in listings of the nation's most popular personalities; Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2018 and awarded her the TIME100 Impact Award in 2022. Padukone, the daughter of the badminton player Prakash Padukone, was born in Copenhagen and raised in Bangalore. As a teenager, she played badminton in national level championships but left her career in the sport to become a fashion model. She soon received offers for film roles and made her acting debut in 2006 as the title character of the Kannada film Aishwarya. Padukone then played a dual role opposite Shah Rukh Khan in her first Bollywood release, the romance Om Shanti Om (2007), which won her the Filmfare Award for Best Female Debut. Padukone received praise for her starring role in the romance Love Aaj Kal (2009), but this was followed by a brief setback. The romantic comedy Cocktail (2012) marked a turning point in her career, and she gained further success with starring roles in the romantic comedies Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani and Chennai Express (both 2013), the heist comedy Happy New Year (2014), Sanjay Leela Bhansali's period dramas Bajirao Mastani (2015) and Padmaavat (2018), and the Hollywood action film XXX: Return of Xander Cage (2017). She also received critical acclaim for playing a character based on Juliet in Bhansali's tragic romance Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013) and a headstrong daughter in the comedy-drama Piku (2015), winning two Filmfare Awards for Best Actress. Following a short hiatus and two commercially unsuccessful productions under her own company Ka Productions, Padukone starred in her highest-grossing Indian film, Pathaan (2023). Padukone is the founder of The Live Love Laugh Foundation, which creates awareness on mental health in India. Vocal about issues such as feminism and depression, she also participates in stage shows, has written columns for a newspaper, designed her own line of clothing for women, and is a prominent celebrity endorser for brands and products. Her other ventures include startup investments and a self-care brand. Padukone is married to her frequent co-star Ranveer Singh. ## Early life and modelling career Padukone was born on 5 January 1986 in Copenhagen, Denmark, to Konkani-speaking parents. Her father, Prakash Padukone, is a former professional badminton player and her mother, Ujjala, is a travel agent. Her younger sister, Anisha, is a golfer. Her paternal grandfather, Ramesh, was a secretary of the Mysore Badminton Association. The family relocated to Bangalore, India when Padukone was a year old. She was educated at Bangalore's Sophia High School and completed her pre-university education at Mount Carmel College. She subsequently enrolled at the Indira Gandhi National Open University for a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology, but dropped out due to scheduling conflicts with her modelling career. Padukone has said that she was socially awkward as a child and did not have many friends. The focus of her life was badminton, which she played competitively from a young age. Describing her daily routine in a 2012 interview, Padukone said, "I would wake up at five in the morning, go for physical training, go to school, again go for playing badminton, finish my homework, and go to sleep." Padukone continued to pursue a career in badminton throughout her school years and played the sport in national level championships. She also played baseball in a few state level tournaments. While concentrating on her education and sporting career, Padukone also worked as a child model, first appearing in a couple of advertising campaigns at the age of eight. In the tenth grade, she changed focus and decided to become a fashion model. She later explained, "I realised that I was playing the game only because it ran in the family. So, I asked my father if I could give up the game and he wasn't upset at all." In 2004, she began a full-time career as a model under the tutelage of Prasad Bidapa. Early in her career, Padukone gained recognition with a television commercial for the soap Liril and modelled for various other brands and products. In 2005, she made her runway debut at the Lakme Fashion Week for designer Suneet Varma and won Model of the Year at the Kingfisher Fashion Awards. Padukone's fame increased when she appeared in a popular print campaign for the 2006 Kingfisher Calendar; the designer Wendell Rodricks commented, "Since Aishwarya Rai, we haven't had a girl as beautiful and fresh." Rodricks had spotted her at a Ganjam jewellery class he was teaching and signed her up with the Matrix talent agency. At the age of 21, Padukone relocated to Mumbai and stayed at her aunt's home. That year, she gained wider recognition by featuring in the music video for Himesh Reshammiya's song "Naam Hai Tera". Padukone soon began to receive offers for film roles. Believing herself to be too inexperienced as an actor, she enrolled for a course at Anupam Kher's film academy. Following much media speculation, the director Farah Khan, who had noticed her in Reshammiya's music video, made the decision to cast her for a role in her upcoming film, then named Happy New Year. Rodricks also takes credit in helping her get the role. Khan was looking for a model to star in the film, and got in touch with Malaika Arora. Rodricks, for whom Padukone had been modelling for roughly two years then, recommended her to Arora, a close friend of his, who in turn recommended her to Khan. ## Acting career ### Film breakthrough and career struggles (2006–2011) Padukone made her acting debut with Aishwarya (2006), a Kannada film directed by Indrajit Lankesh. The romantic comedy was a remake of the Telugu film Manmadhudu, and she was cast in the title role opposite the actor Upendra. The film proved to be a commercial success. RG Vijayasarathy of Rediff.com was appreciative of Padukone's screen presence but added that "she needs to work on her emotional scenes." By the end of 2006, Farah Khan's Happy New Year was shelved, and Khan had instead cast Padukone for the melodrama Om Shanti Om (2007). Set against the backdrop of the Hindi film industry, the film tells the story of a struggling actor who is reincarnated to avenge the death of a film star. Shah Rukh Khan starred as the lead, and Padukone featured in dual roles of a star in the 1970s, and later, an aspiring actress. In preparation, Padukone watched several films of actresses Helen and Hema Malini to study their body language. Her voice was dubbed by the voice artist Mona Ghosh Shetty. For one of the songs in the film, "Dhoom Taana", Padukone drew upon Indian classical dance, and according to Dorling Kindersley, "mesmeriz[ed] audiences" by using hasta mudras (hand gestures). Om Shanti Om emerged as the highest-grossing Hindi film of the year, with a global revenue of ₹1.49 billion (US\$19 million). Taran Adarsh of the entertainment portal Bollywood Hungama opined that she had "all it takes to be a top star", and she was awarded with the Filmfare Best Female Debut Award and received her first Filmfare Award for Best Actress nomination. Bollywood Hungama reported that the success of Om Shanti Om proved a breakthrough for her. Padukone next played one of star Ranbir Kapoor's love interests in Siddharth Anand's romantic comedy Bachna Ae Haseeno (2008). The film was a financial success, but Namrata Joshi of Outlook dismissed her performance as "mannequin-like and utterly lack[ing] fire and zing". Her first release of 2009 came alongside Akshay Kumar in the kung fu comedy Chandni Chowk to China, in which she portrayed dual roles of Indian-Chinese twin sisters. Produced by Warner Bros., it had one of the widest international releases given to an Indian film. Padukone learned jujutsu and performed her own stunts. Despite the hype, Chandni Chowk To China was a financial failure, failing to recoup its ₹800 million (US\$10 million) budget. She appeared alongside Saif Ali Khan in the romantic drama Love Aaj Kal from the writer-director Imtiaz Ali. The film documented the changing value of relationships among the youth and had Padukone play the part of Meera Pandit, a head-strong career woman. With a worldwide gross of ₹1.2 billion (US\$15 million), Love Aaj Kal proved to be the third highest-grossing Hindi film of 2009. Aniruddha Guha of Daily News and Analysis said that Padukone "delivers the best of her four performances so far", and she was awarded with another Best Actress nomination at Filmfare. Padukone had five film releases in 2010. In the psychological thriller Karthik Calling Karthik, she played the supportive girlfriend of a depressed man (played by Farhan Akhtar). Derek Elley of Variety found the film to be "thinly plotted" but considered "the uncomplicated ingenuousness of Padukone" to be the film's highlight. Her most financially profitable film that year was Sajid Khan's ₹1.15 billion (US\$14 million)-grossing comedy film Housefull in which she featured alongside an ensemble cast headlined by Akshay Kumar. Critic Raja Sen described the film as a "festival of bad acting" and attributed Padukone's poor performance to her "plasticky expressions". Pradeep Sarkar's drama Lafangey Parindey (2010) starred Padukone as a blind girl determined to win a skating competition, for which she observed the interactions of blind people and rehearsed scenes while blindfolded. The Hindu's Sudhish Kamath was impressed by the "considerable restraint" in her performance. Her next role was opposite Imran Khan in the romantic comedy Break Ke Baad. CNN-IBN's Rajeev Masand found the film to be "watchable largely for the performance of its leading lady". Padukone's final release of 2010 was Ashutosh Gowariker's period film Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey opposite Abhishek Bachchan. Based on the book Do and Die, the film is a retelling of the 1930 Chittagong armoury raid. Bachchan featured as the revolutionary leader Surya Sen and Padukone played Kalpana Dutta, his confidante. Padukone said that she was unable to research her role as there was very little information on Dutta and relied on Gowarikar's direction. Barring Housefull, none of these films were commercially successful. Padukone began 2011 with an item number in the film Dum Maaro Dum. She referred to it as "the wildest song any actress has done"; the song's sexual content attracted controversy including a court case for indecency. Her next film was Prakash Jha's socio-political drama Aarakshan, which dealt with caste-based reservations in India. Trade journalists had high expectations for the film which ultimately flopped at the box office. Critical reaction was largely negative, though Pratim D. Gupta mentioned Padukone as the most "refreshing thing" about it. Her final appearance that year was in the comedy Desi Boyz alongside Kumar and John Abraham, a role that failed to propel her career forward. The series of poorly received films led critics to perceive that Padukone had "[lost] her sparkle." ### Established actress (2012–2016) Padukone has said that her starring role in the 2012 Homi Adajania-directed romantic comedy Cocktail marked a turning point in her career. Raja Sen opined that she had successfully proved to be a "stunning girl who can also act." Set in London, Cocktail tells the story of a man's relationship with two temperamentally different women—an impulsive party girl (Veronica, played by Padukone) and a submissive girl next door (Meera, played by Diana Penty). During the script narration, the producer Dinesh Vijan offered Padukone the choice of which woman to play; she decided on Veronica to expand her horizons as an actress. Portraying the role was a creative and physical challenge for her, and to achieve the physical requirements of her character she exercised extensively and followed a rigorous diet. Critics were divided in their opinion of the film, but particularly praised Padukone's performance; Devesh Sharma of Filmfare credited her as the "soul of the film" and wrote that she "excels in every scene, whether as a material girl who enjoys sex, drugs and rock and roll or as the jealousy ridden girl out to destroy herself." Cocktail earned Padukone Best Actress nominations at several award ceremonies, including Filmfare, Screen, and IIFA. The film also proved to be a box office success. The year 2013 was key for Padukone, as she starred in four of the top-grossing Hindi films of the year. She reunited with Saif Ali Khan in Abbas–Mustan's Race 2, an ensemble action thriller that served as a sequel to Race (2008). The film received predominantly negative reviews, but grossed a successful total of ₹1.62 billion (US\$20 million). Ayan Mukerji's romantic comedy Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani paired her opposite Ranbir Kapoor. She was cast as Naina Talwar, a "shy wallflower", which marked a departure from the glamorous characters that she had a reputation for portraying. Raja Sen termed it "her most self-aware performance" adding that she "acts within herself and eschews exaggeration, and the results are impressive". The pairing of Padukone with her former boyfriend was highly anticipated, and the film emerged as a major commercial success. Her next appearance was opposite Shah Rukh Khan in Rohit Shetty's action-comedy film Chennai Express, as a Tamil girl on the run from her father (a local don), which required that she adopt a Tamil accent. Critical opinion on her accent was mixed, but her performance received praise; film critic Aseem Chhabra wrote, "Padukone is delightful in the film—beautiful, smiling, and often a lot more playful and funny than Khan." Chennai Express earned over ₹3.95 billion (US\$49 million) to emerge as one of the highest-grossing Indian films. Padukone next played opposite Ranveer Singh in Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela, an adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy of Romeo and Juliet from director Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Her role was Leela, a Gujarati girl based on the character of Juliet. Initially titled Ram-Leela, the film's title was changed after a court case was registered against Bhansali, Padukone, and Singh for "offending the religious sentiments" of the Hindu community by showcasing sex and violence under a title that referred to the life of Rama. The film released among protests, but was generally well received by critics. Meena Iyer of The Times of India mentioned Padukone as "breathtaking", and Khalid Mohamed concluded that "it's Deepika Padukone whom the film belongs to. Looking drop dead gorgeous and going at her part with a wallop, she's the prime asset of Ram-Leela." Her performances in Chennai Express and Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela won her several awards, including the Screen Award for Best Actress for both films and the Filmfare Award for Best Actress for the latter. In 2014, Padukone featured opposite Rajinikanth in the Tamil film Kochadaiiyaan, a period drama shot using motion capture technology. She was paid ₹30 million (US\$380,000) for two days of work in it. In Homi Adajania's satire Finding Fanny, Padukone played a young widow on a road trip with her dysfunctional friends. The film was screened at the 19th Busan International Film Festival; critic Anuj Kumar of The Hindu wrote that Padukone successfully "takes off the fineries of Bollywood and you can sense the freedom from baggage in her performance". Later that year, she starred opposite Shah Rukh Khan for the third time in Farah Khan's renewal of Happy New Year. She played a bar dancer who trains a group of underachievers for a dance competition. Sanjukta Sharma of Mint found her glamorous role to be of minimal importance, but the film became one of her most successful, earning over ₹3.4 billion (US\$43 million) worldwide. Padukone later remarked that production on the film was difficult for her as she suffered from depression and anxiety. Following an appearance in Homi Adajania's online video on feminism, entitled My Choice, Padukone took on the role of a headstrong Bengali girl who cares for her hypochondriac father (played by Amitabh Bachchan), in Shoojit Sircar's comedy-drama Piku (2015). She was drawn to the depiction of a realistic father-daughter bond, which she thought was rare in Hindi cinema. Tanmaya Nanda of Business Standard praised the film's feminist tone, and wrote that Padukone proves "what she is capable of when given something more to do than look pretty and be the crazy-dance girl at parties". NDTV's Saibal Chatterjee opined that she "holds Piku together with a restrained star turn". With a worldwide gross of over ₹1.40 billion (US\$18 million), Piku was a box office hit, and garnered Padukone several awards, including second Best Actress awards at Filmfare and Screen. Later in 2015, Padukone played a vulnerable young woman in love with a psychologically troubled man (played by Ranbir Kapoor) in Imtiaz Ali's romantic drama Tamasha. Sukanya Verma named her performance as the best by an actress that year, writing that she "is so potent in Tamasha, it's almost as if you can hear her heartbeat across the screen". Reacting to the film's commercial failure, Padukone said that she did not measure success with box-office numbers. She reunited with Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Ranveer Singh in Bajirao Mastani, a historical drama about a tragic extramarital affair. Singh was cast as the maratha general Bajirao I, while Priyanka Chopra and Padukone featured as his first and second wife, respectively. To play the warrior-princess Mastani, Padukone learnt sword-fighting, horse-riding, and the martial art form of kalaripayattu. With a revenue of over ₹3.5 billion (US\$44 million), Bajirao Mastani proved to be the fourth highest-grossing Bollywood film of the year. Anupama Chopra found Padukone "riveting", but Subhash K. Jha thought that she was "way too subtle and silken, and not steely enough". At the 61st Filmfare Awards, Bajirao Mastani was named Best Film and Padukone received her second Best Actress nomination in that year. ### Professional expansion and film controversies (2017–present) The action film XXX: Return of Xander Cage (2017), in which Padukone played the leading lady opposite Vin Diesel, marked her first project in Hollywood. The Philadelphia Inquirer's Tirdad Derakhshani dismissed the film as "abysmal" and thought that Padukone's talent was wasted in it, but Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter believed that she "practically steals the film". The film earned over US\$345 million worldwide, a majority of which came from the Chinese box office. Padukone received three nominations at the Teen Choice Awards. In 2018, Padukone portrayed Rani Padmavati, a Rajput queen who commits jauhar (self-immolation) to protect herself from the Muslim invader Alauddin Khilji, in the period drama Padmaavat; it marked her third collaboration with Bhansali and Singh. She was challenged by the need to convey her character's courage through silence, and was emotionally exhausted by the experience. She read history books on the era and researched the various depictions of Padmavati. Right-wing Hindu groups speculated that the film portrayed a romantic liaison between Padmavati and Khilji; they protested violently and placed a bounty to behead Padukone and Bhansali. Following a deferment, the film was cleared for release after several modifications were made to it. Anna M. M. Vetticad of Firstpost criticised the film's glorification of jauhar, but credited Padukone for managing to "eke something out of the stereotype-ridden writing". With a then-record budget of ₹2 billion (US\$25 million), Padmaavat had earnings of ₹5.45 billion (US\$68 million) to emerge as one of Indian cinema's biggest grossers. She received another Best Actress nomination at Filmfare. Following Padmaavat, Padukone took some time off work to focus on her home and family. In 2018, she formed her own company, named Ka Productions. The company's first release was Chhapaak (2020), a drama by Meghna Gulzar, in which Padukone starred as an acid attack survivor (based on Laxmi Agarwal). She found it taxing to film in extreme heat wearing prosthetic makeup on her face, and considered it to be the most physically challenging role of her career. Shubhra Gupta of The Indian Express was appreciative of Padukone for "not just putting the focus on the ravaged-skin [...] but reflecting a mix of pain, anger, resignation" and Teo Bugbee of The New York Times found her "by turns inquisitive, watchful and serene but never maudlin". She received another Best Actress nomination at Filmfare. Amidst significant political backlash due to Padukone's perceived support for the Citizenship Amendment Act protests, Chhapaak failed commercially. Padukone's next production venture was 83 (2021), a sports drama about India's victory at the 1983 Cricket World Cup, starring Ranveer Singh as Kapil Dev, in which she also took on the role of Dev's wife, Romi. The film was delayed several times chiefly due to the COVID-19 pandemic in India. Padukone was director Kabir Khan's first choice as he considered casting a real-life couple as an onscreen pair to be a good marketing strategy. Reviews for the film were positive, with Davesh Sharma of Filmfare commending Padukone for adding glamour to her supporting part. It failed to perform well commercially. Padukone next took on a leading role in Shakun Batra's Gehraiyaan (2022), a drama about infidelity which was released on Amazon Prime Video. She described her part of a troubled woman engaged in an affair as the most layered of her career. In a mixed review for the film, Siddhant Adlakha of IndieWire was appreciative of Padukone's "emotionally complex" performance. She served as a jury member at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Padukone reunited with Shah Rukh Khan in Siddharth Anand's action film Pathaan (2023), set in the YRF Spy Universe. A song in the film, "Besharam Rang", featured Padukone in a saffron bikini, which became controversial once right-wing Hindutva groups deemed it obscene and objectionable. The Central Board of Film Certification cleared the film for release after some edits were made to the song sequence. Saibal Chatterjee wrote that Padukone "pulls off the dual act of an irrepressible femme fatale and a committed soldier with elan". Pathaan broke several box-office records, earning over ₹10 billion (US\$130 million) to rank as Padukone's highest-grossing Indian film release and Hindi cinema's second-biggest grosser. Padukone will reunite with Khan once again for a brief role (billed as a special appearance) in the action thriller Jawan. She will star opposite Prabhas in Kalki 2898 AD, a Telugu-Hindi bilingual science fiction film from filmmaker Nag Ashwin, and in another action film for Anand, named Fighter, alongside Hrithik Roshan. ## Personal life Padukone shares a close bond with her family, and visits them regularly in her hometown of Bangalore. She lives in Prabhadevi, a neighbourhood in Mumbai, and has admitted to missing the presence of her parents there. A practicing Hindu, Padukone considers religion to be an important aspect of her life and makes frequent visits to temples and other religious shrines. While filming Bachna Ae Haseeno in 2008, Padukone began a romantic relationship with co-star Ranbir Kapoor. She spoke openly about the relationship and sported a tattoo of his initials on the nape of her neck. She has said that the relationship had a profound effect on her, transforming her into a more confident and social person. The couple broke up a year later; she professed in an interview to feeling betrayed for a long time. In a 2010 interview, Padukone accused him of infidelity, and Kapoor later admitted to it. They reconciled their friendship while working on Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. Padukone subsequently became reticent to discuss her personal life, but in 2017, she fondly spoke of her relationship with her frequent co-star Ranveer Singh, whom she began dating in August 2012. In October 2018, the couple announced their impending marriage. The following month, they married in traditional Konkani Hindu and Sikh Anand Karaj ceremonies at Lake Como, Italy. ## Off-screen work In addition to acting, Padukone has written opinion columns and has been involved with women's health and fitness magazines. She has also supported charitable organisations, and has performed for stage shows. In 2009, she was hired by Hindustan Times to write weekly columns for their lifestyle section; through these columns she interacted with her fans and passed details of her personal and professional life. That year, she participated in the World 10K Bangalore marathon, which raised ₹13.1 million (US\$160,000) in support of 81 NGOs. In 2010, Padukone adopted the Maharashtrian village of Ambegaon as part of NDTV's Greenathon Campaign, to provide the village with a regular supply of electricity. She visited Indian jawans (troops) in Jammu, for an Independence Day special episode of NDTV's reality show Jai Jawaan. Padukone took part in the opening ceremony of the third season of the Indian Premier League at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai. Three years later, she performed alongside Shah Rukh Khan, Katrina Kaif, and Pitbull for the sixth edition of the Indian Premier League. In 2014, she participated in a concert tour across North America, entitled "SLAM! The Tour", in which she performed alongside her co-stars from Happy New Year. Padukone has also been involved with the Olympic Gold Quest team, established by her father and Geet Sethi to support Indian athletes at the Olympic Games, along with sports personalities such as Leander Paes and Viswanathan Anand and several other actors. In 2022, Padukone and Spanish footballer Iker Casillas unveiled the FIFA World Cup Trophy at the competition's final match in Qatar. In 2013, she launched her own line of clothing for women, in association with the retail chain Van Heusen. Two years later, she collaborated with the fashion portal Myntra to launch another line under her brand "All About You". From 2019 to 2021, she served as the chairperson of the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image. Through her own company, Ka Enterprises, Padukone has invested in several startups, including Drum Foods International, a fast-moving consumer goods company, and Blu Smart, an electric taxi. In 2022, she launched her own self-care brand, named 82°E, beginning with skincare products. The brand raised \$7.5 million in seed funding to launch new products. Padukone has also been outspoken on issues such as feminism and has said, "New feminism isn't about being aggressive; it's about reaching the top yet being soft. It's about being you – feminine, strong and full of will power." In a 2015 interview, Padukone spoke about her personal experience of overcoming depression, and in October that year she formed a foundation to create awareness on mental health in India, named The Live Love Laugh Foundation. The following year, she launched a campaign named More Than Just Sad to assist general physicians in their treatment of patients suffering from depression or anxiety. Also in 2016, the foundation teamed with Facebook and the AASRA organisation to launch multilingual tools and educational resources in Facebook's networking site to support people with suicidal tendencies. Padukone became the brand ambassador for the NGO Indian Psychiatric Society and on her foundation's first anniversary, the two organisations collaborated to launch the video and poster campaign \#DobaraPoocho dedicated to victims and survivors of depression. The World Economic Forum presented her with the Crystal Award in 2020 for creating awareness on mental health. In 2020, Padukone attended a protest for students who were brutalised during the 2020 JNU Attack due to their protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act. Members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party criticised her decision and asked people to boycott her film Chhapaak. Many others praised her for standing up against a crackdown on dissent, as mainstream Bollywood actors avoid making political statements fearing backlash and consequences on their film. When asked about the political backlash she has since faced, Padukone said, "I don't know if I'm supposed to feel something about it. But the truth is, I don't feel anything about it." ## In the media The journalist Vir Sanghvi, in 2013, described Padukone as "strong, someone who makes up her own mind, [and] has motivation within herself." She is particularly known in the media as a professional, disciplined performer, whose "work takes precedence over everything else". A reviewer for Rediff.com described her personality as "simple", "grounded", and "accessible", and wrote, "She takes criticism in her stride, acknowledges her limitations and strives to work hard at getting better. She handles praise with equal composure." Ayan Mukerji (the director of Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani) considers her to be "a woman who will flirt with you but you will love to take her home to meet your mom as well". Padukone maintains an active social media presence. Padukone is considered among the most popular and high-profile celebrities in India. Analysing her career, Reuters published that after making a successful debut with Om Shanti Om, she featured in a series of films for which critics labelled her as "wooden" and "mocked her accent". The Indian Express added, "Not too long ago after a few unwise script calls and the public blow up of her high profile relationship with Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika was written off. Credit to her much touted professionalism, dedication, discipline and perseverance that she bounced back." Following the success of Cocktail, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, and Chennai Express, several media publications began crediting her as the most successful contemporary actress in India. India Today featured her among the nation's 50 most powerful people in 2017 and 2019. The global edition of Forbes ranked her as the tenth highest-paid actress in the world in 2016 and in 2018, the magazine ranked her as the highest-earning woman celebrity in India. From 2014 to 2016 and in 2018, she was the highest ranked woman on the Indian edition of Forbes' "Celebrity 100" list, peaking at the fourth position in 2018 with an estimated annual earning of over ₹1.12 billion (US\$14 million). Also in 2018, Time magazine named Padukone one of the 100 most influential people in the world; Variety magazine featured her in their list of the 50 most impactful women in the world, and the market research firm YouGov named her the world's thirteenth most admired woman. Padukone was featured in The Indian Express's listing of the most powerful Indians in 2018, 2019, and 2023. On International Women's Day in 2022, Outlook India listed her as one of the women redefining leadership roles. In the same year, Padukone was awarded the TIME100 Impact Award for her work with mental health advocacy. Padukone ranks high on various listings of the most attractive Indian celebrities. In 2008, she topped Indian Maxim'''s "Hot 100" list, and in 2012, she was named "India's Most Beautiful Woman" by the Indian edition of People magazine. Padukone has frequently featured in The Times of India's listing of the "Most Desirable Woman", topping the list in 2012 and 2013. In 2010 and 2014, she was named the "World's Sexiest Woman" by the Indian edition of FHM. and she was selected by the UK magazine Eastern Eye as the "Sexiest Asian Woman" in 2016 and 2018, and later, of the decade. Taking note of her dress sense, Filmfare credited her as one of the "few actresses who experiments with colours, cuts and silhouettes". In the fitness book The Four-Week Countdown Diet, Padukone was cited by Namita Jain as "the ultimate role model for a healthy, fit and active lifestyle". Padukone is an active endorser for several brands and products, including Tissot, Maybelline, Coca-Cola, and L'Oreal Paris, among others. In 2014, Business Standard reported that Padukone earned ₹50 million (US\$630,000) to ₹60 million (US\$750,000) per endorsement deal and TAM AdEX named Padukone the most visible face on television in India that year. She has regularly featured in Duff & Phelps' listings of Indian celebrities with the highest brand value, peaking at the second position in 2018 with an estimated brand value of US\$102.5 million. In 2020, Padukone was criticised for a TikTok video aimed towards the promotion of her film Chhapaak, in which she asked users to recreate her "acid-attack survivor look" from the film which was deemed "insensitive" and "disrespectful" to acid-attack victims. Later that year, Padukone was among several Bollywood actors who were criticised for posting Instagram messages showing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, despite their previous work advertising skin-lightening products which perpetuate colourism. In 2020, she became the first Indian actor to campaign for the fashion company Louis Vuitton, and in 2022, she was named a brand ambassador for the luxury jewellery brand Cartier. ## Accolades Padukone has been the recipient of three Filmfare Awards: Best Female Debut for Om Shanti Om (2007), and two Best Actress awards for Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013) and Piku'' (2015).
61,258	Rod Steiger	1,173,570,647	American actor (1925–2002)	[ "1925 births", "2002 deaths", "20th-century American male actors", "21st-century American male actors", "American male film actors", "American male television actors", "American people of French descent", "American people of German descent", "American people of Scottish descent", "BAFTA winners (people)", "Best Actor Academy Award winners", "Best Drama Actor Golden Globe (film) winners", "Best Foreign Actor BAFTA Award winners", "Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)", "David di Donatello winners", "Deaths from pneumonia in California", "Male actors from Greater Los Angeles", "Male actors from New York (state)", "Method actors", "Military personnel from New York (state)", "People from Westhampton, New York", "Silver Bear for Best Actor winners", "United States Navy personnel of World War II", "United States Navy sailors", "West Side High School (New Jersey) alumni" ]	Rodney Stephen Steiger (/ˈstaɪɡər/, STY-gər; April 14, 1925 – July 9, 2002) was an American actor, noted for his portrayal of offbeat, often volatile and crazed characters. Ranked as "one of Hollywood's most charismatic and dynamic stars," he is closely associated with the art of method acting, embodying the characters he played, which at times led to clashes with directors and co-stars. He starred as Marlon Brando's mobster brother Charley in On the Waterfront (1954), the title character Sol Nazerman in The Pawnbroker (1964) which won him the Silver Bear for Best Actor, and as police chief Bill Gillespie opposite Sidney Poitier in the film In the Heat of the Night (1967) which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Steiger was born in Westhampton, New York, the son of a vaudevillian. He had a difficult childhood, with an alcoholic mother from whom he ran away at the age of 16. After serving in the South Pacific Theater during World War II, he began his acting career with television roles in 1947, and went on to garner critical acclaim for his portrayal of the main character in the teleplay "Marty" (1953). He made his stage debut in 1946, in a production of Curse you, Jack Dalton! at the Civic Repertory Theatre of Newark, and subsequently appeared in productions such as An Enemy of the People (1950), Clifford Odets's Night Music (1951), Seagulls Over Sorrento (1952) and Rashomon (1959). Steiger made his film debut in Fred Zinnemann's Teresa in 1951, and subsequently appeared in films such as The Big Knife (1955), Oklahoma! (1955), Jubal (1956), Across the Bridge (1957) and Al Capone (1959). After Steiger's performance in The Pawnbroker in 1964, in which he played an embittered Jewish Holocaust survivor working as a pawnbroker in New York City, he portrayed an opportunistic Russian politician in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago (1965). In the Heat of the Night (1967) won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Steiger, who was lauded for his performance as a Mississippi police chief who learns to respect an African-American officer (Poitier) as they search for a killer. The following year, he played a serial killer of many guises in No Way to Treat a Lady. During the 1970s, Steiger increasingly turned to European productions in his search for more demanding roles. He portrayed Napoleon Bonaparte in Waterloo (1970), a Mexican bandit in Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker! (1971), Benito Mussolini in Last Days of Mussolini (1975), and ended the decade playing a disturbed priest in The Amityville Horror (1979). By the 1980s, heart problems and depression took their toll on Steiger's career, and he found it difficult to find employment, agreeing to appear in low-budget B movies. One of his final roles was as judge H. Lee Sarokin in the prison drama The Hurricane (1999), which reunited him with In the Heat of the Night director Norman Jewison. Steiger was married five times, and had a daughter, opera singer Anna Steiger, and a son, Michael Steiger. He died of pneumonia and kidney failure as a result of complications from surgery for a gallbladder tumor on July 9, 2002, aged 77, in Los Angeles, and was survived by his fifth wife Joan Benedict Steiger. ## Early life and acting background Steiger was born on April 14, 1925, in Westhampton, New York, the only child of Lorraine (née Driver) and Frederick Steiger, of French, Scottish and German descent. Rod was raised as a Lutheran. He never knew his father, a vaudevillian who had been part of a travelling song-and-dance team with Steiger's mother, but was told that he was a handsome Latino-looking man, who was a talented musician and dancer. Biographer Tom Hutchinson describes him as a "shadowy, fugitive figure," one who "haunted" Rod throughout his life and was an "invisible presence and unseen influence." Hutchinson described Steiger's mother as "plump, energetic and small, with long auburn hair." She had a good singing voice and nearly became a Hollywood actress, but after a leg surgery permanently impaired her walking ability, she gave up acting and turned to alcohol. As a result, she quit show business and moved away from Westhampton to raise her son. They moved through several towns, including Irvington and Bloomfield, before settling in Newark, New Jersey. Her alcoholism caused Steiger much embarrassment, and the family was frequently mocked by other children and their parents within the community. At the age of five he was sexually abused by a pedophile who lured him in with a butterfly collection. Steiger said of his troubled family background: "If you had the choice of having the childhood you experienced, with your alcoholic mother and being the famous actor you are today, or having a loving, secure childhood and not being famous, which would you take? A loving, secure childhood in a New York minute". During the last 11 years of her life, Steiger's mother stayed sober and regularly attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Steiger recalled: "I was so proud of her. She turned herself around. She came alive again". During his childhood, and owing to his considerable strength and bulk, Steiger became known as "The Rock". Despite being mocked over his mother's alcoholism, he was a popular figure at school and an able softball player. He displayed an interest in writing poetry and acting during his adolescent years, and appeared in several school plays while at West Side High School in Newark. Tired of fighting with his mother, he ran away from home at age sixteen to join the United States Navy during World War II. He enlisted on May 11, 1942, and received his training at the U.S. Naval Training Station in Newport, Rhode Island. He joined the newly commissioned USS Taussig (DD-746) on May 20, 1944. While serving as a torpedoman on destroyers, he saw action in the South Pacific, including the Battle of Iwo Jima. Steiger later commented: "I loved the Navy. I was stupid enough to think I was being heroic." His experiences during the war haunted him for the rest of his life, particularly the loss of Americans during the Battle of Iwo Jima, as well as the sinking of vessels by the Taussig which were known to have women and children aboard. On December 17, 1944, off the coast of Luzon in the Philippines, Steiger and the Taussig encountered Typhoon Cobra, which became known as Halsey's Typhoon, with winds reaching one hundred knots (115 mph) and 80 foot (24 m) waves. As a result, three U.S. destroyers were lost, but the Taussig survived, with Steiger tying a rope to himself on deck and flattening himself as waves engulfed the ship. After the war, the GI Bill paid for his rent at a room on West 81st Street in New York City, an income of just over \$100 a month, and four years of schooling. He initially found a job oiling machines and washing floors. He decided to attend a drama class, primarily because of its membership of attractive young women. Known as the Civil Service Little Theater group, it was conducted by the Office of Dependants and Beneficiaries, where he was employed at the time. This led him to start a two-year course at the New School for Social Research, run by German émigré Erwin Piscator. During one audition, Steiger was cast after barely uttering a few words, the director exclaiming he had a "fresh, wonderful quality." Another talented pupil at the time was Walter Matthau, who dubbed the institution "The Neurotic School for Sexual Research." Steiger was surprised to discover his own talent as an actor, and he was encouraged to pursue further studies at the Dramatic Workshop. One of the main reasons he wanted to be an actor was to regain public respect for his family name, which had so humiliated him during childhood. Another important factor was his belief that he did not "have the temperament for a regular job", and would have ended up a miserable, violent alcoholic. His only role model as an actor was Paul Muni, who he thought was "the greatest," although he also had a deep respect for French actor Harry Baur and, according to biographer Hutchinson, he admired Charlie Chaplin "to the point of adoration." ## Career ### Early career and breakthrough (1946–1956) Steiger made his stage debut in a production of Curse you, Jack Dalton! (1946) at the Civic Repertory Theatre of Newark. Subsequent to this, he received an invitation from one of his teachers, Daniel Mann, to attend the Actors Studio, established by Elia Kazan in October 1947. It was here, along with Marlon Brando, Karl Malden and Eli Wallach, that he studied method acting, which became deeply engrained in him. Lacking matinée idol looks, much like Malden and Wallach, he began pursuing a career as a character actor rather than as a leading man. Steiger's stage work continued in 1950, with a minor role as a townperson in a stage production of An Enemy of the People at the Music Box Theatre. His first major role on Broadway came in Clifford Odets's production of Night Music (1951), where he played A. L. Rosenberger. The play was held at the ANTA Playhouse. The following year, he played a telegraphist in the play Seagulls Over Sorrento, performed at the John Golden Theatre beginning on September 11, 1952. Steiger's early roles, although minor, were numerous, especially in television series during the early 1950s, when he appeared in more than 250 live television productions over a five-year period. He was spotted by Fred Coe, NBC's manager of program development, who increasingly gave him bigger parts. Steiger considered television to be what repertory theatre had been for an earlier generation, and saw it as a place where he could test his talent with a plethora of different roles. Soon afterward he began receiving positive reviews from critics such as John Crosby, who noted that Steiger regularly gave "effortless persuasive performances". Among Steiger's credits were Danger (1950–53), Lux Video Theatre (1951), Out There (1951), Tales of Tomorrow (1952–53), The Gulf Playhouse (1953), Medallion Theatre (1953), Goodyear Television Playhouse (1953), and as Shakespeare's Romeo in "The First Command Performance of Romeo and Juliet (1957)" episode of You Are There in 1954, under director Sidney Lumet. He continued to make appearances in various playhouse television productions, appearing in five episodes of Kraft Theatre (1952–54), which earned him praise from critics, six episodes of The Philco Television Playhouse (1951–55) and two episodes of Schlitz Playhouse of Stars (1957–58). Steiger made his big screen debut in 1953, with a small role in Fred Zinnemann's Teresa, shot in 1951. Steiger, who described himself as "cocky", won over Zinnemann by praising his direction. Zinnemann recalled that Steiger was "very popular, extremely articulate and full of remarkable memories", and the two remained highly respectful of each other for life. On May 24, 1953, Steiger played the title role in Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty" episode of the Goodyear Television Playhouse. The role had originally been intended for Martin Ritt, who later became a director. "Marty" is the story of a lonely and homely butcher from the Bronx in search of love. The play was a critical success that increased Steiger's public exposure; Tom Stempel noted that he brought "striking intensity to his performance as Marty, particularly in giving us Marty's pain". As Steiger refused to sign a seven-year studio contract, he was replaced with Ernest Borgnine in the film Marty (1955), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, as well as the Best Actor Oscar for Borgnine. 1953 proved to be Steiger's breakthrough year; he garnered Sylvania Awards for Marty and four other best performances of the year—as Vishinsky and Rudolf Hess in two episodes of You Are There, as gangster Dutch Schultz in a thriller, and as a radar operator in My Brother's Keeper. For his role as Charley "the Gent", the brother of Marlon Brando's character in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), Steiger was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Film writer Leo Braudy wrote that the "incessantly repeated images of its taxicab confrontation between Brando and Rod Steiger have made the film iconic". The taxicab scene took eleven hours to shoot and was heavily scripted, despite Brando fuelling the popular myth in his autobiography that the scene was improvised. Brando stated that seven takes were needed because Steiger could not stop crying, which Steiger found to be unfair and inaccurate. Although Steiger retained great respect for Brando as an actor, he disliked him as a person and frequently complained during the production of Brando's "predilection for leaving the set" immediately after shooting his scenes. Steiger later remarked: "We didn't get to know each other at all. He always flew solo and I haven't seen him since the film. I do resent him saying he's just a hooker, and that actors are whores". Steiger also responded unfavorably when he learned that Kazan had been awarded an honorary Oscar by the Academy in 1999. In a 1999 interview with BBC News, Steiger said he probably would not have done On the Waterfront if he'd known at the time that Kazan had provided the House Un-American Activities Committee with names of performers suspected of being Communists. Steiger played Jud Fry in the film version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! (1955), in which he performed his own singing. It was one of the biggest location film productions of the 1950s, shot near Nogales, Arizona with a crew of 325 people and some 70 trucks. Steiger portrayed a disturbed, emotionally isolated version of Jud, which television channel Turner Classic Movies (TCM) believed brought a "complexity to the character that went far beyond the stock musical villain". Steiger observed that James Dean, who auditioned for the role that went to Gordon MacRae, was a "nice kid absorbed by his own ego, so much so that it was destroying him", which he thought led to his death. Dean reportedly gave Steiger his prized copy of Ernest Hemingway's book Death in the Afternoon, and had underlined every appearance of the word "death". Later in 1955, Steiger played an obnoxious film tycoon, loosely based on Columbia boss Harry Cohn, opposite Jack Palance and Ida Lupino in Robert Aldrich's film noir The Big Knife. Steiger bleached his hair for the part, sought inspiration for the role from Russian actor Vladimir Sokoloff, read a book about the Treblinka extermination camp to understand his character thoroughly, and visited the perfume department of a store in Beverly Hills, California, to try to understand his character's contempt for women. Steiger and Palance did not get along during the production, and in one scene Palance threw several record albums at Steiger in frustration, feeling that he was trying to steal the scene. Steiger earned critical acclaim later that year for a role as a prosecuting major in Otto Preminger's The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, alongside Gary Cooper and Charles Bickford. Steiger portrayed the character "Pinky" in Columbia Pictures' western, Jubal (1956), which co-starred Glenn Ford and Ernest Borgnine. Steiger's character is a rancher, a "sneering baddie", who becomes jealous when his former mistress becomes attracted to Ford's character. Ford noted Steiger's deep commitment to method acting during production, considering him to be a "fine actor but a real strange fellow". Steiger disliked the experience and frequently clashed with director Delmer Daves, who was more favorable to Ford's lighthearted take on the film. Upon its release in April 1956, a writer for Variety was impressed with the "evil venom" displayed by his character, and remarked that there had not "been as hateful a screen heavy around in a long time". In Mark Robson's The Harder They Fall, Steiger played a crooked boxing promoter who hires a sports journalist (Humphrey Bogart in his last role). Steiger referred to Bogart as "a professional" who had "tremendous authority" during filming. ### Struggling actor (1957–1963) Steiger appeared in three films released in 1957. The first was John Farrow's film noir The Unholy Wife, in which he played a wealthy Napa Valley vintner who marries a femme fatale named Phyllis (Diana Dors). In its original review of the film, The New York Times described Steiger's performance as "curious" further stating that the actor's voice modulation "ranges from Marlon Brando to Ronald Colman and back." During the production of Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow, in which he played a Confederate army veteran who refuses to accept defeat following the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox at the end of the American Civil War, Steiger badly sprained his ankle before shooting one of the battle scenes and was unable to walk, let alone run. Fuller instead got one of the Native American extras to run in Steiger's place, which is why the scene was shot showing only the feet, instead of using close-ups. Steiger had researched the history behind the film and decided to play the character as an Irishman, becoming "the first Irish cowboy" as he put it. Later that year, Steiger took the lead role in the British thriller Across the Bridge, in which he played a German conman with British citizenship who goes into hiding in Mexico after embezzling company funds. Film critic Dennis Schwartz stated that Steiger gave "one of his greatest performances". Steiger portrayed a mastermind criminal seeking to obtain a \$500,000 ransom, opposite James Mason and Inger Stevens, in Andrew L. Stone's Cry Terror! (1958) for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Paul Beckley of the Herald Tribune had thought Steiger "superbly laconic", but Dennis Schwartz dismissed the film as "an ill-conceived attempt" with "too many coincidences and contrived plot points to sustain interest". The following year, Steiger appeared with Claire Bloom (whom he later married) in a Fay and Michael Kanin stage production of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film, Rashomon, where he enacted the role of the bandit originally played by Toshiro Mifune. A major success, it was lauded by critics and nominated for three Tony awards. Robert Coleman of the Daily Mirror described Steiger's performance as "magnificently animalish", while Kenneth Tynan of The New Yorker thought the acting helped set new standards for Broadway. The same year, Steiger portrayed iconic mobster Al Capone in the film of the same name. Steiger was particularly keen on demonstrating the showiness of Capone, speaking thunderously, slinging a camel-hair coat over his shoulders and wearing his hat at a jaunty angle. The film, noted for its deglamorized portrayal of the subject, earned Steiger a Laurel Award for Best Male Dramatic Performance nomination. Although Hutchinson, author of Rod Steiger: Memoirs of a friendship, perceived Steiger's portrayal of Capone to be more of a caricature, George Anastasia and Glen Macnow, authors of the book The Ultimate Book of Gangster Movies, described it as one of the best screen portrayals of Capone. Following the success of Al Capone, Steiger played sophisticated thief Paul Mason, who masterminds a caper to steal \$4 million in French francs from the underground vault of the casino of Monte Carlo, in the Henry Hathaway heist film Seven Thieves (1960). Bosley Crowther of The New York Times gave a positive review of the film, praising the "nerve-rackingly delicate plot" and the "most elaborate roles" of Steiger and his co-star, Edward G. Robinson. The following year, he took the part of a prison psychiatrist who tries to cure the psychological demons of Stuart Whitman's character in The Mark. Steiger's performance was so convincing that, after the film was released, he received a call from a psychiatric institution asking him to attend one of their board meetings. The Mark was followed by a role in the European film production of World in My Pocket alongside Nadja Tiller. Steiger increasingly played in films in Italy and France during this period. Not only did he believe he had greater credibility and esteem as an actor in Europe, but he approved of the more relaxed filming schedule prevalent there at that time. In 1962, Steiger appeared on Broadway in Moby Dick—Rehearsed, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, as well as playing a detective searching for a scientist's (Alan Ladd) mugger in Philip Leacock's 13 West Street for Columbia Pictures. Steiger played a small role of a destroyer commander among the large ensemble cast of The Longest Day, which included John Wayne, Richard Todd, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Sean Connery and Henry Fonda. According to co-star Richard Burton, Steiger had privately admitted to him that he was in financial trouble at the time and had a face lift, which Burton thought made him look like "one half of a naked ass-hole". The following year, Steiger played ruthless Neapolitan land developer and city councilman Edoardo Nottola, who uses his political power to make personal profit in a large scale suburban real estate deal, in Francesco Rosi's Italian production, Hands over the City (1963). According to biographer Francesco Bolzoni, Rosi had cast Steiger in the Italian language film because he had wanted "a rich interpreter of great capacity" in the part of the land developer. ### Mainstream film acclaim (1964–1969) Shortly after Hands over the City, Steiger agreed to appear in another Italian film, Time of Indifference (1964), in which he starred opposite Claudia Cardinale and Shelley Winters. Though Steiger's powerful performance was unaffected, the production was marred by a dispute between director Francesco Maselli and producer Franco Cristaldi, with one wanting it to be a purely political film and the other wanting emphasis on the erotic subplot and his relationship with Cardinale. In Sidney Lumet's gritty drama The Pawnbroker (1964), Steiger played an embittered, emotionally withdrawn survivor of the Holocaust living in New York City. Richard Harland Smith of TCM notes that Steiger's career was waning at the time, and he had to "scramble for paying gigs for a decade" before getting this part. Steiger agreed to a reduced fee of \$50,000. He read Edward Lewis Wallant's novel and the script many times to develop an intimate understanding of the character, and insisted on reducing his lines to make his character more realistic and alienated from society. Lumet noted that during the production Steiger had a tendency to be overly dramatic, stating: "Sure, Rod has weaknesses of rhetoric, but you can talk them through with him. I explained that this solitary Jew could not rise to heights of emotion; he had been hammered by life and by people. The faith he had to find was in other people, because God had betrayed him." Steiger remarked of the film: "I think my best work is in The Pawnbroker. The last scene, where I find the boy dead on the street. I think that's the highest moment, whatever it may be, with my talent." He drew upon inspiration for this climactic scene, in which he appears to show his frustration through a silent scream, from Picasso's Guernica, which depicts war-ravaged villagers. Cecil Wilson of the Daily Mail wrote that Steiger's character "seems to encompass all the agony ever inflicted on man". Although the film attracted controversy and was accused of anti-Semitism, Steiger was widely acclaimed for his performance, which garnered him the prize for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival and his second Best Actor nomination at the Oscars. Steiger was certain that he had produced an Oscar-winning performance; he was shocked when he lost to Lee Marvin. In 1965, Steiger played an effeminate embalmer in Tony Richardson's comedy The Loved One, about the funeral business in Los Angeles, based on the 1948 short satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh. His curly-haired appearance in the film was modeled on a bust of Apollo he once saw while meeting Richardson. Steiger offended Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who found his character repellent. His next role, as Komarovsky, a Russian politician and "villainous opportunist" who rapes Julie Christie's character in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago (1965), was one of his favorites. Steiger, one of only two Americans in the cast, was initially apprehensive about working with such great British actors as Ralph Richardson and Alec Guinness, and was pleased when the film was completed that he did not stand out as an American. The film was the biggest international box office draw of the 1960s, grossing \$200 million worldwide. It has since been acclaimed as one of the greatest films ever made, and in 1998 was selected as the 39th best American film in the original AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list by the American Film Institute. Steiger had intended returning to the stage, and had signed on to play the title character in Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, at the Lincoln Center Repertory Company in April 1967, but the production was cancelled when he became ill. Steiger won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Chief of Police Bill Gillespie in In the Heat of the Night, opposite Sidney Poitier. He played a Southern police chief searching for a murderer. Prejudiced against blacks, he jumps to the conclusion that the culprit is Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), an African-American man passing through town after visiting his mother, who later turns out to be an experienced homicide detective from Philadelphia. The film deals with the way the two men interact and join forces in solving the crime, as Steiger's Gillespie learns to greatly respect the black man he initially took to be a criminal. Steiger drew upon his experience in the Navy with a Southerner named "King", remembering his accent. Poitier considered Steiger and Spencer Tracy to have been the finest actors he had ever worked with, remarking in 1995, "He's so good he made me dig into bags I never knew I had." A. D. Murphy of Variety described Steiger's performance as "outstanding", writing: "Steiger's transformation from a diehard Dixie bigot to a man who learns to respect Poitier stands out in smooth comparison to the wandering solution of the murder." Steiger won a plethora of other awards, including a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and awards for Best Actor from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle. In 1968, Steiger played a serial killer opposite George Segal in Jack Smight's black comedy thriller No Way to Treat a Lady. During the course of the film, he adopts various disguises, including those of an Irish priest, a New York City policeman, a German plumber, and a gay hairdresser, to avoid being identified, and to put his victims at ease, before strangling them and painting a pair of lips on their foreheads with garish red lipstick. The film and Steiger's performance were critically acclaimed, with Vincent Canby of The New York Times highlighting Steiger's "beautifully uninhibited performance as a hammy", and a writer for Time Out describing him as "brilliant as a sort of Boston strangler, son of a great actress who has left her boy with a mother fixation". Later in 1968, Steiger played a repressed gay non-commissioned officer opposite John Phillip Law in John Flynn's The Sergeant for Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, which earned him the David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actor. Despite the award win, film critic Pauline Kael of The New Yorker was particularly critical of the casting of Steiger as a homosexual and felt that he was "totally outside his range", to which Steiger concurred that he was ineffective. Steiger was cast as a short-tempered tattooed man with soon-to-be ex-wife Claire Bloom in the science fiction picture The Illustrated Man (1969). The film was a critical and commercial failure, and Ray Bradbury, who wrote the screenplay, said: "Rod was very good in it, but it wasn't a good film ... the script was terrible". Steiger had better luck alongside Bloom later that year in Peter Hall's British drama Three into Two Won't Go, playing an Irishman who cheats on his wife with a young hiker. It was entered into the Berlin International Film Festival and became the 19th most popular film at the UK box office in 1969. ### Historical roles and declining fortunes (1970–1981) Steiger was offered the title role in Patton (1970), but turned it down because he did not want to glorify war. The role was then given to George C. Scott, who won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance. Steiger called this refusal his "dumbest career move", remarking, "I got on my high horse. I thought I was a pacifist." Instead, he chose to portray Napoleon Bonaparte opposite Christopher Plummer in Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo (1970), a co-production between the Soviet Union and Italy. Anatoly Efros wrote: "I watched with extraordinary respect, no, that is not the right word, with enthusiasm, the acting of Rod Steiger in the role of Napoleon in Waterloo," while literary critic Daniel S. Burt describes Steiger's Napoleon as an "unusual interpretation", finding him less convincing than Plummer's Wellington. In 1971, Steiger played a chauvinistic big game hunter, explorer and war hero opposite Susannah York in Mark Robson's Happy Birthday, Wanda June, before agreeing to star alongside James Coburn as Mexican bandit Juan Miranda in Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker!, which was alternatively titled A Fistful of Dynamite. Leone was initially dissatisfied with his performance in that he played his character as a serious, Zapata-like figure. As a result, tension grew between Steiger and Leone, including one incident that ended with Steiger walking off during the filming of the scene where Juan's stagecoach is destroyed. After the film's completion, Leone and Steiger were content with the final result, and Steiger praised Leone for his skills as a director. Steiger auditioned for the role of Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), a film adaptation of Italian American author Mario Puzo's 1969 novel of the same name, but Puzo felt that Steiger was too old for the part and rejected him. Steiger played a rural Tennessee patriarch and father of Jeff Bridges, at odds with Robert Ryan's character, in Lolly-Madonna XXX (1973), which received mixed reviews. Later that year he was cast as the turban-wearing German officer Guenther von Lutz in Duccio Tessari's Italian war comedy The Heroes, opposite Rod Taylor, and appeared as "foul-mouthed Sicilian mobster" Eugenio Giannini opposite Gian Maria Volonté's Lucky Luciano in Francesco Rosi's film of the same name. In 1975, Steiger portrayed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in Carlo Lizzani's Last Days of Mussolini, which received a positive critical reception. He appeared in Claude Chabrol's French picture Innocents with Dirty Hands, playing the role of Louis Wormser, the wealthy alcoholic husband of Romy Schneider's character Julie Wormser. It was poorly received by critics, and Steiger found the director, whom he had admired, a bitter disappointment. He was highly critical of Chabrol's lack of communication and aloofness from the production, and preference for playing chess on set instead of talking through scenes. Vincent Canby of The New York Times dismissed it as "little more than a soap opera", writing: "The performances are of a piece—uniformly atrocious. Mr. Steiger surpasses his own earlier records for lumbering busyness. Within his first few minutes on screen he (1) gets drunk, (2) whines, (3) pleads for understanding, (4) weeps and (5) goes to bed alone." Later that year, Steiger starred as an Irish Republican Army terrorist who plans to blow up the Houses of Parliament in Don Sharp's British thriller Hennessy. John Simon of New York Magazine wrote: "This fellow Hennessy, as played by Rod Steiger, is about as interesting and likable as a Guy Fawkes dummy." The following year, Steiger portrayed the comic actor W. C. Fields in an Arthur Hiller biopic, W. C. Fields and Me, for Universal Pictures. The screenplay, which was based on a memoir by Carlotta Monti, who was Fields' mistress for the last 14 years of his life, was penned by Bob Merrill. Steiger read extensively about Fields in preparation for the role, and developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of his career and personal life. He concluded that he would base his characterization around his performance in The Bank Dick (1940) . One day, Fields' mistress Monti turned up on set, and watched the scene where he briefly thanks everybody. Nervous that she might not approve, he broke down in tears after Monti met him after the scene and fondly said "Woody, Woody, Woody, My Woody", a nickname used only by those very close to Fields. Despite the energy Steiger put into the picture, like the actor's previous recent films, it was poorly received by critics. Canby called it "dreadful" and described Steiger's portrayal of Fields as a "wax dummy of a character". Lucia Bozzola of The New York Times later referred to Steiger's portrayal of Fields as "superb", but noted that his Hollywood career had "undeniably fallen from his 1950s and '60s heights". Steiger played Pontius Pilate in Franco Zeffirelli's TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (1977). Stacy Keach, who portrayed Barabbas, expressed his joy at the opportunity to work with Steiger, describing him as "generous and opinionated". In 1978, Steiger played a senator in Norman Jewison's F.I.S.T., opposite Sylvester Stallone, who played a Cleveland warehouse worker involved in the labor union leadership of the fictional organisation named Federation of Inter-State Truckers. Love and Bullets, later that year, in which Steiger appeared as a mafia boss, was poorly received; Roger Ebert dismissed it as a "hopelessly confused hodgepodge of chases, killings, enigmatic meetings and separations, and insufferably overacted scenes by Steiger alternating with alarmingly underacted scenes by [Charles] Bronson". The following year, Steiger was cast as a general opposite Richard Burton and Robert Mitchum in Andrew V. McLaglen's war film Breakthrough, set on the Western Front. In The Amityville Horror (1979), Steiger appeared as a disturbed priest, who is invited to perform an exorcism on a haunted house. Again Steiger was accused of overacting; Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Steiger bellows and weeps and overdoes absolutely everything. He won't even pick up the phone before it's rung 12 or 15 times." Pauline Kael thought that Steiger's "spiritual agony was enough to shatter the camera lens". In 1980, Steiger received two Genie Award for Best Performance by a Foreign Actor nominations for his roles in Klondike Fever and The Lucky Star, both Canadian productions. Klondike Fever is based on Jack London's journey from San Francisco to the Klondike gold fields in 1898. Steiger revisited his role as Mussolini in Lion of the Desert, a production that was financed by Muammar Gaddafi, and which co-starred Anthony Quinn as Bedouin tribal leader Omar Mukhtar, fighting the Italian army in the years leading up to World War II. The Italian authorities reportedly banned the film in 1982, as it was considered damaging to the army, and it was not shown on Italian television until a state visit by Gaddafi in 2009. It received critical acclaim in Britain, where it was praised in particular for the quality of its battle scenes. Later in 1981, Steiger won the Montréal World Film Festival Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of white-bearded Orthodox rabbi Reb Saunders in Jeremy Kagan's The Chosen. Janet Maslin commented that Steiger's "slow, rolling delivery" was more "numbing than prepossessing", though a critic from Variety thought it an "exceptional performance as the somewhat tyrannical but loving patriarch". ### B-movies and criticism (1982–1994) After his open-heart surgery in 1979, clinical depression and health problems during the 1980s directly affected Steiger's career, and he often turned to B-movies, low-budget, independent productions and TV miniseries. He admitted that during this period he accepted "everything I was offered", and knew that many of the films he appeared in were not great, but wanted to demonstrate his strong work ethic despite his issues. He later regretted the poorer films in which he appeared during the 1980s, and wished he had done more stage work. He sank into an even deeper depression when he was not involved in acting, but it bothered him more that his acting career had taken a turn for the worse and was no longer challenging. The major studio producers were wary of his problems and considered him a liability. Steiger spoke about the experience to a younger colleague while advising: "Never tell anyone if you've got heart problems, kid. Never." His reputation as a fine character actor remained intact, and Joel Hirschhorn at the time considered his talent to be "as strong as ever". In 1984, Steiger starred as a detective assigned to investigate the murder of a Chicago psychoanalyst (Roger Moore), a man whom he detests from a previous case, in Bryan Forbes's The Naked Face. Richard Christiansen of the Chicago Tribune referred to it as a "wimpy suspense movie shot in Chicago in the fall of 1983, [that] doesn't do much good for the city or for anyone connected with it", and considered Steiger to be "acting in his high hysteria gear", who "snarls and whines and overacts". Steiger took a break from cinema in the mid-1980s, during which he appeared in the Yorkshire Television mini-series The Glory Boys (1984) with Anthony Perkins, and Hollywood Wives (1985) with Angie Dickinson. Steiger and Perkins were at loggerheads during the production of The Glory Boys. Perkins resented the fact that Steiger insisted on a bigger trailer and felt that Steiger was trying to steal scenes from him, while Steiger had thought Perkins "so jittery and jinxed by the chemicals he was taking" that he felt sorry for him and believed that he was jeopardizing the success of the film. Steiger also performed on Joni Mitchell's 1985 album Dog Eat Dog, where he provided the voice of an evangelist in the song "Tax Free". Steiger appeared in the Argentine-American film Catch the Heat (1987), an action/martial arts picture about a Brazilian drug baroness who smuggles drugs into the United States inside her breast implants. According to director Fred Olen Ray, it was pulled from distribution within a week of release. In 1988, Steiger and Yvonne De Carlo played a spooky elderly couple with developmentally delayed children in John Hough's horror film American Gothic. Universally panned by the critics, Caryn James of The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Steiger addresses the camera as if he were reciting Shakespeare, he is truly, straightforwardly, hilariously bad." During the last year of the decade he played authority figures, including a mayor in The January Man, and as Judge Prescott in Tennessee Waltz. Although Steiger admitted that his performance in The January Man was "way over the top", he enjoyed the experience, thereby marking a positive turning point after a period of clinical depression. In 1990, Steiger starred in Men of Respect, a crime drama film adaptation of William Shakespeare's play Macbeth. He played a character based on King Duncan, opposite John Turturro as Mike Battaglia (Macbeth), who plays a Mafia hitman who climbs his way to the top by killing Steiger's character. The film was critically panned, with Roger Ebert awarding it one star out of four, describing the concept as a "very, very bad idea". Steiger played another mobster, Sam Giancana, two years later in the miniseries Sinatra (1992). Steiger portrayed a reverend living in a small town in the American South in the macabre Merchant Ivory film production The Ballad of the Sad Café (1991), co-starring Vanessa Redgrave and Keith Carradine. The film met with generally lukewarm reviews, though it was entered into the 41st Berlin International Film Festival. Steiger auditioned for the part of an elderly Irishman in Ron Howard's Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Steiger, who had long been bald, was ordered by Howard to wear a wig to the audition. He resented the fact that Howard insisted on taping the audition, which he believed to be a form of humiliation for actors, serving as after-dinner entertainment for the Hollywood executives. Steiger never forgave Howard, whom he referred to as a "cocksucker", for rejecting him for the part and giving it to Cyril Cusack. In 1993, Steiger portrayed an aging gynaecologist who terrorizes his urban neighbors in a rural community in Burlington, Vermont in The Neighbor. Dennis Schwartz considered it to have been one of Steiger's creepiest roles, though he thought that the poor script had rendered the role awkward and "mildly entertaining in the sense that Steiger is asked to carry the film and hams it up". The following year, Steiger agreed to play the role of a Cuban mob boss opposite Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone in Luis Llosa's thriller The Specialist, citing its purpose as a "\$40 million commercial" to show a new generation that he existed. Critics panned the film, which has a four percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 27 reviews as of July 2015. The role earned Steiger a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor nomination, and the film was listed in The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of "The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made". ### Later work and final years (1995–2002) Following The Specialist (1994), Steiger appeared in Tom Clancy's Op Center (1995), a film that was edited down into a TV miniseries, and featured in a Columbo television film, Strange Bedfellows. The following year, he took a minor role as Doc Wallace in the Dale Rosenbloom family drama Shiloh. He reprised the role three years later in the sequel. Also in 1996, Steiger played a "jingoistic top general" who "petitions the president to go nuclear in the middle of a global crisis" in the ensemble production of Mars Attacks!. In 1997, Steiger played Tony Vago, the mob boss of Vincent Gallo's character in Kiefer Sutherland's Truth or Consequences, N.M., a gritty noir about a drug heist gone wrong. Steiger played judges in Antonio Banderas's comedy-drama Crazy in Alabama and in the prison drama, The Hurricane, both in 1999, the latter of which tells the story of former middleweight boxer Rubin Carter, who was wrongly convicted of a triple homicide in a bar in Paterson, New Jersey. The Hurricane reunited Steiger with Norman Jewison, who had directed him in In the Heat of the Night. Steiger portrayed H. Lee Sarokin, the judge responsible for freeing Carter. Sarokin thought it was a "marvellous film" that was Oscar-worthy, but found Steiger's portrayal as overacted and a "little arrogant and pompous". After a minor role as a "bombastic priest" in End of Days (1999), Steiger was one of the lead actors in Burt Reynolds's The Last Producer (2000), a film about a washed-up, veteran producer (Reynolds) who tries to re-enter the movie business by producing a new film. Steiger's last film role was as the billiard hall manager, Nick, in Poolhall Junkies (2002); it was poorly received by critics. ## Personal life Steiger was married five times: he married actress Sally Gracie (1952–1958), actress Claire Bloom (1959–1969), secretary Sherry Nelson (1973–1979), singer Paula Ellis (1986–1997) and actress Joan Benedict Steiger (married 2000 until his death). He had a daughter, opera singer Anna Steiger (born in 1960) by Bloom, and a son, Michael Steiger (born in 1993), from his marriage to Ellis. In an interview with journalist Kenneth Passingham, Steiger stated that Bloom was "all I ever wanted in a woman", and that "maybe our marriage was better than most because we were both established when we met". The couple bought a home in Malibu, California, a community that appealed to Steiger but which Bloom found boring. They also purchased an apartment in Manhattan and a cottage in County Galway, in close proximity to John Huston's home. Financial considerations led Steiger to sell their New York apartment in the mid-1970s. It upset him greatly when his marriage with Bloom ended in 1969 and that she quickly remarried Broadway producer Hillard Elkins the same year, a man whom Steiger had entrusted to care for her while he was away shooting Waterloo. Steiger was also close friends with actress Elizabeth Taylor. Steiger was outspoken on McCarthyism. He was particularly critical of Charlton Heston's stance on weapons, and publicly referred to him as "America's favorite fascist". In one clash in a column in the Los Angeles Times, Steiger responded to a letter sent by Heston saying that he was shocked that the American Film Institute had not honored Elia Kazan because of his testimony to the Un-American Activities Committee. Steiger wrote that he was "appalled, appalled, appalled" at actors and writers who had been forced to drive cabs because they were blacklisted and had even committed suicide as a result. Heston did not reply. Steiger suffered from depression throughout much of his life. He described himself as "incapacitated for about eight years with clinical depression" before his Oscar win for In The Heat of the Night. His career problems from the 1970s onwards were often exacerbated by health issues. He underwent open-heart surgery in 1976 and again in 1979 and struggled with obesity, though certain roles, such as Napoleon, required him to intentionally gain weight. After the decline of his third marriage in 1979, a deep depression, partly a side effect of his surgery, negatively affected his career during the 1980s. He became increasingly reclusive during this period, often confining himself to his apartment, watching American football for several hours. He said of the experience: "You begin to lose self-esteem. You don't walk, you don't shave and if no one was watching you'd go to the bathroom right where you were sitting". He would lie in bed at night thinking, "You'll never act again. Why bother? You're no good". Despite these challenges, Steiger continued to act into the 1990s and early 2000s. In one of his final interviews, he stated that there was a stigma wrongfully attached to sufferers of depression and that it was caused by a chemical imbalance, not a mental disease. He commented: "Pain must never be a source of shame. It's a part of life, it's part of humanity." ### Death Steiger died in a Westside hospital in Los Angeles on July 9, 2002, at age 77, of pneumonia and kidney failure as a result of complications from surgery for a gallbladder tumor. He was buried in Forest Lawn – Hollywood Hills Cemetery. The film Saving Shiloh, released in 2006, was dedicated to his memory. ## Acting style Steiger was one of Hollywood's most respected character actors. Hutchinson described him as "one of Hollywood's most charismatic and dynamic stars". Yet for Hutchinson, Steiger remained "out of sympathy with Hollywood" during his career, believing that accomplished actors often struggle to find challenging films as they got older. Steiger was an "effusive talent" according to Lucia Bozzola of The New York Times, and was particularly noted for his intense portrayal of offbeat, often volatile and crazed characters. After On the Waterfront (1954), Steiger became somewhat typecast for playing tough characters and villains, and grew increasingly frustrated playing the "Mafia heavy or a near-psychopath" during the 1970s, roles that he could play menacingly, but provided little opportunity for him to showcase his talent. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons hailed him as "the Screen's No.1 Bad Man", while the newspaper London Evening News referred to him as "the man you would love to hate if you had the courage". A 1960 publication by Dean Jennings of The Saturday Evening Post referred to Steiger as an "angry, hot-tempered newcomer of prodigious acting talents, [who] works best only at emotional white heat", and remarked that he found it "stimulating to carry theatrical fantasy into his private life". Pauline Kael found his performances so powerful that she believed he "often seems to take over a picture even when he isn't in the lead". The journal Films and Filming, surveying his career in 1971, noted that his talent "developed steadily through films good and bad", and that the secret of his success was that he stayed grounded, citing a 1956 interview where he said "I pity the player who can't keep his feet on the ground. It's too easy to trade on success and forget that no performer can stand still." A product of the Actors Studio, Steiger is closely associated with method acting, embodying the characters he played. Writer James F. Scott notes that during his career, he "many times put aside his own personality to think his way into an alien psyche". Steiger once said: > I don't like the term Method, but for the sake of argument method acting is a means to an end. It is something that helps you get involved in the part personally so that you can communicate with the audience. No matter what, the American actor of the fifties changed acting the world over. Montgomery Clift was perhaps the actor who started it, Brando caused the sensation and [James] Dean made it a cult. Steiger was so devoted to his craft that during the 1970s he turned to many foreign productions, especially in Italy, to obtain the sort of roles he desired, but often clashed with directors over his method acting techniques. In one of his last interviews, Steiger said: "What is the greatest thing an artist in any profession can give to a person?—that would be a constructive, warm memory. Because that gets into your brain and therefore into your life, so to speak. And that's it, when somebody says to me 'I'll never forget', that's worth more to me than five Academy Awards, I'm in that person's life". Film writer Paul Simpson notes how closely Steiger prepared for his roles, and how he "effortlessly" recreated the mannerisms of figures such as Mussolini, in a "compelling take on an enigmatic figure". Judith Crist of New York Magazine, reviewing Duck, You Sucker!, commented that Steiger was "totally without mannerisms, always with manner", and noted that his "silences are stunningly effective". Roger Ebert later echoed this statement, concurring that Steiger lacked mannerisms, writing, "When he gets a character worth playing with, he creates it new from the bottom up, out of whole cloth. I don't know how he does it. It's almost as if he gets inside the skin of the guy he's playing and starts being that person for a while". Steiger said: "I always tried to do things different. If I got a role which was similar to another I'd try to do it a little different." His explosive screen performances were an influence on many later actors, including Robert De Niro, who used Steiger's portrayal of Al Capone as a reference for his own performance in The Untouchables (1987). Elvis Presley was highly impressed with Steiger's "powerful and wrenching performance" in The Pawnbroker. Despite Steiger's acclaim as an actor, he was frequently accused of overacting and won his share of critics, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s. His acting was so dynamic at times that critics found him excessive and overbearing, and even uncomfortable or laughable to watch. Steiger once clashed with Armenian director Rouben Mamoulian, during a theatrical production of Oklahoma!, as he was intolerant of Steiger's "unusual acting technique". Steiger ignored the director's concerns that he was mumbling his lines, and when he began chomping loudly on an apple during a scene with Gordon MacRae, Mamoulian exclaimed: "Get out of my theater. Get out of my life!", and fired him. Even Kazan found several of the Actors Studio's techniques disagreeable, preferring "more humor and verve and less self-indulgence, self-pity and self-awareness". Kazan felt that Steiger often displayed a competitive edge as an actor and tried to steal scenes from his co-stars. Steiger rejected these claims, insisting that he was merely "trying to take the medium of acting to as far as I can go, and that why I sometimes go over the edge". Several co-stars found working with Steiger difficult; Warren Oates, according to director Norman Jewison, viewed Steiger as "somebody who had a tendency to go over the top" during the making of In The Heat of the Night. Writer Richard Dyer highlights the contrast in the film between the acting styles of Steiger and Poitier, with "Poitier's stillness and implied intensity" and "Steiger's busy, exteriorised method acting". Humphrey Bogart, Steiger's co-star in The Harder They Fall, referred to Steiger's method acting as the "scratch-your-ass-and-mumble school of acting". Director Robert Aldrich notes that Steiger had a habit of changing his lines, which often confused his co-stars. Aldrich stated: "Usually I lie awake at nights trying to think of ways to improve an actor's performance. With Steiger, the problem is to try and contain him". Steiger was particularly aggressive towards director Kenneth Annakin during the making of Across the Bridge, insisting on rewriting most of the script and changing many of the lines to better fit Steiger's idea of the character. Annakin stated that he had "never known an actor to put so much thought and preparation into a performance" as Steiger. Hutchinson revealed that Steiger often suffered from panic during filming and that fear of failure haunted him throughout his life, but fear also provided him with a source of strength in his acting. ## Filmography and theatre credits
7,506,350	Chalciporus piperatus	1,170,321,250	Species of fungus in the family Boletaceae found in mixed woodland in Europe and North America	[ "Chalciporus", "Fungi described in 1790", "Fungi of Africa", "Fungi of Asia", "Fungi of Central America", "Fungi of Europe", "Fungi of New Zealand", "Fungi of South America", "Inedible fungi", "Taxa named by Jean Baptiste François Pierre Bulliard" ]	Chalciporus piperatus, commonly known as the peppery bolete, is a small pored mushroom of the family Boletaceae found in mixed woodland in Europe and North America. It has been recorded under introduced trees in Brazil, and has become naturalised in Tasmania and spread under native Nothofagus cunninghamii trees. A small bolete, the fruit body has a 1.6–9 cm (5⁄8–3+1⁄2 in) orange-fawn cap with cinnamon to brown pores underneath, and a 4–9.5 cm (1+5⁄8–3+3⁄4 in) high by 0.6–1.2 cm (1⁄4–1⁄2 in) thick stipe. The flesh has a very peppery taste. The rare variety hypochryseus, found only in Europe, has yellow pores and tubes. Described by Pierre Bulliard in 1790 as Boletus piperatus, it is only distantly related to other members of the genus Boletus and was reclassified as Chalciporus piperatus by Frédéric Bataille in 1908. The genus Chalciporus was an early branching lineage in the Boletaceae and appears to be related to boletes with parasitic properties. Previously thought to be ectomycorrhizal (a symbiotic relationship that occurs between a fungus and the roots of various plant species), C. piperatus is now suspected of being parasitic on Amanita muscaria. ## Taxonomy and naming French mycologist Pierre Bulliard described the species as Boletus piperatus in 1790. In its taxonomic history, it has been transferred to the genera Leccinum (Samuel Frederick Gray, 1821), Viscipellis (Lucien Quélet, 1886), Ixocomus (Quélet, 1888), Suillus (Otto Kuntze, 1898), and Ceriomyces (William Alphonso Murrill, 1909). It was reclassified and given its current binomial name in 1908 by Frédéric Bataille when he made it the type species of the newly circumscribed genus Chalciporus. The species name piperatus means "peppery" in Latin. It is commonly known as the "peppery bolete". Chalciporus piperatus is a member of the genus Chalciporus, with which the genus Buchwaldoboletus form a group of fungi that is an early offshoot in the Boletaceae. Many members of the group appear to be parasitic. Two varieties have been described. Chalciporus piperatus var. hypochryseus was originally described as Boletus hypochryseus by Czech mycologist Josef Šutara in 1993, and was moved to Chalciporus a year later by Regis Courtecuisse. Wolfgang Klofac and Irmgard Krisai-Greilhuber reclassified it as a variety of C. piperatus in 2006, although some sources continue to regard it as a distinct species. Variety amarellus, first published by Quélet as Boletus amarellus in 1883 and later transferred to Chalciporus by Bataille in 1908, was described as a variety of C. piperatus in 1974 by Albert Pilát and Aurel Dermek. Authorities disagree as to whether or not it has independent taxonomic significance. ## Description One of the smaller boletes, Chalciporus piperatus has an orange-fawn 1.6–9 cm (5⁄8–3+1⁄2 in) cap that is initially convex before flattening out in age. The cap surface can be furrowed; shiny when dry, it can be a little sticky when wet, and may crack with age. The colour of the pore surface ranges from yellowish to dark reddish brown in maturity. When bruised, the pore surface stains brown. Individual pores are angular, measuring about 0.5–2 mm wide, while the tubes are 3–10 mm deep. Slender for a bolete, the stipe measures 4–9.5 cm (1+5⁄8–3+3⁄4 in) long by 0.6–1.2 cm (1⁄4–1⁄2 in) thick, and is either roughly the same width throughout its length, or slightly thicker near the base. The colour of the stem is similar to the cap, or lighter, and there is yellow mycelium at the base. The flesh is yellow, sometimes with reddish tones, maturing to purplish brown. It has no odour. The spore print is brown to cinnamon. Variety hypochryseus is essentially identical to the main form except for its bright yellow tubes and pores. Variety amarellus has pinker pores and a taste that is bitter rather than peppery. The spores are smooth, narrowly fusiform (fuse-shaped), and measure 7–12 by 3–5 μm. The basidia (spore-bearing cells) measure 20–28 by 6–8 μm and are hyaline (translucent), four-spored, and narrowly club-shaped, with many internal oil droplets. Cystidia are fusiform, sometimes with a rounded tip, and have dimensions of 30–50 by 9–12 μm. Some are more or less hyaline, while others are encrusted with a golden pigment. The cap cuticle is a trichodermium, an arrangement in which the outermost hyphae emerge roughly parallel, like hairs, perpendicular to the cap surface. These hyphae are 10–17 μm wide and have elliptical to cylindrical cells at their ends that are not gelatinous. Clamp connections are absent from the hyphae. ### Similar species The fruit body of the North American species Chalciporus piperatoides are similar, but can be distinguished by its flesh and pores staining blue after cutting or bruising. It has a less peppery taste. Another mild-tasting relative, C. rubinellus, has brighter colours than C. piperatus, including completely red tubes. One European species, C. rubinus, has a shape similar to C. piperatus, but has red pores and a stem covered in red dots. ## Distribution and habitat Fruit bodies of Chalciporus piperatus occur singly, scattered, or in groups on the ground. The fungus occurs naturally in or near coniferous or beech and oak woodlands, often on sandy soils. Fruit bodies appear in Europe in late summer and autumn from August to November. The fungus is widespread across North America, fruiting from July to October in the eastern states and from September to January on the Pacific Coast. It is found in Mexico and Central America. In Asia, it has been collected from Pakistan, West Bengal (India), and Guangdong Province (China). In South Africa, it is known from the southwestern Cape Province and the eastern Transvaal Province. Chalciporus piperatus grows in conifer plantations associated with the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) and the chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius). It has been recorded under introduced loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) plantations in Santa Catarina and Paraná states in southern Brazil, and under introduced trees in the Los Lagos Region of Chile. It has also spread into native forest in northeastern Tasmania and Victoria, having been found growing with the native myrtle beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii). The rare variety hypochryseus occurs only in Europe, including Austria, Czechia, Greece, Italy, and Spain. Also rare, variety amarellus is widespread in European coniferous forests, where it usually found near pines, spruce, and sometimes fir. Fruit bodies can be parasitised by the mould Sepedonium chalcipori, a highly specialised mycoparasite that is only known to infect this bolete. Infections result in necrotic mushroom tissue and the production of copious yellow conidia. Initially thought to be ectomycorrhizal (symbiotic with plants, like most Boletaceae), C. piperatus has not been confirmed as such in multiple synthesis studies or in isotope fractionation studies. There is some speculation that C. piperatus is a mycoparasite on the mycorrhiza of Amanita muscaria. In New Zealand, A. muscaria is thought to have been introduced with Pinus radiata, and has made a host jump to the native Nothofagus trees; C. piperatus has since been observed fruiting near Nothofagus trees with A. muscaria associations. Buchwaldoboletus lignicola is in the same clade as C. piperatus and is thought to be a parasite as well, strengthening the evidence that C. piperatus and its relatives may be mycoparasites. ## Uses This mushroom contains toxins, and is usually considered inedible. It has been used as a condiment in many countries, with the Italian chef Antonio Carluccio recommending it be used only to add its peppery flavour to other mushrooms. Some recommend that it be well-cooked before consumption to minimize the risk of gastric symptoms, but the peppery taste is lost with cooking, and even more so by reducing it to a powdered form. Fruit bodies can be used for mushroom dyeing; depending on the mordant used, yellow, orange, or greenish-brown dyes can be made. ## Chemistry Sclerocitrin, a pigment compound originally isolated from the common earthball (Scleroderma citrinum), is the major contributor to the yellow colour of the mycelium and the stipe base of C. piperatus fruit bodies. Other compounds that have been isolated from this species include norbadione A, chalciporone, xerocomic acid, variegatic acid, variegatorubin, and another yellow pigment, chalcitrin. Chalciporone is responsible for the bitter taste of the fruit bodies. The pigments sclerocitrin, chalcitrin, and norbadione A are derived biosynthetically from xerocomic acid. Related compounds found in the fruit bodies include the chalciporone isomers isochalciporone and dehydroisochalciporone. A field study of fungi growing in polluted sites in Czechia and Slovakia found that C. piperatus fruit bodies growing near lead smelters and on mine and slag dumps had the greatest ability to bioaccumulate the element antimony. In one collection, an "extremely high" level of the element was detected—1423 milligrams of antimony per kilogram of dried mushroom. In comparison, the antimony levels detected in other common terrestrial fungi from the same area, both saprobic and ectomycorrhizal, were more than an order of magnitude smaller. ## See also - List of North American boletes
11,534,627	Fanny Imlay	1,154,735,099	Daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft	[ "1794 births", "1810s suicides", "1816 deaths", "Drug-related suicides in Wales", "English people of American descent", "French people of American descent", "French people of English descent", "Godwin family", "People from London" ]	Frances Imlay (14 May 1794 – 9 October 1816), also known as Fanny Godwin and Frances Wollstonecraft, was the illegitimate daughter of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the American commercial speculator and diplomat Gilbert Imlay. Wollstonecraft wrote about her frequently in her later works. Fanny grew up in the household of anarchist political philosopher William Godwin, the widower of her mother, with his second wife Mary Jane Clairmont and their combined family of five children. Fanny's half-sister Mary grew up to write Frankenstein and married Percy Bysshe Shelley, a leading Romantic poet, who composed a poem on Fanny's death. Although Gilbert Imlay and Mary Wollstonecraft lived together happily for brief periods before and after the birth of Fanny, he left Wollstonecraft in France in the midst of the Revolution. In an attempt to revive their relationship, Wollstonecraft travelled to Scandinavia on business for him, taking the one-year-old Fanny with her, but the affair never rekindled. After falling in love with and marrying Godwin, Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth in 1797, leaving the three-year-old Fanny in the hands of Godwin, along with their newborn daughter Mary. Four years later, Godwin remarried and his new wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, brought two children of her own into the marriage, most significantly Claire Clairmont. Wollstonecraft's daughters resented the new Mrs Godwin and the attention she paid to her own daughter. The Godwin household became an increasingly uncomfortable place to live as tensions rose and debts mounted. The teenage Mary and Claire escaped by running off to the Continent with Shelley in 1814. Fanny, left behind, bore the brunt of her stepmother's anger. She became increasingly isolated from her family and died by suicide in 1816. ## Life ### Birth Fanny Wollstonecraft was the daughter of the British feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the American entrepreneur Gilbert Imlay. Both had moved to France during the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft to practise the principles laid out in her seminal work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Imlay to engage in speculative business ventures. The two met and fell in love. At one point during Wollstonecraft and Imlay's relationship, the couple could meet only at a tollbooth between Paris and Neuilly, and it was there that their daughter was conceived; Fanny was therefore, in Godwin's words, a "barrier child". Frances "Fanny" Imlay, Wollstonecraft's first child, was born in Le Havre on 14 May 1794, or, as the birth certificate stated, on the 25th day of Floreal in the Second Year of the Republic, and named after Fanny Blood, her mother's closest friend. Although Imlay never married Wollstonecraft, he registered her as his wife at the American consulate to protect her once Britain and France went to war in February 1793. Most people, including Wollstonecraft's sisters, assumed they were married—and thus, by extension, that Fanny was legitimate—and she was registered as such in France. ### Infancy and early childhood Initially, the couple's life together was idyllic. Wollstonecraft playfully wrote to one friend: "My little Girl begins to suck so manfully that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the R[igh]ts of Woman" [emphasis in original]. Imlay soon tired of Wollstonecraft and domestic life and left her for long periods of time. Her letters to him are full of needy expostulations, explained by most critics as the expressions of a deeply depressed woman but by some as a result of her circumstances—alone with an infant in the middle of the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft returned to London in April 1795, seeking Imlay, but he rejected her; the next month she attempted to commit suicide, but he saved her life (it is unclear how). In a last attempt to win him back, she embarked upon a hazardous trip to Scandinavia from June to September 1795, with only her one-year-old daughter and a maid, in order to conduct some business for him. Wollstonecraft's journey was daunting not only because she was travelling to what some considered a nearly uncivilized region during a time of war, but also because she was travelling without a male escort. When she returned to England and realized that her relationship with Imlay was over, she attempted suicide a second time. She went out on a rainy night, walked around to soak her clothes, and then jumped into the River Thames, but a stranger rescued her. Using her diaries and letters from her journey to Scandinavia, Wollstonecraft wrote a rumination on her travels and her relationship—Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)—in which, among other things, she celebrated motherhood. Her maternal connection to her daughter prompted her to reflect on a woman's place in the world: > You know that as a female I am particularly attached to her—I feel more than a mother's fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex. I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart. With trembling hand I shall cultivate sensibility, and cherish delicacy of sentiment, lest, whilst I lend fresh blushes to the rose, I sharpen the thorns that will wound the breast I would fain guard—I dread to unfold her mind, lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit—Hapless woman! what a fate is thine! Wollstonecraft lavished love and attention on her daughter. She began two books, drawn from her own experience, related to Fanny's care: a parenting manual entitled Letters on the Management of Infants and a reading primer entitled Lessons. In one section of Lessons, she describes weaning: > When you were hungry, you began to cry, because you could not speak. You were seven months without teeth, always sucking. But after you got one, you began to gnaw a crust of bread. It was not long before another came pop. At ten months you had four pretty white teeth, and you used to bite me. Poor mamma! Still I did not cry, because I am not a child, but you hurt me very much. So I said to papa, it is time the little girl should eat. She is not naughty, yet she hurts me. I have given her a crust of bread, and I must look for some other milk. In 1797, Wollstonecraft fell in love with and married the philosopher William Godwin (she had become pregnant with his child). Godwin grew to love Fanny during his affair with Wollstonecraft; he brought her back a mug from Josiah Wedgwood's pottery factory with an "F" on it that delighted both mother and daughter. Wollstonecraft died in September of the same year, from complications giving birth to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who survived. Three-year-old Fanny, who had been scarred from smallpox, was unofficially adopted by her stepfather and given the name of Godwin. Her copy of Wollstonecraft's only completed children's book, Original Stories from Real Life (1788), has the initials "F. G." written in large print in it. According to the dominant interpretation of Godwin's diary, it was not until Fanny turned twelve that she was informed in an important conversation with Godwin that he was not her natural father. In the only biography of Fanny, Janet Todd disputes this reading, arguing instead that the conversation was about Fanny's future. She finds it unlikely that Fanny would have been unaware of her origins in the open and liberal Godwin household. After Wollstonecraft's death, Godwin and Joseph Johnson, Wollstonecraft's publisher and close friend, contacted Fanny's father, but he was uninterested in raising his child. (Neither Wollstonecraft nor her daughter ever saw Gilbert Imlay after 1796.) Wollstonecraft's two sisters, Eliza Bishop and Everina Wollstonecraft, Fanny's only two living female relatives, were anxious to care for her; Godwin, disliking them, turned down their offer. Several times throughout Fanny's childhood Wollstonecraft's sisters asked Godwin to allow them to raise their niece and each time he refused. Godwin himself did not seem particularly ready for parenthood and he now had two small children to raise and no steady source of income. However, he was determined to care for them. During these early years of Fanny's life, Joseph Johnson served as an "unofficial trustee" for her as he had occasionally for her mother. He even willed her £200, but Godwin owed Johnson so much money upon his death in 1809 that Johnson's heirs demanded Godwin pay the money back as part of his arrears. ### Childhood Although Godwin was fond of his children, he was, in many ways, ill-equipped to care for them. As Todd explains, he was constantly annoyed by their noise, demanding silence while he worked. However, when he took a trip to Dublin to visit Wollstonecraft's sisters, he missed the girls immensely and wrote to them frequently. On 21 December 1801, when Fanny was seven, Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont, a neighbour with two children of her own: three-year-old Claire and six-year-old Charles. She had never been married and was looking, like Godwin, for financial stability. Although Clairmont was well-educated and well-travelled, most of Godwin's friends despised her, finding her vulgar and dishonest. They were astonished that Godwin could replace Mary Wollstonecraft with her. Fanny and her half-sister Mary disliked their stepmother and complained that she preferred her own children to them. On 28 March 1803, baby William was born to the couple. Although Godwin admired Wollstonecraft's writings, he did not agree with her that women should receive the same education as men. Therefore, he occasionally read to Fanny and Mary from Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories (1786) and Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Lessons for Children (1778–79), but, according to Todd, he did not take great pains with their educations and disregarded the books Wollstonecraft had written for Fanny. William St Clair, in his biography of the Godwins and the Shelleys, argues that Godwin and Wollstonecraft spoke extensively about the education they wanted for their children and that Godwin's writings in The Enquirer reflect these discussions. He contends that after Wollstonecraft's death Godwin wrote to a former pupil to whom she had been close, now Lady Mountcashell, asking her advice on how to raise and educate his daughters. In her biography of Mary Shelley, Miranda Seymour agrees with St Clair, arguing that "everything we know about his daughter's [Mary's and presumably Fanny's] early years suggests that she was being taught in a way of which her mother would have approved", pointing out that she had a governess, a tutor, a French-speaking stepmother, and a father who wrote children's books whose drafts he read to his own first. It was the new Mrs Godwin who was primarily responsible for the education given to the girls, but she taught her own daughter more, including French. Fanny received no formal education after her stepfather's marriage. Yet, the adult Imlay is described by Charles Kegan Paul, one of Godwin's earliest biographers, as "well educated, sprightly, clever, a good letter-writer, and an excellent domestic manager". Fanny excelled in drawing and was taught music. Despite Godwin's atheism, all of the children were taken to an Anglican church. The Godwins were constantly in debt, so Godwin returned to writing to support the family. He and his wife started a Juvenile Library for which he wrote children's books. In 1807, when Fanny was 13, they moved from the Polygon, where Godwin had lived with Wollstonecraft, to 41 Skinner Street, near Clerkenwell, in the city's bookselling district. This took the family away from the fresh country air and into the dirty, smelly, inner streets of London. Although initially successful, the business gradually failed. The Godwins also continued to borrow more money than they could afford from generous friends such as publisher Joseph Johnson and Godwin devotee Francis Place. As Fanny grew up, her father increasingly relied on her to placate tradespeople who demanded bills be paid and to solicit money from men such as Place. According to Todd and Seymour, Fanny believed in Godwin's theory that great thinkers and artists should be supported by patrons and she believed Godwin to be both a great novelist and a great philosopher. Throughout her life, she wrote letters asking Place and others for money to support Godwin's "genius" and she helped run the household so that he could work. ### Teenage years Godwin, never one to mince words, wrote about the differences he perceived between his two daughters: > My own daughter [Mary] is considerably superior in capacity to the one her mother had before. Fanny, the eldest, is of a quiet, modest, unshowy disposition, somewhat given to indolence, which is her greatest fault, but sober, observing, peculiarly clear and distinct in the faculty of memory, and disposed to exercise her own thoughts and follow her own judgment. Mary, my daughter, is the reverse of her in many particulars. She is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire for knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes is almost invincible. My own daughter is, I believe, very pretty; Fanny is by no means handsome, but in general prepossessing. The intellectual world of the girls was widened by their exposure to the literary and political circles in which Godwin moved. For example, during former American vice-president Aaron Burr's self-imposed exile from the United States after his acquittal on treason charges, he often spent time with the Godwins. He greatly admired the works of Wollstonecraft and had educated his daughter according to the precepts of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. He was anxious to meet the daughters of the woman he revered and referred to Fanny, Mary, and Claire as "goddesses". He spent most of his time talking with Fanny about political and educational topics. Burr was impressed by the Lancastrian teaching method and took Fanny to see a model school in 1811. #### Percy, Mary, and Claire It was not Burr, but the Romantic poet and writer Percy Bysshe Shelley who had the greatest impact on Fanny and her sisters' lives. Impressed by Godwin's Political Justice, Shelley wrote to him and the two started corresponding. In 1812, Shelley asked if Fanny, then 18 and the daughter of one of his heroes, Mary Wollstonecraft, could come live with him, his new wife, and her sister. Having never actually met Shelley and being sceptical of his motivations (Shelley had eloped to marry his wife, Harriet), Godwin refused. When Shelley finally came to visit the Godwins, all three girls were enamoured of him, particularly Imlay. Both Shelley and Fanny were interested in discussing radical politics; for example, Shelley liked to act as if class were irrelevant, but she argued that it was significant in daily affairs. In 1814, Shelley spent a considerable amount of time at the Godwins' and he and Fanny may have fallen in love. Later, Claire Clairmont claimed that they had been. Fanny was sent to Wales in May of that year; Todd speculates that Godwin was trying to separate her from Shelley while Seymour hints that Mrs Godwin was trying to improve her despondent mood. Meanwhile, the Godwin household became even more uncomfortable as Godwin sank further into debt and as relations between Mary and her stepmother became increasingly hostile. Mary Godwin consoled herself with Shelley and the two started a passionate love affair. When Shelley declared to Godwin that the two were in love, Godwin exploded in anger. However, he needed the money that Shelley, as an aristocrat, could and was willing to provide. Frustrated with the entire situation, Mary Godwin, Shelley, and Claire Clairmont ran off to Europe together on 28 June 1814. Godwin hurriedly summoned Fanny home from Wales to help him handle the situation. Her stepmother wrote that Fanny's "emotion was deep when she heard of the sad fate of the two girls; she cannot get over it". In the middle of this disaster, one of Godwin's protégés killed himself, and young William Godwin ran away from home and was missing for two days. When news of the girls' escapade became public, Godwin was pilloried in the press. Life in the Godwin household became increasingly strained. When Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, and Shelley returned from the Continent in September 1814, they took a house together in London, enraging Godwin still further. Fanny felt pulled between the two households: she felt loyal both to her sisters and to her father. Both despised her decision not to choose a side in the family drama. As Seymour explains, Fanny was in a difficult position: the Godwin household felt Shelley was a dangerous influence and the Shelley household ridiculed her fear of violating social conventions. Also, her aunts were considering her for a teaching position at this time, but were reluctant because of Godwin's shocking Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). Seymour writes, the "few timid visits Fanny made to see Mary and [Claire] in London were acts of great courage; she got little thanks for them". Although instructed by Godwin not to speak to Shelley and her sisters, Fanny warned them of creditors who knew of Shelley's return (he also was in debt). Her attempts to persuade Clairmont to return to the Godwins' convinced Shelley that she was of Godwin's party and he began to distrust her. Fanny was also still responsible for soliciting money from Shelley in order to repay her father's debts; despite Shelley's essential elopement with two of his daughters, Godwin agreed to accept £1,200 from Shelley. When Mary Godwin gave birth to a daughter in February 1815, she immediately sent for Fanny, particularly as both she and the infant were ill. Godwin chastised Fanny for disobeying his orders not to see her half-sister and her misery increased. After the death of the child, Fanny paid more frequent visits to the couple. Soon after, Clairmont became a lover of the Romantic poet Lord Byron, and Mary Godwin and Shelley had a second child on 24 January 1816, who was named William after Godwin. In February, Fanny went to visit the Shelleys, who had settled in Bishopsgate. Godwin's debts continued to mount, and while he demanded money from Shelley, Godwin still refused to see either him or his daughter. At this time, Charles Clairmont (Fanny's step-brother), frustrated with the tension in the Godwin household, left for France and refused to help the family any further. At around the same time, Claire Clairmont, Mary Godwin, and Shelley left for the Continent, seeking Byron. Godwin was aghast. He relied on Shelley's money, and the stain on his family's reputation only increased when the public learned that the group had left to join the rakish Byron. Amidst all of this family turmoil, Fanny still found time to ponder larger social issues. The utopian socialist Robert Owen came to visit Godwin in the summer of 1816 and he and Fanny discussed the plight of the working poor in Britain. She agreed with many of Owen's proposals, but not all of them. She decided, in the end, that his utopian scheme was too "romantic", because it depended heavily on the goodwill of the rich to sacrifice their wealth. That same summer, George Blood—the brother of Fanny's namesake—came to meet her for the first time and told her stories of her mother. After this meeting she wrote to Mary Godwin and Shelley: "I have determined never to live to be a disgrace to such a mother... I have found that if I will endeavour to overcome my faults I shall find being's [sic] to love and esteem me" [emphasis in original]. Before Mary Godwin, Clairmont, and Shelley had left for the Continent, Fanny and Mary had had a major argument and no chance to come to a reconciliation. Fanny attempted in her letters to Mary to smooth over the relationship, but her sense of loneliness and isolation in London was palpable. She wrote to Mary of "the dreadful state of mind I generally labour under & which I in vain endeavour to get rid of". Many scholars attribute Fanny's increasing unhappiness to Mrs Godwin's hostility towards her. Kegan, and others, contend that Fanny was subject to the same "extreme depression to which her mother had been subject, and which marked other members of the Wollstonecraft family". Wandering amongst the mountains of Switzerland, frustrated with her relationship with Shelley, and engrossed by the writing of Frankenstein, her sister was unsympathetic. The group returned from the Continent, with a pregnant Clairmont, and settled in Bath (to protect her reputation, they attempted to hide the pregnancy). Fanny saw Shelley twice in September 1816; according to Todd's interpretation of Fanny's letters, Fanny had earlier tried to solicit an invitation to join the group in Europe and she repeated these appeals when she saw Shelley in London. Todd believes that Fanny begged to be allowed to stay with them because life in Godwin's house was unbearable, with the constant financial worries and Mrs Godwin's insistent haranguing, and that Shelley refused, concerned with anyone learning about Clairmont's condition, most of all someone he believed might inform Godwin (Shelley was being sued by his wife and was worried about his own reputation). After Shelley left, Todd explains that Fanny wrote to Mary "to make clear again her longing to be rescued". ## Death ### Theories On 9 October 1816, Fanny left Godwin's house in London and died by suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum at an inn in Swansea, Wales; she was 22. The details surrounding her death and her motivations are disputed. Most of the letters regarding the incident were destroyed or are missing. In his 1965 article "Fanny Godwin's Suicide Re-examined", B. R. Pollin lays out the major theories that had been put forward regarding her suicide and which continue to be used today: - Fanny had just learned of her illegitimate birth. - Mrs Godwin became more cruel to Fanny after Mary Godwin and Claire Clairmont ran off with Percy Shelley. - Fanny had been refused a position at her aunts' school in Ireland. - Fanny was depressive, and her condition was aggravated by the state of the Godwin household. - Fanny was in love with Percy Shelley and distraught that Mary and he had fallen in love. Pollin dismisses the first of these, as have most later biographers, arguing that Fanny had access to her mother's writings and Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman which openly discuss the circumstances of her birth. Fanny herself even makes this distinction in letters to her half-sister Mary Godwin. Pollin is also sceptical of the second explanation, pointing to Fanny's letter to Mary of 3 October 1816 in which she defended her step-mother: "Mrs. Godwin would never do either of you a deliberate injury. Mamma and I are not great friends, but always alive to her virtues, I am anxious to defend her from a charge so foreign to her character." Pollin finds no evidence that Fanny had been refused a position at her aunts' school, only that such a scheme may have been "in contemplation", as Godwin later wrote, although Seymour grants this explanation some plausibility. St Clair claims that Fanny was on her way to join her maternal aunts in Ireland when she decided to commit suicide. He believes that it was to be a probationary visit, to see if she could be a teacher in their school. Godwin's modern biographer, Richard Holmes, dismisses this story. In his survey of the letters of the Godwins and the Shelleys, Pollin comes to the conclusion that Fanny was not depressive. She is frequently described as happy and looking toward the future and describes herself this way. The mentions of melancholia and sadness are specific and related to particular events and illness. Richard Holmes, in his biography of Percy Shelley, argues that "her agonizing and loveless suspension between the Godwin and Shelley households was clearly the root circumstance" of her suicide. Godwin biographer and philosopher Don Locke argues that "most probably because she could absorb no more of the miseries of Skinner Street, her father's inability to pay his debts or write his books, her mother's unending irritability and spitefulness", all of which she blamed on herself, she committed suicide. Pollin largely agrees with Todd, speculating that Fanny saw Percy Shelley in Bath and he "somehow failed her", causing her to commit suicide. Seymour and others speculate that Shelley's only failure was to live up to his financial promises to Godwin and it was this that helped push Fanny over the edge; she was convinced, like her father, "that the worthy have an absolute right to be supported by those who have the worth to give". Todd, on the other hand, agrees with Pollin and speculates that Fanny went to see Mary Godwin and Shelley. Todd argues that Fanny had affection for Shelley and felt that his home was her only haven. Relying on scraps of poetry that Shelley may have written after Fanny's death, Todd concludes that Shelley saw her in Bath and rejected her pleas because he needed to protect Claire's reputation as well as his own at this time. Todd also notes that Fanny had worn her mother's stays, which were embroidered with the initials "M.W.", and the nicest clothes she owned. She had adorned herself with a Swiss gold watch sent to her from Geneva by the Shelleys and a necklace, in order to make a good impression. After Shelley rejected her, Todd concludes, Fanny decided to end her life. ### Suicide and aftermath On the night of 9 October, Fanny checked into the Mackworth Arms Inn in Swansea and instructed the chambermaid not to disturb her. The same night Mary Godwin, staying in Bath with Shelley, received a letter Fanny had mailed earlier from Bristol. Her father in London also received a letter. The alarming nature of the letters prompted both Godwin and Shelley to set out for Bristol at once (although they travelled separately). By the time they tracked her to Swansea on 11 October, they were too late. Fanny was found dead in her room on 10 October, having taken a fatal dose of laudanum, and it was only Shelley who stayed to deal with the situation. Fanny left behind an unaddressed note, describing herself as "unfortunate", perhaps referring to Mary Wollstonecraft's description of her as "my unfortunate girl" in the note she wrote on "Lessons" before she herself attempted suicide: > I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as The note appears to have originally been signed, but the name was torn off or burned off so that her body could not be identified. When the announcement was printed in the local newspaper, The Cambrian, therefore, it did not refer to Fanny specifically. At the inquest, Fanny was declared "dead", rather than a suicide or an insanity victim, which saved her body from various indignities. Todd speculates that Shelley arranged for Fanny to be declared "dead" (an appellation more common for the well-to-do) and removed any identifying items, such as her name on the note. She also concludes that to protect the rest of the family, he refused to claim her body. No one else claimed Fanny's body and it was probably buried in a pauper's grave. In fact, Godwin wrote to Percy Shelley: > Do nothing to destroy the obscurity she so much desired, that now rests upon the event. It was, as I said, her last wish ... Think what is the situation of my wife & myself, now deprived of all our children but the youngest [William]; & do not expose us to those idle questions, which to a mind in anguish is one of the severest trials. > > We are at this moment in doubt whether during the first shock we shall not say she is gone to Ireland to her aunts, a thing that had been in contemplation ... What I have most of all in horror is the public papers; & I thank you for your caution as it might act on this. Because suicide was considered scandalous, disreputable, and sinful at the time, which might have damaged Godwin's business, the family told various stories regarding Imlay's death in order to cover up the truth, including that she had gone on vacation, that she had died of a cold in Wales, that she had died of an "inflammatory fever", that she was living with her mother's sisters, or, if forced to admit suicide, that Fanny killed herself because Shelley loved Mary Godwin and not her. Neither Percy nor Mary mention Fanny's death in their surviving letters from this time. Claire Clairmont claimed in a letter to Byron that Percy became ill because of her death, but as Holmes notes, there is no other evidence for this assertion. Yet Locke writes that Shelley told Byron he felt "a far severer anguish" over Fanny's suicide than over Harriet's (his wife's) suicide just two months later. While there is no known image of Fanny, a few months after her death, Shelley penned the poem quoted at the beginning of this article. As Seymour writes, "[p]ublished by Mary without comment, it has always been supposed to allude to his last meeting with her half-sister." ## Family tree
17,573,131	Ngo Dinh Diem presidential visit to Australia	1,152,171,975	1957 official visit by South Vietnamese president	[ "1957 in Australia", "1957 in Vietnam", "1957 in international relations", "20th-century diplomatic conferences", "Australia–Vietnam relations", "Diplomatic conferences in Australia", "Diplomatic visits by heads of government", "History of South Vietnam", "Ngo Dinh Diem", "September 1957 events in Australia" ]	The Ngô Đình Diệm presidential visit to Australia from 2 to 9 September 1957 was an official visit by the first president of the Republic of Vietnam. It was part of a year of travelling for Diệm, who made official visits to the United States and other anti-communist countries. As with his American trip, Diệm was warmly and lavishly received during the height of the Cold War, garnering bipartisan praise from both the Liberal Party of Australia of Prime Minister Robert Menzies and the opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP). Diệm addressed the Parliament of Australia and was made an honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George, one of the highest imperial honours that can be bestowed on a non-British subject—at the time, Australians were also British subjects. Diệm did not engage in substantive political discussions with the Australian leaders and he spent most of his time at public functions. He was universally extolled by the media, which praised him for what they perceived to be a successful, charismatic, democratic and righteous rule in South Vietnam, overlooking his authoritarianism, election fraud and other corrupt practices. The Australian Catholic leadership and media were particularly glowing towards the South Vietnamese head of state. A member of Vietnam's Catholic minority and the brother of Vietnam's leading archbishop, Diệm had pursued policies in Vietnam favoring his co-religionists. He exempted the Catholic Church from land redistribution, gave them more aid and job promotions, and allowed Catholic paramilitaries to attack Buddhists, who formed the religious majority. Diệm's visit was a highmark in relations between Australia and South Vietnam. Over time, Diệm became unpopular with his foreign allies, who began to criticise his autocratic style and religious bias. By the time of his assassination in 1963, he had little support. Australia later sent troops to support South Vietnam in the anti-communist fight, but the bipartisanship evaporated during the mid-1960s as the ALP began to sympathise with North Vietnam and opposition to the Vietnam War grew. The ALP later withdrew support for and refused to accept refugees from South Vietnam after winning office, but on the return of the centre right Liberal-National coalition to power in 1975, Vietnamese refugees were allowed to resettle in Australia in large numbers. ## Background In 1933, the devoutly Catholic Diệm was appointed Interior Minister of Vietnam, serving under Emperor Bảo Đại. However, a few months thereafter he resigned and became a private citizen because the French colonialists would not give Vietnam any meaningful autonomy. During World War II, Imperial Japan attacked Indochina and wrested control from France, but when they were defeated by the Allies in 1945, a power vacuum was created. The communist-dominated Việt Minh of Hồ Chí Minh fought for Vietnamese independence, while the French attempted to regain control of their colony by creating the French Union-allied State of Vietnam under Bảo Đại. A staunch anti-communist nationalist, Diệm opposed both and attempted to create his own movement, with little success. With both the French and the communists hostile to him, Diệm felt unsafe and went into self-imposed exile in 1950. He spent the next four years in the United States and Europe enlisting support, particularly among Vatican officials and fellow Catholic politicians in America. The success of the effort was helped by the fact that his elder brother Ngô Đình Thục was the leading Catholic cleric in Vietnam and had studied with high-ranking Vatican officials in Rome a few decades earlier. In 1954, the French lost the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Conference was held to determine the future of French Indochina. The Việt Minh were given control of North Vietnam, while the State of Vietnam controlled the territory south of the 17th parallel. The Geneva agreements, which the State of Vietnam did not sign, called for reunification elections to be held in 1956. Bảo Đại appointed Diệm as his prime minister, hoping that he would be able to attract American aid as the French withdrew from Southeast Asia. Diệm then deposed Bảo Đại in a fraudulent referendum and declared himself president of the newly proclaimed Republic of Vietnam. Diệm received support from the U.S. and other anti-communist countries in the midst of the Cold War. He refused to hold the national elections and asserted that Hồ Chí Minh would rig the ballots in the north, although he had done so himself in deposing Bảo Đại. ## Meetings and ceremonies Diệm arrived in the capital Canberra on 2 September 1957; his visit was the first by a foreign incumbent head of state to Australia. He had visited the US in May, and the visit to Australia was the second of three legs in a tour of anti-communist countries in the Asia Pacific region; Diệm had visited Thailand in August and went on to South Korea after leaving Australia. The magnitude of the ceremonial welcome accorded to Diệm was unseen since the visit in 1954 by Queen Elizabeth II. According to Peter Edwards, a military historian at the Australian War Memorial specialising in the Vietnam War, "Everywhere he was feted as a man of courage, faith and vision", and he noted that Diệm was received with "more ceremony and pageantry" than the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in 1954. Diệm travelled with five others, including the Minister for Public Works and Communications, the Health Minister, and the Permanent Secretary-General of the Department for National Defense. Ahead of his arrival, the South Vietnamese leader had specifically asked to visit Australian manufacturing sites in Sydney and Melbourne, particularly those in the food processing, textile, shipbuilding and housing industries. Upon disembarking from his plane at Canberra Airport on the morning of Monday 2 September, Diệm was photographed for The Age and described as a "small but striking figure in a royal blue silk frock coat, long white trousers and black mandarin hat". He was greeted by the Governor-General of Australia Sir William Slim and the Prime Minister of Australia Robert Menzies, and was also introduced to the British High Commissioner Lord Carrington and United States Ambassador William Sebald. He was given a 21-gun salute and a guard of honour by the Royal Australian Air Force, whose fighter jets flew overhead, before making a speech about bilateral relations. Diệm said thanked Australia for its "unflagging support in our most critical hours" and praised relations as being of "a quality normally only found in countries united by long friendship". He said "From our common love for freedom and our determination to keep it, stem the solidarity and friendship between our two countries." The South Vietnamese leader was then hosted for a dinner reception at Yarralumla, the residence of the Governor-General. The centrepiece of Diệm's visit was a speech to a joint sitting of the Parliament of Australia on Tuesday, September 3, with both the House of Representatives and the Senate in attendance. President Diệm said that "moral and spiritual rearmament" and the "moral unity" of the people were the key factors in fighting the spread of communism. After the speech, Menzies called for three cheers for Diệm at an official parliamentary luncheon. Doc Evatt, the leader of the opposition Australian Labor Party joined in, proclaiming that peace, stability and democracy had been achieved in South Vietnam. On the same day, Diệm also visited the Australian War Memorial and the Australian National University. On Wednesday, 4 September, Diệm visited the Royal Military College Duntroon in Canberra, where he watched and addressed a parade of Australian cadets, who were training to become officers. Diệm told the students that they were "comrades of the Free World" and that they would help to defend like-minded countries. At midday, Diệm left the national capital to begin a two-day stint in Melbourne, the capital and largest city in the southern state of Victoria. He was flown to Melbourne Airport by a Royal Australian Air Force Convair and met by a guard of honour formed by members of the Royal Australian Navy. Diệm was met by Premier of Victoria Sir Henry Bolte and Lieutenant-Governor Sir Edmund Herring, and was the guest of honour at a reception hosted by Premier Bolte at Parliament House. On Thursday, 5 September, Diệm attended official receptions at Melbourne Town Hall and at the residence of the Governor of Victoria, re-emphasising his themes of anti-communism and the bilateral focus on democracy. He also visited three factories and had a private audience with the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne Daniel Mannix, who was well known for his political power and advocacy in Australia. The next morning, before departing for Sydney, Diệm inspected a textile factory in the inner-northern suburb of Carlton and visited several large-scale public housing estates. At the time, Australia was undergoing a post-World War II population boom and was dealing with housing pressures, an issue that was also confronting South Vietnam following the large influx of northern refugees after the partition in 1954. The guard of honour and a 21-gun salute that Diệm received at Parliament House was repeated in Sydney and Melbourne, where large crowds cheered Diệm's arrival at the airport and the passing of his motorcade. After arriving in Sydney on Friday, September 6, around midday aboard the RAAF Convair, the South Vietnamese leader was taken outside the capital cities for two days during the weekend, so that he could see the Snowy Mountains Scheme, a large hydroelectricity project in highland Victoria. He returned to Sydney on Sunday, September 8, and left Australia the following evening. In one of Diệm's final functions in Sydney, a minor emergency occurred at the Australia Hotel during a banquet hosted by the Premier of New South Wales, Joseph Cahill. A fire ignited in a pile of rubbish, causing alarm bells to sound for ten minutes, interrupting Premier Cahill when he was making his speech, but no evacuation was required. At the end of the visit, Menzies bestowed on Diệm an honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George, one of the highest imperial honours that had been bestowed on someone who was not a British subject. In his final comments, Diệm said "I have been enriched by this visit to Australia, for I have noted the vast material and spiritual resources of a people who are hard-working, upright, frank, and loyal in their social, political and international relations." He was met by Governor-General Slim, Prime Minister Menzies, the heads of the branches of the Australian Defence Force, the New South Wales Police Commissioner, and given a guard of honour by 100 soldiers before departing on a Qantas Super Constellation requisitioned for his use. Edwards said of the trip: "Australia had now associated Diệm's survival with its national interest, publicly and without restraint", something that eventually extended to military support against the Vietnamese communists. Diệm spent little time on detailed defence and policy discussions with Australian officials during the trip, because of his extensive meetings with Catholic leaders. Although Diệm had signalled his intentions to discuss defence relations during the visit, these did not materialise. At the end of the visit, Diệm and Menzies released a bilateral statement, announcing that they would increase the magnitude of the Colombo Plan, a program under which Asian students could study abroad in Western nations. However, there was little detail in the announcements relating to anti-communism, with only general expressions of Australian support, including a pledge to increase the amount of non-military aid for the South Vietnamese Civil Guard and civilian aid equipment. Diệm had previously stated that if North Vietnam attacked the south, he would send the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to land in the Red River Delta in the north and retaliate. This was contrary to the air attack plans of the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), which had vowed to defend the south under the provisions of the Manila Treaty. Despite the public statements of support, the Australian government never shared the details of the SEATO plans with Diệm. ## Media reception and support The Australian media wrote uniformly glowing reports that heaped praise on Diệm, and generally presented him as a courageous, selfless and wise leader. The Sydney Morning Herald described Diệm as "One of the most remarkable men in the new Asia ... authoritarian in approach but liberal in principle". The Age compared Diệm favourably to Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee, the Presidents of the Republic of China and South Korea respectively. The trio were the respective leaders of the anti-communist halves of the three countries in Asia that had been divided along communist and anti-communist lines. The Age opined that Diệm was not "morally equivocal" but "incorruptible and intensely patriotic" compared to his anti-communist counterparts, and "the type of Asian leader whose straight talk and courageous manner should be valued". The editorial also noted Diệm's strong religious opinions and linked to his strident anti-communism and opposition to neutralism. It further acclaimed him as "incorruptible and patriotic" and that he had restored order to a chaotic country. The Canberra Times noted that Diệm's visit coincided with that of Foreign Minister Richard Casey to Malaya for that country's independence celebrations. Australia had supported Malaya's successful fight against communism and the newspaper compared the two countries, predicting that they would succeed because "the leaders owe their authority to popular support". Like the politicians, the press overlooked the negative aspects and reality of Diệm's rule, such as his authoritarianism. Although Diệm was depicted as being extremely popular and democratic, he had made himself president when his brother rigged a 1955 referendum that allowed him to depose Bảo Đại; Diệm was subsequently credited with 133% of the votes in Saigon. Diệm's family regime routinely engaged in corruption, ballot stuffing and arbitrary arrests of all opposition. The newspapers also failed to mention that the South Vietnamese economy was largely being propped up by the Commercial Import Program run by the United States and that land reform had failed. The mainstream media depicted Diệm as a friendly and charismatic leader who related well to the populace. The Herald showed photographs of the president eating cheese, and inspecting the foliage at the Botanic Gardens. Diệm was depicted making friends with a young boy from a Collingwood public housing estate and having tea with South Vietnamese students studying abroad at the University of Melbourne, with the females wearing the traditional áo dài. In contrast, Diệm was generally regarded as aloof and distant from the population, rarely heading outside the presidential palace to mingle with his people, and holding military processions in honour of his ascension to power in front of empty grandstands. The strongest support for Diệm came from the Australian Catholic media. Diệm was a Catholic in a majority Buddhist country, and he had close religious links with the Vatican, who had helped him rise to power. He had stayed in a seminary run by Cardinal Francis Spellman in the United States in the early 1950s before his elevation to power. Diệm's elder brother Archbishop Ngô Đình Thục was the leading Catholic figure in Vietnam and a classmate of Spellman when the pair studied in Rome. Spellman was widely regarded as the most powerful Catholic figure in the United States and he helped to organise support for Diệm among American politicians, particularly Catholics. In 1957, Diệm dedicated his country to the Virgin Mary and ruled on the basis of a Catholic doctrine known as personalism. His younger brother Ngô Đình Nhu ran the secret and autocratic Catholic Cần Lao Party (Personalist Labor Party), which provided a clandestine network of support and police-state mechanisms to protect Diệm's rule. It counted many leading public servants and military officers among its members. Diệm also maintained land policies that were preferential to the Roman Catholic Church, the largest property owner in the country. Their holdings were exempt from redistribution under land reform schemes, while the construction of Buddhist temples was restricted; military and civil service promotions were given preferentially to Catholics. Some Catholic priests ran their own private armies and in some areas, forced conversions, looting, shelling and demolition of pagodas occurred. The Catholic Weekly described Diệm as "his nation's saviour from Red onslaught ... an ardent patriot of great courage and moral integrity and an able intellectual". The paper also praised Diệm's Catholic links, pointing out that Thục was a former classmate of the current Archbishop of Sydney Norman Thomas Gilroy when they studied at the Vatican. Diệm's achievements and support for Catholics were particularly praised by Bob Santamaria, the unofficial leader and guiding influence of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The DLP had broken away from the Australian Labor Party (ALP), the nation's main centre-left social democratic party. The split occurred in the 1950s during the McCarthyism scares, as the Catholic factions broke away to form the DLP on the basis that the ALP was too lenient towards communists. One of the reasons that Menzies strongly backed Diệm was to gain further favour with the DLP and accentuate the divisions among his left wing opponents. Diệm's visit prompted increased interest in Vietnam by Australian Catholics, particularly supporters of the DLP. Australian Catholics came to see South Vietnam as an anti-communist and Vatican stronghold in Asia and as a result, became strong supporters of the Vietnam War. Harold Lalor, a Jesuit priest and leading confidant of Santamaria, had studied with Thục in Rome. During the trip, Diệm met with Gilroy, the first Australian cardinal, as well as Santamaria and Archbishop of Melbourne Daniel Mannix, both of whom praised him strongly. Mannix was one of the most powerful men in Australia during the era, and had great political influence. ## Aftermath The positive reception accorded to Diệm in 1957 contrasted with increasingly negative Australian attitudes towards Vietnam. Over time, the media in both Australia and the United States began to pay more attention to Diệm's autocratic style and religious bias, especially after the eruption of the Buddhist crisis in 1963, and the iconic self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức. After six months of civil unrest, Diệm was deposed and assassinated in November 1963, and by that time, little goodwill remained. With new leadership in Saigon, and an escalation in the war against the communists, Australia sent in ground troops—including conscripts—to support South Vietnam, but over time, the bipartisanship of the 1950s evaporated. The centre-left ALP became more opposed to Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, and Arthur Calwell ― in one of his last acts as Leader of the ALP — stridently denounced South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ as a "fascist dictator" and a "butcher" ahead of his 1967 visit. At the time, Kỳ was the chief of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force and headed a military junta. Despite the controversy leading up to the visit, Kỳ's trip was a success. He dealt with the media effectively, despite hostile sentiment from some sections of the press and public. However, with the war becoming increasing destructive, and the death toll rising, opposition to the Vietnam War grew. In 1970, Labor leader Gough Whitlam posed with the Viet Cong flag, and his deputy Jim Cairns, the chairman of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, led large anti-war protests. Labor won the 1972 federal election on an anti-war platform, and Whitlam withdrew Australian troops and recognised North Vietnam, which welcomed his electoral success. Whitlam later refused to accept South Vietnamese refugees following the fall of Saigon to the communists in April 1975. The Liberals—led by Malcolm Fraser—condemned Whitlam, and after defeating Labor in December 1975, allowed South Vietnamese refugees to settle in Australia in large numbers. ## See also - Ngô Đình Diệm presidential visit to the United States
46,513,054	Teresa Sampsonia	1,154,858,892	Noblewoman of the Safavid Empire of Iran	[ "1580s births", "1668 deaths", "16th-century people of Safavid Iran", "17th-century Iranian women", "17th-century people of Safavid Iran", "Burials at Santa Maria della Scala", "Circassian nobility", "Converts to Roman Catholicism from Eastern Orthodoxy", "Iranian Roman Catholics", "Iranian emigrants to Italy", "Iranian people of Circassian descent" ]	Teresa Sampsonia (born Sampsonia; after marriage Lady Shirley, 1589–1668) was an Iranian noblewoman of the Safavid Empire of Iran. She was the wife of Elizabethan English adventurer Robert Shirley, whom she accompanied on his travels and embassies across Europe in the name of the Safavid King (Shah) Abbas the Great (r. 1588–1629). Teresa was received by many of the royal houses of Europe, such as English prince Henry Frederick and Queen Anne (her child's godparents) and contemporary writers and artists such as Thomas Herbert and Anthony van Dyck. Herbert considered Robert Shirley "the greatest Traveller of his time", but admired the "undaunted Lady Teresa" even more. Following the death of her husband from dysentery in 1628, and due to impediments from grandees at the court, and the authorities, during the reign of Abbas's successor and grandson Safi (r. 1629–1642), Teresa decided to leave Iran. She lived in a convent in Rome for the rest of her life, devoting her time to charity and religion. As a pious Christian, and because of her love for her husband, Teresa had Shirley's remains transported to Rome from Isfahan and reburied; on the headstone of their mutual grave she mentions their travels and refers to her noble Circassian origins. Thanks to her exploits, Teresa has been described as someone who subverted patriarchal gender roles common to the Muslim and Christian cultures of her time. Due to their hybrid identities and adventures, Teresa and her husband became the subject of several contemporary literary and visual works. Nevertheless, the story of Teresa as an important woman of the 17th century has been largely overshadowed and obscured by the tale of her husband Robert and his brothers. ## Early life and marriage Teresa was born in 1589 into a noble Orthodox Christian Circassian family in the Safavid Empire, ruled at the time by Shah Abbas the Great. She was named Sampsonia at birth. The daughter of Ismail Khan, a brother-in-law of the King, she grew up in Isfahan in the Iranian royal court as a reportedly beautiful, accomplished horsewoman who enjoyed embroidery and painting. Robert Shirley was an English adventurer who was sent to the Safavids, after a Persian embassy was sent to Europe, to forge an alliance against the neighbouring Ottoman Empire, rivals of the Safavids. During his attendance at court, Teresa met him and fell in love. On 2 February 1608, with the approval of her aunt and Abbas, Teresa married Robert Shirley in Iran. At about the time of their wedding, she was baptised as a Roman Catholic by the Carmelites in Isfahan with the name Teresa. Her baptismal name derives from the founder of the Discalced Carmelites, Teresa of Ávila. ## Travels ### First mission Teresa accompanied Robert on his diplomatic missions for Shah Abbas to England and other royal houses in Europe. When they set off on their first embassy trip, Robert was captured by his enemies. Teresa reportedly managed to save him and put to flight the attackers; for this, the Carmelite records praised her as "a true Amazon". Teresa and Shirley visited the Grand Duke of Muscovy Vasili IV, Pope Paul V in Rome and King Sigismund III of Poland. In Poland, Teresa lived in a convent in Kraków for some time while her husband visited Prague, where Emperor Rudolph II (r. 1576–1612) bestowed on him the title of Count Palatine. He arrived in Rome on 27 September 1609 and met Ali Qoli Beg, Abbas I's ambassador, with whom he had an audience with the Pope. Shirley then left for Savoy, Florence, Milan, Genoa, France, Flanders and Spain (Barcelona and Madrid). Teresa rejoined him in Lisbon via Hamburg. They then went to Valladolid and Madrid where Teresa came to know the Carmelite nuns, particularly Mother Beatrix de Jesus (the niece of Saint Teresa) from whom she received a relic of Teresa. Teresa and Shirley left for the Dutch Republic and subsequently sailed from Bayonne to England, where they arrived around the beginning of August 1611. Their only child, a son named Henry, in all likelihood the first English-born child of Iranian descent according to Sheila R. Canby, was born in November 1611 at the Shirley home in Sussex. His godparents were Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, for whom he was named, and Queen Anne. Teresa and Robert remained in England a little over a year. Before departing from Gravesend to Safavid Iran in 1612–1613, they decided to turn young Henry over to Robert's family in Sussex. He is believed to have survived until at least 1622, but to have died at a young age. Teresa and Shirley's two-and-a-half-year return voyage to Iran proved to be extremely difficult. On one occasion, they were almost killed at sea. On another, during their short stop in Mughal India to meet Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–1627), hostile Portuguese tried to assassinate the couple. The couple remained in Iran for a few months, before embarking on their second embassy. ### Second mission On their last mission, Teresa and Robert arrived in Lisbon through Goa on 27 September 1617. They headed towards Madrid, where they stayed until March 1622, then went to Florence and Rome. During this last brief visit to Rome between 22 July and 29 August 1622, Anthony van Dyck (then 23 years old) painted their portraits. The couple then went to Warsaw in Poland, and perhaps Moscow afterwards, before visiting England in 1623 for the last time. They sailed for the Safavid Empire in 1627 on an East India Company ship with Dodmore Cotton, an envoy from the King of England to Persia and other courts. Teresa and Robert returned to Isfahan through Surat and Bandar Abbas. The couple then moved to Qazvin (the former capital of Safavid Iran) where the king rewarded them with valuable gifts. Shirley and Cotton became seriously ill with fever (probably dysentery), shortly after their arrival. ## Departure from Safavid kingdom Shirley and Teresa were troubled by the jealousy of several nobles and grandees at court, who spread a rumour that Teresa was a Muslim before she became a Christian. They disgraced her to the Shah, and it was reportedly published in the court that he intended to execute her by burning. Fifteen days after hearing the report, Robert died of fever on 13 July 1628 in Qazvin. According to his wishes, he was buried in the Discalced Carmelite church in Isfahan. The Shah summoned Teresa, asking her why the grandees were so opposed to her. She remained silent to protect them; according to contemporaneous accounts, the Shah advised her not to be afraid, "because it would be harder for him to put one woman to death than a hundred men". Some of his corrupt officials plundered her wealth. Teresa reportedly became seriously ill, and was moved to Isfahan to receive the sacraments from the priests; she recovered and decided to move to a Christian land. In the Safavid Empire, women were prohibited from travelling abroad without permission. So the Carmelites in Isfahan asked the governor of Shiraz, Emamqoli Khan, son of the celebrated Allahverdi Khan (one of Abbas's closest associates), for consent on Teresa's behalf. A favourite of Emamqoli Khan wanted to marry Teresa, and reminded the governor of the report that she had been a Muslim before she was a Christian. She was ordered to appear before a mullah (a religious judge) in a mosque, who would question her about her past and her religion. This was unacceptable to the Carmelites, who asked the governor to have Teresa questioned in the church of the Carmelite fathers. The mullah rejected this, but an agreement was reached that they would meet in the home of a steward of the governor of Shiraz, who was a friend of the Carmelite Fathers. She was questioned for an hour before she was allowed to return home. Safavid Iran was disturbed by the death of Shah Abbas a few months after Shirley's death. Abbas's grandson, Safi (r. 1629–1642), succeeded him; he was less consistent than his grandfather in his religious tolerance. The favourite of Emamqoli Khan, who still wanted to marry Teresa, sent his servants to the Carmelites in Isfahan to capture her. The priests denied knowing her whereabouts, and advised her to take refuge in the Church of Saint Augustine in New Julfa (the Armenian quarter in Isfahan). The priests were brought to the favourite's house and reportedly threatened with torture before they were released. The mullah asked Emamqoli Khan for permission to question Teresa again. Since he favoured the Carmelite Fathers, and did not want to insult the mullah, he said that the matter concerned Isfahan prefect (darugha) Khosrow Mirza. The prefect, like the governor of Shiraz, was also a Georgian. He had Teresa arrested and brought before him; a judge questioned her about her religion. She professed her Christianity, reportedly saying that she would die "a thousand times" for it. The judge accused her of lying and threatened to burn her alive if she did not convert to Islam. When Teresa refused, the judge threatened to have her thrown from a tower; she reportedly said that would suit her better, because she would die (and go to heaven) more quickly. According to the Carmelites, the judge was shamed by her reminder of Shirley's service. He ended the questioning and reported to the prefect of Isfahan who allowed Teresa to return to her house and had the mullah dismissed. The Carmelite Fathers received the necessary permission from the governor of Shiraz in September 1629. Teresa's departure was documented in a letter from Father Dimas in the Carmelite archives in Rome: > 18.9.1629 ... The lady Countess Donna Teresa, who was the consort of the late Count Palatine Don Robert Sherley, leaves here for Rome; she is a lady of great spirit and valour ... In these parts, she has been an apostle and a martyr confessed and professed ... Three years after returning from her last trip, Teresa left her country of birth forever. She lived in Constantinople for three years, receiving a certificate from the commissary general of the Dominicans in the East on 21 June 1634 reportedly attesting to her pious conduct. Around that time, she decided to retire to a convent in Rome, which was attached to the Carmelite Santa Maria della Scala church. ## Later life and death On 27 December 1634 she arrived in Rome and was received kindly by Pope Urban VIII, who entrusted her to the Carmelites. Teresa bought a house next to the church. In 1658 she had Robert's remains transported from Isfahan to Rome, where he was reburied in the Santa Maria della Scala. In the Carmelite convent, she devoted herself to charity and religion until her death at age 79 in 1668. Teresa was buried in the church, where she had lived for forty years, in the same grave where she had buried her husband Robert ten years earlier. She had the headstone inscribed: > Deo Optimo Maximo Roberto Sherleyo Anglo Nobilissimo Comiti Cesareo Equiti Aurato Rodulfi II Imperatori Legato Ad Scia Abbam Regem Persarum et Eiusdeum Regis Secundo Ad Romanos Pontifices Imperatores Reges Hispaniae Angliae Poloniae Moscoviae Mogorri Aliosque Europae Principes Inclito Oratori. Theresia Sampsonia Amazonites Samphuffi Circassiae Principes Filia Viro Amatissimo et Sibi Posuit Illius Ossibus Suisque Laribus In Urbem E Perside Pietatis Ergo Translatis Annos Nata LXXIX MDCLXVIII (Translated as "To God, the Best and Greatest. For Robert Sherley, most noble Englishman, Count Palatine, Knight of the Golden Spur, Emperor Rudolph II's envoy to Shah Abbas, the King of Persia, (and) the representative of the same King to the Popes of Rome, to Emperors, to the Kings of Spain, England, Poland, Muscovy, and the Mogul Empire, distinguished ambassador to other European princes. Theresia Sampsonia, native of the land of the Amazons, daughter of Samphuffus, prince of Circassia, set up [this monument] for her most beloved husband and for herself, as a resting place for his bones—brought to Rome from Persia for dutiful devotion's sake—and for her own, aged seventy-nine. 1668.") According to Bernadette Andrea (2017), the text demonstrates that Teresa subverted the patriarchal gender roles common to the Muslim and Christian cultures of her time. ## In popular culture The adventures of Teresa and her husband, and what Andrea calls their "hybrid identities", inspired a variety of literary and visual works. According to Manoutchehr Eskandari-Qajar, Shirley and his "exotic wife with an even more exotic life story" sparked a great deal of curiosity and interest among their contemporaries in the West. During her journeys between Persia and Europe, Teresa was remarked upon by contemporary writers, artists and European royal houses. Travel writer Thomas Herbert described Shirley as "the greatest Traveller of his time", but he admired the "undaunted Lady Teresa" even more, as one whose "faith was ever Christian". Teresa and her husband were invariably noted for their exotic garb. In every high-level meeting, Shirley appeared in his high-status Persian attire of silk and velvet. He was Persianized to such a degree that contemporary playwright and pamphleteer Thomas Middleton referred to him as the "famous English Persian". Works inspired by the couple include two portraits by van Dyck, pamphlets in many languages, and Jacobean stage plays including The Travels of the Three English Brothers. Lady Mary Wroth's Urania was partly influenced by Teresia Sampsonia's travels to England with her husband. Tuson argues that Teresa's story has been overshadowed by "the partly self-created myth of the Shirley's", who became the main subject of many of the contemporary "biographies as well as subsequent historical studies". Carmen Nocentelli notes that the "figure of Teresa has been generally obscured by those of her male relatives". According to Nocentelli: > Whether she is identified as "Sir Robert Sherley...his Persian lady", "the Sophies Neece," or "the King of Persia his cousin Germaine", she is little more than a prop in the so-called Sherley myth, a tale of masculine globe-trotting featuring Robert and his two older brothers, Anthony and Thomas, as exemplars of English prowess and entrepreneurism. Nocentelli does add that the belittling of Teresa as a historic figure of importance was limited to England. Outside England, "Teresa Sampsonia Sherley was a figure of note in and of her own right". Contemporaneous Italian traveller Pietro della Valle referred to Teresa as an "Ambassadress of the King of Persia", which Nocentelli interprets as putting Teresa on an "equal footing with her husband". In 2009, in London, there were two simultaneous exhibitions which featured Teresa and her husband: Shah 'Abbas: The Remaking of Iran (British Museum, February to June 2009) and Van Dyck and Britain (Tate Britain, February to May 2009). ## See also - Circassians in Iran - Portrait of Lady Theresa Shirley
187,604	Vasa (ship)	1,171,346,378	17th-century Swedish warship	[ "1620s ships", "1627 establishments in Sweden", "1628 in Sweden", "Archaeology of shipwrecks", "Maritime archaeology", "Maritime incidents in 1628", "Maritime incidents in Sweden", "Maritime incidents involving engineering failures", "Military history of Sweden", "Museum ships in Sweden", "Ships built in Stockholm", "Ships of the Swedish Navy", "Ships preserved in museums", "Shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea", "Shipwrecks of Sweden", "Tourist attractions in Stockholm" ]	Vasa or Wasa () is a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628. The ship sank after sailing roughly 1,300 m (1,400 yd) into her maiden voyage on 10 August 1628. She fell into obscurity after most of her valuable bronze cannons were salvaged in the 17th century, until she was located again in the late 1950s in a busy shipping area in Stockholm harbor. The ship was salvaged with a largely intact hull in 1961. She was housed in a temporary museum called Wasavarvet ("The Vasa Shipyard") until 1988 and then moved permanently to the Vasa Museum in the Royal National City Park in Stockholm. The ship is one of Sweden's most popular tourist attractions and has been seen by over 35 million visitors since 1961. Since her recovery, Vasa has become a widely recognized symbol of the Swedish Empire. The ship was built on the orders of the King of Sweden Gustavus Adolphus as part of the military expansion he initiated in a war with Poland-Lithuania (1621–1629). She was constructed at the navy yard in Stockholm under a contract with private entrepreneurs in 1626–1627 and armed primarily with bronze cannons cast in Stockholm specifically for the ship. Richly decorated as a symbol of the king's ambitions for Sweden and himself, upon completion she was one of the most powerfully armed vessels in the world. However, Vasa was dangerously unstable, with too much weight in the upper structure of the hull. Despite this lack of stability, she was ordered to sea and foundered only a few minutes after encountering a wind stronger than a breeze. The order to sail was the result of a combination of factors. The king, who was leading the army in Poland at the time of her maiden voyage, was impatient to see her take up her station as flagship of the reserve squadron at Älvsnabben in the Stockholm Archipelago. At the same time the king's subordinates lacked the political courage to openly discuss the ship's problems or to have the maiden voyage postponed. An inquiry was organized by the Swedish Privy Council to find those responsible for the disaster, but in the end no one was punished. During the 1961 recovery, thousands of artifacts and the remains of at least 15 people were found in and around Vasa's hull by marine archaeologists. Among the many items found were clothing, weapons, cannons, tools, coins, cutlery, food, drink and six of the ten sails. The artifacts and the ship herself have provided scholars with invaluable insights into details of naval warfare, shipbuilding techniques and everyday life in early 17th-century Sweden. Today Vasa is the world's best-preserved 17th century ship, and the most visited museum in Scandinavia. The wreck of Vasa continually undergoes monitoring and further research on how to preserve her. ## Historical background During the 17th century, Sweden went from being a sparsely populated, poor, and peripheral northern European kingdom of little influence to one of the major powers in continental politics. Between 1611 and 1718 it was the dominant power in the Baltic, eventually gaining territory that encompassed the Baltic on all sides. This rise to prominence in international affairs and increase in military prowess, called stormaktstiden ("age of greatness" or "great power period"), was made possible by a succession of able monarchs and the establishment of a powerful centralized government, supporting a highly efficient military organization. Swedish historians have described this as one of the more extreme examples of an early modern state using almost all of its available resources to wage war; the small northern kingdom transformed itself into a fiscal-military state and one of the most militarized states in history. Gustavus Adolphus (1594–1632) has been considered one of the most successful Swedish kings in terms of success in warfare. When Vasa was built, he had been in power for more than a decade. Sweden was embroiled in a war with Poland-Lithuania, and looked apprehensively at the development of the Thirty Years' War in present-day Germany. The war had been raging since 1618 and from a Protestant perspective it was not successful. The king's plans for a Polish campaign and for securing Sweden's interests required a strong naval presence in the Baltic. The Swedish Navy suffered several severe setbacks during the 1620s. In 1625, a squadron cruising in the Bay of Riga was caught in a storm and ten ships ran aground and were wrecked. In the Battle of Oliwa in 1627, a Swedish squadron was outmaneuvered and defeated by a Polish force and two large ships were lost. Tigern ("The Tiger"), which was the Swedish admiral's flagship, was captured by the Poles, and Solen ("The Sun") was blown up by her own crew when it was boarded and nearly captured. In 1628, three more large ships were lost in less than a month. Admiral Klas Fleming's flagship Kristina was wrecked in a storm in the Gulf of Danzig, Riksnyckeln ("Key of the Realm") ran aground at Viksten in the southern archipelago of Stockholm and Vasa foundered on her maiden voyage. Gustavus Adolphus was engaged in naval warfare on several fronts, which further exacerbated the difficulties of the navy. In addition to battling the Polish navy, the Swedes were indirectly threatened by Imperial forces that had invaded Jutland. The Swedish king had little sympathy for the Danish king, Christian IV, and Denmark and Sweden had been bitter enemies for well over a century. However, Sweden feared a Catholic conquest of Copenhagen and Zealand. This would have granted the Catholic powers control over the strategic passages between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, which would be disastrous for Swedish interests. Until the early 17th century, the Swedish navy was composed primarily of small to medium-sized ships with a single gundeck, normally armed with 12-pounder and smaller cannons; these ships were cheaper than larger ships and were well-suited for escort and patrol. They also suited the prevailing tactical thinking within the navy, which emphasized boarding as the decisive moment in a naval battle rather than gunnery. The king, who was a keen artillerist, saw the potential of ships as gun platforms, and large, heavily armed ships made a more dramatic statement in the political theater of naval power. Beginning with Vasa, he ordered a series of ships with two full gundecks, outfitted with much heavier guns. Five such ships were built after Vasa: Äpplet ("The Apple"), Kronan ("The Crown"), Scepter ("Sceptre") and Göta Ark ("Ark of Gothenburg"), before the Privy Council cancelled the orders for the others after the king's death in 1632. These ships, especially Kronan and Scepter, were much more successful, took part in battles, and served as flagships in the Swedish navy until the 1660s. The second of the so-called regalskepp (usually translated as "royal ships"), Äpplet was built simultaneously with Vasa. The only significant difference between the design of Vasa and her sister ship was an increase in width of about a meter (3.1 ft). The wreck of Äpplet, visibly very similar to Vasa, was found in December 2021. Äpplet, and other ships, are believed ultimately to have been decommissioned and sunk as underwater barriers against enemy ships. ## Construction ### Process Just before Vasa was ordered, Dutch-born Henrik Hybertsson ("Master Henrik") was shipwright at the Stockholm shipyard. On 16 January 1625, Master Henrik and business partner Arendt de Groote signed a contract to build four ships, two with a keel of around 135 feet (41 m) and two smaller ones of 108 feet (33 m). Master Henrik and Arendt de Groote began buying the raw materials needed for the first ships in 1625, purchasing timber from individual estates in Sweden as well as buying rough-sawn planking in Riga, Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad), and Amsterdam. As they prepared to begin the first of the new ships in the autumn of 1625, Henrik corresponded with the king through Vice Admiral Klas Fleming about which ship to build first. The loss of ten ships in the Bay of Riga led the king to propose building two ships of a new, medium size as a quick compromise, and he sent a specification for this, a ship which would be 120 feet (37 m) long on the keel. Henrik declined, since he had already cut the timber for a large and a small ship. He laid the keel for a larger ship in late February or early March 1626. Master Henrik never saw Vasa completed; he fell ill in late 1625, and by the summer of 1626 he had handed over supervision of the work in the yard to another Dutch shipwright, Henrik "Hein" Jacobsson. He died in the spring of 1627, probably about the same time as the ship was launched. After launching, work continued on finishing the upper deck, the sterncastle, the beakhead and the rigging. Sweden had still not developed a sizeable sailcloth industry, and material had to be ordered from abroad. In the contract for the maintenance of rigging, French sailcloth was specified, but the cloth for the sails of Vasa most likely came from Holland. The sails were made mostly of hemp and partly of flax. The rigging was made entirely of hemp imported from Latvia through Riga. The king visited the shipyard in January 1628 and made what was probably his only visit aboard the ship. In the summer of 1628, the captain responsible for supervising construction of the ship, Söfring Hansson, arranged for the ship's stability to be demonstrated for Vice Admiral Fleming, who had recently arrived in Stockholm from Prussia. Thirty men ran back and forth across the upper deck to start the ship rolling, but the admiral stopped the test after they had made only three trips, as he feared the ship would capsize. According to testimony by the ship's master, Göran Mattson, Fleming remarked that he wished the king were at home. Gustavus Adolphus had been sending a steady stream of letters insisting that the ship be put to sea as soon as possible. ### Design and stability There has been much speculation about whether Vasa was lengthened during construction and whether an additional gun deck was added late during the build. Little evidence suggests that Vasa was substantially modified after the keel was laid. Ships contemporary to Vasa that were elongated were cut in half and new timbers spliced between the existing sections, making the addition readily identifiable, but no such addition can be identified in the hull, nor is there any evidence for any late additions of a second gundeck. The king ordered seventy-two 24-pound guns for the ship on 5 August 1626, and this was too many to fit on a single gun deck. Since the king's order was issued less than five months after construction started, it would have come early enough for the second deck to be included in the design. The French Galion du Guise, the ship used as a model for Vasa, according to Arendt de Groote, also had two gun decks. Laser measurements of Vasa's structure conducted in 2007–2011 confirmed that no major changes were implemented during construction, but that the centre of gravity was too high. Vasa was an early example of a warship with two full gun decks, and was built when the theoretical principles of shipbuilding were still poorly understood. There is no evidence that Henrik Hybertsson had ever built a ship like it before, and two gundecks is a much more complicated compromise between seaworthiness and firepower than a single gundeck. Safety margins at the time were also far below anything that would be acceptable today. Combined with the fact that 17th-century warships were built with intentionally high superstructures (to be used as firing platforms), this made Vasa a risky undertaking. Henrik Hybertsson died in 1627, before the ship was finished, and the contract was taken over by his widow Margareta Nilsdotter. ### Armament Vasa was built during a time of transition in naval tactics, from an era when boarding was still one of the primary ways of fighting enemy ships to an era of the strictly organized ship-of-the-line and a focus on victory through superior gunnery. Vasa was armed with powerful guns and built with a high stern, which would act as a firing platform in boarding actions for some of the 300 soldiers it was supposed to carry, but the high-sided hull and narrow upper deck were not optimized for boarding. It was neither the largest ship ever built, nor the one carrying the greatest number of guns. What made her arguably the most powerful warship of the time was the combined weight of shot that could be fired from the cannons of one side: 588 pounds (267 kg), excluding stormstycken, guns used for firing anti-personnel ammunition instead of solid shot. This was the largest concentration of artillery in a single warship in the Baltic at the time, perhaps in all of northern Europe, and it was not until the 1630s that a ship with more firepower was built. This large amount of naval artillery was placed on a ship that was quite small relative to the armament carried. By comparison, USS Constitution, a frigate built by the United States 169 years after Vasa, had roughly the same firepower, but was over 700 tonnes (690 long tons; 770 short tons) heavier. The Constitution, however, belonged to a later era of naval warfare that employed the line of battle tactic, where ships fought in a line of ships (or line ahead) attempting to present the batteries of one side of each ship toward the enemy. The guns would be aimed in the same direction, and fire could be concentrated on a single target. In the 17th century, tactics involving organized formations of large fleets had still not been developed. Rather, ships would fight individually or in small improvised groups, and focused on boarding. Vasa, though possessing a formidable battery, was built with these tactics in mind, and therefore lacked a unified broadside with guns that were all aimed in roughly the same direction. Rather, the guns were intended to be fired independently and were arranged according to the curvature of the hull, so that the ship bristled with artillery in all directions, covering virtually all angles. Naval gunnery in the 17th century was still in its infancy. Guns were expensive and had a much longer lifespan than any warship. Guns with a lifetime of over a century were not unheard of, while most warships would be used for only 15 to 20 years. In Sweden and many other European countries, a ship would normally not "own" its guns, but would be issued armament from the armory for every campaign season. Ships were therefore usually fitted with guns of very diverse age and size. What allowed Vasa to carry so much firepower was not merely that an unusually large number of guns were crammed into a relatively small ship, but also that the 46 main 24-pounder guns were of a new and standardized lightweight design. These were cast in a single series at the state gun foundry in Stockholm, under the direction of the Swiss-born founder Medardus Gessus. Two additional 24-pounders, of a heavier and older design, were mounted in the bows as bow chasers. Four more heavy guns were intended for the stern, but the cannon foundry could not cast guns as fast as the navy yard could build ships, and Vasa waited nearly a year after construction was finished for its armament. When the ship sailed in August 1628, eight of the planned armament of 72 guns had still not been delivered. All cannons during this time had to be made from individually made moulds that could not be reused, but Vasa's guns had such uniform precision in their manufacturing that their primary dimensions varied by only a few millimeters, and their bores were almost exactly 146 mm (5.7 in). The remaining armament of Vasa consisted of eight 3-pounders, six large-caliber stormstycken (similar to what the English called howitzers) for use during boarding actions, and two 1-pound falconets. Also included on board were 894 kilograms (1,971 pounds) of gunpowder and over 1,000 shot of various types for the guns. ### Ornamentation As was the custom with warships at the time, Vasa was decorated with sculptures intended to glorify the authority, wisdom and martial prowess of the monarch and also to deride, taunt and intimidate the enemy. The sculptures made up a considerable part of the effort and cost of building the ship. The symbolism used in decorating the ship was mostly based on the Renaissance idealization of Roman and Greek antiquity, which had been imported from Italy through German and Dutch artists. Imagery borrowed from Mediterranean antiquity dominates the motifs, but also include figures from the Old Testament and even a few from ancient Egypt. Many of the figures are in Dutch grotesque style, depicting fantastic and frightening creatures, including mermaids, wild men, sea monsters and tritons. The decoration inside the ship is much sparser and is largely confined to the steerage and the great cabin, at the after end of the upper gundeck. Residues of paint have been found on many sculptures and on other parts of the ship. The entire ornamentation was once painted in vivid colors. The sides of the beakhead (the protruding structure below the bowsprit), the bulwarks (the protective railing around the weather deck), the roofs of the quarter galleries, and the background of the transom (the flat surface at the stern of the ship) were all painted red, while the sculptures were decorated in bright colors, and the dazzling effect of these was in some places emphasized with gold leaf. Previously, it was believed that the background color had been blue and that all sculptures had been almost entirely gilded, and this is reflected in many paintings of Vasa from the 1970s to the early 1990s, such as the lively and dramatic drawings of Björn Landström or the painting by Francis Smitheman. In the late 1990s, this view was revised and the colors are properly reflected in more recent reproductions of the ship's decoration by maritime painter Tim Thompson and the 1:10 scale model in the museum. Vasa is an example not so much of the heavily gilded sculptures of early Baroque art but rather "the last gasps of the medieval sculpture tradition" with its fondness for gaudy colors, in a style that today would be considered extravagant or even vulgar. The sculptures are carved out of oak, pine or linden, and many of the larger pieces, like the huge 3-meter (9.8-foot) long figurehead lion, consist of several parts carved individually and fitted together with bolts. Close to 500 sculptures, most of which are concentrated on the high stern and its galleries and on the beakhead, are found on the ship. The figure of Hercules appears as a pair of pendants, one younger and one older, on each side of the lower stern galleries; the pendants depict opposite aspects of the ancient hero, who was extremely popular during antiquity as well as in 17th-century European art. On the transom are biblical and nationalistic symbols and images. A particularly popular motif is the lion, which can be found as mascarons originally fitted on the insides of the gunport doors, grasping the royal coat of arms on either side, the figurehead, and even clinging to the top of the rudder. Each side of the beakhead originally had 20 figures (though only 19 have actually been found) that depicted Roman emperors from Tiberius to Septimius Severus. Overall, almost all heroic and positive imagery is directly or indirectly identified with the king and was originally intended to glorify him as a wise and powerful ruler. The only actual portrait of the king is located at the very top of the transom in the stern. Here he is depicted as a young boy with long, flowing hair, being crowned by two griffins representing the king's father, Charles IX. A team of at least six expert sculptors worked for a minimum of two years on the sculptures, most likely with the assistance of an unknown number of apprentices and assistants. No direct credit for any of the sculptures has been provided, but the distinct style of one of the most senior artists, Mårten Redtmer, is clearly identifiable. Other accomplished artists, like Hans Clausink, Johan Didrichson Tijsen (or Thessen in Swedish) and possibly Marcus Ledens, are known to have been employed for extensive work at the naval yards at the time Vasa was built, but their respective styles are not distinct enough to associate them directly with any specific sculptures. The artistic quality of the sculptures varies considerably, and about four distinct styles can be identified. The only artist who has been positively associated with various sculptures is Mårten Redtmer, whose style has been described as "powerful, lively and naturalistic". He was responsible for a considerable number of the sculptures. These include some of the most important and prestigious pieces: the figurehead lion, the royal coat of arms, and the sculpture of the king at the top of the transom. Two of the other styles are described as "elegant ... a little stereotyped and manneristic", and of a "heavy, leisurely but nevertheless rich and lively style", respectively. The fourth and last style, deemed clearly inferior to the other three, is described as "stiff and ungainly" and was done by other carvers, perhaps even apprentices, of lesser skill. ## Maiden voyage ### Sinking On 10 August 1628, Captain Söfring Hansson ordered Vasa to depart on her maiden voyage to the naval station at Älvsnabben. The day was calm, and the only wind was a light breeze from the southwest. The ship was warped (hauled by anchor) along the eastern waterfront of the city to the southern side of the harbor, where four sails were set, and the ship made way to the east. The gun ports were open, and the guns were out to fire a salute as the ship left Stockholm. As Vasa passed under the lee of the bluffs to the south (now called Södermalm), a gust of wind filled her sails, and she heeled suddenly to port. The sheets were cast off, and the ship slowly righted herself as the gust passed. At Tegelviken, where there is a gap in the bluffs, an even stronger gust again forced the ship onto her port side, this time pushing the open lower gunports under the surface, allowing water to rush in onto the lower gundeck. The water building up on the deck quickly exceeded the ship's minimal righting ability, and water continued to pour in until it ran down into the hold. The ship swiftly sank to a depth of 32 m (105 ft) only 120 m (390 ft) from shore. Survivors clung to debris or the upper masts, which were still above the surface. Many nearby boats rushed to their aid, but despite these efforts and the short distance to land, 30 people reportedly perished with the ship. Vasa sank in full view of a crowd of hundreds, if not thousands, of mostly ordinary Stockholmers who had come to see the ship set sail. The crowd included foreign ambassadors, in effect spies of Gustavus Adolphus' allies and enemies. ### Inquest The Council sent a letter to the king the day after the loss, telling him of the sinking, but it took over two weeks to reach him in Poland. "Imprudence and negligence" must have been the cause, he wrote angrily in his reply, demanding in no uncertain terms that the guilty parties be punished. Captain Söfring Hansson, who survived the disaster, was immediately taken for questioning. Under initial interrogation, he swore that the guns had been properly secured and that the crew was sober. A full inquest before a tribunal of members of the Privy Council and Admiralty took place at the Royal Palace on 5 September 1628. Each of the surviving officers was questioned as was the supervising shipwright and a number of expert witnesses. Also present at the inquest was the Admiral of the Realm, Carl Carlsson Gyllenhielm. The object of the inquest was as much or more to find a scapegoat as to find out why the ship had sunk. Whoever the committee might find guilty for the fiasco would face a severe penalty. Surviving crew members were questioned one by one about the handling of the ship at the time of the disaster. Was it rigged properly for the wind? Was the crew sober? Was the ballast properly stowed? Were the guns properly secured? However, no one was prepared to take the blame. Crewmen and contractors formed two camps; each tried to blame the other, and everyone swore he had done his duty without fault and it was during the inquest that the details of the stability demonstration were revealed. Next, attention was directed to the shipbuilders. "Why did you build the ship so narrow, so badly and without enough bottom that it capsized?" the prosecutor asked the shipwright Jacobsson. Jacobsson stated that he built the ship as directed by Henrik Hybertsson (the original shipbuilder, recently deceased), who in turn had followed the specification approved by the king. Jacobsson had in fact widened the ship by 1-foot 5 inches (c. 42 cm) after taking over responsibility for the construction, but construction of the ship was too far advanced to allow further widening. In the end, no guilty party could be found. The answer Arendt de Groote gave when asked by the court why the ship sank was "Only God knows". Gustavus Adolphus had approved all measurements and armaments, and the ship was built according to the instructions and loaded with the number of guns specified. In the end, no one was punished or found guilty for negligence, and the blame effectively fell on the dead Henrik Hybertsson. ## Vasa as a wreck Less than three days after the disaster, a contract was signed for the ship to be raised. However, those efforts were unsuccessful. The earliest attempts at raising Vasa by English engineer Ian Bulmer, resulted in righting the ship but also got it more securely stuck in the mud, which was one of the biggest impediments to the earliest attempts at recovery. Salvaging technology in the early 17th century was much more primitive than today, but the recovery of ships used roughly the same principles as were used to raise Vasa more than 300 years later. Two ships or hulks were placed parallel to either side above the wreck, and ropes attached to several anchors were sent down and hooked to the ship. The two hulks were filled with as much water as was safe, the ropes tightened, and the water pumped out. The sunken ship then rose with the ships on the surface and could be towed to shallower waters. The process was then repeated until the entire ship was successfully raised above water level. Even if the underwater weight of Vasa was not great, the mud in which it had settled made it sit more securely on the bottom and required considerable lifting power to overcome. More than 30 years after the ship's sinking, in 1663–1665, Albreckt von Treileben and Andreas Peckell mounted an effort to recover the valuable guns. With a simple diving bell, the team of Swedish and Finnish divers retrieved more than 50 of them. Such activity waned when it became clear that the ship could not be raised by the technology of the time. However, Vasa did not fall completely into obscurity after the recovery of the guns. The ship was mentioned in several histories of Sweden and the Swedish Navy, and the location of the wreck appeared on harbor charts of Stockholm in the 19th century. In 1844, the navy officer Anton Ludwig Fahnehjelm turned in a request for salvaging rights to the ship, claiming he had located it. Fahnehjelm was an inventor who designed an early form of light diving suit and had previously been involved in other salvage operations. There were dives made on the wreck in 1895–1896, and a commercial salvage company applied for a permit to raise or salvage the wreck in 1920, but this was turned down. In 1999, a witness also claimed that his father, a petty officer in the Swedish navy, had taken part in diving exercises on Vasa in the years before World War I. ### Deterioration In the 333 years that Vasa lay on the bottom of Stockholm harbor (called Stockholms ström, "the Stream", in Swedish), the ship and its contents were subject to several destructive forces, first among which were decomposition and erosion. Among the first things to decompose were the thousands of iron bolts that held the beakhead and much of the sterncastle together, and this included all of the ship's wooden sculptures. Almost all of the iron on the ship rusted away within a few years of the sinking, and only large objects, such as anchors, or items made of cast iron, such as cannonballs, survived. Organic materials fared better in the anaerobic conditions, and so wood, cloth and leather are often in very good condition, but objects exposed to the currents were eroded by the sediment in the water, so that some are barely recognizable. Objects which fell off the hull into the mud after the nails corroded through were well protected, so that many of the sculptures still retain areas of paint and gilding. Of the human remains, most of the soft tissue was consumed, leaving only the bones, which were often held together only by clothing, although in one case, hair, nails and brain tissue survived. The parts of the hull held together by joinery and wooden treenails remained intact for as much as two centuries, suffering gradual erosion of surfaces exposed to the water, unless they were disturbed by outside forces. Eventually the entire sterncastle, the high, aft portion of the ship that housed the officers' quarters and held up the transom, gradually collapsed into the mud with all the decorative sculptures. The quarter galleries, which were merely nailed to the sides of the sterncastle, collapsed fairly quickly and were found lying almost directly below their original locations. Human activity was the most destructive factor, as the initial salvage efforts, the recovery of the guns, and the final salvage in the 20th century all left their marks. Peckell and Treileben broke up and removed much of the planking of the weather deck to get to the cannons on the decks below. Peckell reported that he had recovered 30 cartloads of wood from the ship; these might have included not just planking and structural details but also some of the sculptures which today are missing, such as the life-size Roman warrior near the bow and the sculpture of Septimius Severus that adorned the port side of the beakhead. Since Vasa lay in a busy shipping channel, ships occasionally dropped anchor over her, and one large anchor demolished most of the upper sterncastle, probably in the 19th century. Construction work in Stockholm harbor usually entails blasting of bedrock, and the resulting tonnes of rubble were often dumped in the harbor; some of this landed on the ship, causing further damage to the stern and the upper deck. ### Vasa rediscovered In the early 1950s, amateur archaeologist Anders Franzén considered the possibility of recovering wrecks from the cold brackish waters of the Baltic because, he reasoned, they were free from the shipworm Teredo navalis, which usually destroys submerged wood rapidly in warmer, saltier seas. Franzén had previously been successful in locating wrecks such as Riksäpplet and Lybska Svan, and after long and tedious research he began looking for Vasa as well. He spent many years probing the waters without success around the many assumed locations of the wreckage. He did not succeed until, based on accounts of an unknown topographical anomaly just south of the Gustav V dock on Beckholmen, he narrowed his search. In 1956, with a home-made, gravity-powered coring probe, he located a large wooden object almost parallel to the mouth of dock on Beckholmen. The location of the ship received considerable attention, even if the identification of the ship could not be determined without closer investigation. Soon after the announcement of the find, planning got underway to determine how to excavate and raise Vasa. The Swedish Navy was involved from the start, as were various museums and the National Heritage board, representatives of which eventually formed the Vasa Committee, the predecessor of the Vasa Board. ### Recovery A number of possible recovery methods were proposed, including filling the ship with ping-pong balls and freezing it in a block of ice, but the method chosen by the Vasa Board (which succeeded the Vasa Committee) was essentially the same one attempted immediately after the sinking. Divers spent two years digging six tunnels under the ship for steel cable slings, which were taken to a pair of lifting pontoons at the surface. The work under the ship was extremely dangerous, requiring the divers to cut tunnels through the clay with high-pressure water jets and suck up the resulting slurry with a dredge, all while working in total darkness with hundreds of tonnes of mud-filled ship overhead. A persistent risk was that the wreck could shift or settle deeper into the mud while a diver was working in a tunnel, trapping him underneath the wreckage. The almost vertical sections of the tunnels near the side of the hull could also potentially collapse and bury a diver inside. Despite the dangerous conditions, more than 1,300 dives were made in the salvage operation without any serious accidents. Each time the pontoons were pumped full, the cables tightened and the pontoons pumped out, the ship was brought a meter closer to the surface. In a series of 18 lifts in August and September 1959, the ship was moved from a depth of 32 to 16 meters (105 to 52 feet) in the more sheltered area of Kastellholmsviken, where divers could work more safely to prepare for the final lift. Over the course of a year and a half, a small team of commercial divers cleared debris and mud from the upper decks to lighten the ship, and made the hull as watertight as possible. The gun ports were closed by means of temporary lids, a temporary replacement of the collapsed sterncastle was constructed, and many of the holes from the iron bolts that had rusted away were plugged. The final lift began on 8 April 1961, and on the morning of 24 April, Vasa was ready to return to the world for the first time in 333 years. Press from all over the world, television cameras, 400 invited guests on barges and boats, and thousands of spectators on shore watched as the first timbers broke the surface. The ship was then emptied of water and mud and towed to the Gustav V dry dock on Beckholmen, where the ship was floated on its own keel onto a concrete pontoon, on which the hull still stands. From the end of 1961 to December 1988, Vasa was housed in a temporary facility called Wasavarvet ("The Vasa Shipyard"), which included exhibit space as well as the activities centred on the ship. A building was erected over the ship on its pontoon, but it was very cramped, making conservation work awkward. Visitors could view the ship from just two levels, and the maximum viewing distance was in most places only a couple of meters, which made it difficult for viewers to get an overall view of the ship. In 1981, the Swedish government decided that a permanent building was to be constructed, and a design competition was organized. The winning design, by the Swedish architects Månsson and Dahlbäck, called for a large hall over the ship in a polygonal, industrial style. Ground was broken in 1987, and Vasa was towed into the half-finished Vasa Museum in December 1988. The museum was officially opened to the public in 1990. ## Archaeology Vasa posed an unprecedented challenge for archaeologists. Never before had a four-storey structure, with most of its original contents largely undisturbed, been available for excavation. The conditions under which the team had to work added to the difficulties. The ship had to be kept wet in order that it not dry out and crack before it could be properly conserved. Digging had to be performed under a constant drizzle of water and in a sludge-covered mud that could be more than 1 metre (3 ft 3 in) deep. In order to establish find locations, the hull was divided into several sections demarcated by the many structural beams, the decking and by a line drawn along the centre of the ship from stern to bow. For the most part, the decks were excavated individually, though at times work progressed on more than one deck level simultaneously. ### Finds Vasa had four preserved decks: the upper and lower gun decks, the hold and the orlop. Because of the constraints of preparing the ship for conservation, the archaeologists had to work quickly, in 13-hour shifts during the first week of excavation. The upper gun deck was greatly disturbed by the various salvage projects between 1628 and 1961, and it contained not only material that had fallen down from the rigging and upper deck, but also more than three centuries of harbor refuse. The decks below were progressively less disturbed. The gundecks contained not just gun carriages, the three surviving cannons, and other objects of a military nature, but were also where most of the personal possessions of the sailors had been stored at the time of the sinking. These included a wide range of loose finds, as well as chests and casks with spare clothing and shoes, tools and materials for mending, money (in the form of low-denomination copper coins), privately purchased provisions, and all of the everyday objects needed for life at sea. Most of the finds are of wood, testifying not only to the simple life on board, but to the generally unsophisticated state of Swedish material culture in the early 17th century. The lower decks were primarily used for storage, and so the hold was filled with barrels of provisions and gunpowder, coils of anchor cable, iron shot for the guns, and the personal possessions of some of the officers. On the orlop deck, a small compartment contained six of the ship's ten sails, rigging spares, and the working parts for the ship's pumps. Another compartment contained the possessions of the ship's carpenter, including a large tool chest. After the ship itself had been salvaged and excavated, the site of the loss was excavated thoroughly during 1963–1967. This produced many items of rigging tackle as well as structural timbers that had fallen off, particularly from the beakhead and sterncastle. Most of the sculptures that had decorated the exterior of the hull were also found in the mud, along with the ship's anchors and the skeletons of at least four people. The last object to be brought up was the nearly 12-metre-long (39 ft) longboat, called esping in Swedish, found lying parallel to the ship and believed to be towed by Vasa when it sank. Many of the more recent objects contaminating the site were disregarded when the finds were registered, but some were the remains of the 1660s salvage efforts, and others had their own stories to tell. Among the best-known of these was a statue of 20th-century Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, which was placed on the ship as a prank by students of Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University) the night before the final lift. The inspiration for the prank was that Sweden had forbidden Nurmi from competing in the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, United States. ## Causes of sinking Vasa sank because it had very little initial stability—resistance to heeling under the force of wind or waves acting on the hull. This was due to the distribution of mass in the hull structure, and to the ballast, guns, provisions, and other objects loaded on board placing a lot of weight too high in the ship. This put the centre of gravity very high relative to the centre of buoyancy, thus making the ship readily heel in response to little force, and not providing enough righting moment for it to become upright again. The reason for the high centre of gravity was the hull construction. The part of the hull above the waterline was too high and too heavily built in relation to the amount of hull in the water. The headroom in the decks was higher than necessary for crewmen who were, on average, 1.67 meters (5 feet 6 inches) tall, making the weight of the decks and the guns higher than needed. In addition, the deck beams and their supporting timbers were over-dimensioned and more closely spaced than required for the loads they carried, contributing too much weight to the already tall and heavy upper works. The guns weighed little over 60 tonnes (59 long tons; 66 short tons), about 5% of the total displacement of the loaded ship, not enough in themselves to cause the ship to capsize. During construction both Swedish feet (of 29.69 cm) and Amsterdam feet (of 28.31 cm) were in use by different teams. Four rulers used by the workmen who built the ship have been found; two were calibrated in Swedish feet, of 12 Swedish inches, and the other two were calibrated in Amsterdam feet, of 11 Amsterdam inches. The use of different units of length on the two sides of the vessel caused the ship to be heavier on the port side. Although the mathematical tools for calculating or predicting stability were still more than a century in the future, and 17th-century scientific ideas about how ships behaved in water were deeply flawed, the people associated with building and sailing ships for the Swedish navy were very much aware of the forces at work and their relationships to each other. In the last part of the inquest held after the sinking, a group of master shipwrights and senior naval officers were asked for their opinions about why the ship sank. Their discussion and conclusions show very clearly that they knew what had happened, and their verdict was summed up very clearly by one of the captains, who said that the ship did not have enough "belly" to carry the heavy upperworks. Common practice of the time dictated that heavy guns were to be placed on the lower gun deck to decrease the weight on the upper gun deck and improve stability. The armament plans were changed many times during the build to either 24-pounders on the lower deck along with lighter 12-pounders on the upper deck or 24-pounders on both decks. The gun ports on the upper deck were the correct size for 12-pounders, but in the end the ship was finished with the heavy 24-pounders on both decks, and this may have contributed to poor stability. Vasa might not have sunk when it did if the ship had sailed with the gunports closed. Ships with multiple tiers of gunports normally sailed with the lowest tier closed, since the pressure of wind on the sails would often push the hull over until the lower gunport sills were under water. For this reason the gunport covers were made with a double lip designed to seal well enough to keep out most of the water. Captain Söfring Hansson had ordered the lower gundeck ports closed once the ship began to take on water, but by then it was too late. If he had done it before he sailed, Vasa might not have sunk on that day. ## Conservation Although Vasa was in surprisingly good condition after 333 years at the bottom of the sea, it would have quickly deteriorated if the hull had been simply allowed to dry. The large bulk of Vasa, over 600 cubic meters (21,000 cu ft) of oak timber, constituted an unprecedented conservation problem. After some debate on how to best preserve the ship, conservation was carried out by impregnation with polyethylene glycol (PEG), a method that has since become the standard treatment for large, waterlogged wooden objects, such as the 16th-century English ship Mary Rose. Vasa was sprayed with PEG for 17 years, followed by a long period of slow drying, not entirely complete by 2011. The reason that Vasa was so well-preserved was not just that the shipworm that normally devours wooden ships was absent, but also that the water of Stockholms ström was heavily polluted until the late 20th century. The highly toxic and hostile environment meant that even the toughest microorganisms that break down wood had difficulty surviving. This, and Vasa being newly built and undamaged when she sank, contributed to her conservation. However, some properties of the water were harmful. Chemicals present in the water around Vasa had penetrated the wood, and the timber was full of the corrosion products from the bolts and other iron objects which had corroded away. Once the ship was exposed to the air, reactions began inside the timber that produced acidic compounds. In the late 1990s, spots of white and yellow residue were noticed on Vasa and some of the associated artefacts; these turned out to be sulfate-containing salts that had formed on the surface of the wood when sulfides reacted with atmospheric oxygen. The salts on the surface of Vasa and objects found in and around it are not a threat in themselves despite the discoloring, but if they are from inside the wood, they may expand and crack the timber from inside. As of 2002, the amount of sulfuric acid in Vasa'''s hull was estimated to be more than 2 tonnes (4,400 lb), and more is continually being created. Enough sulfides are present in the ship to produce another 5,000 kilograms (11,000 pounds) of acid at a rate of about 100 kilograms (220 pounds) per year; this might eventually destroy the ship almost entirely. While most of the scientific community considers that the destructive substance responsible for Vasa's long-term decay is sulfuric acid, Ulla Westermark, professor of wood technology at Luleå University of Technology, has proposed another mechanism with her colleague Börje Stenberg. Experiments done by Japanese researchers show that treating wood with PEG in an acidic environment can generate formic acid and eventually liquify the wood. Vasa was exposed to acidic water for more than three centuries, and therefore has a relatively low (acidic) pH. Samples taken from the ship indicate that formic acid is present, and that it could be one of the multiple causes of a suddenly accelerated rate of decomposition. The museum is constantly monitoring the ship for damage caused by decay or warping of the wood. Ongoing research seeks the best way to preserve the ship for future generations and to analyze the existing material as closely as possible. A current problem is that the old oak of which the ship is built has lost a substantial amount of its original strength, and the cradle that supports the ship is not well suited to the distribution of weight and stress in the hull. "The amount of movement in the hull is worrying. If nothing is done, the ship will most likely capsize again", states Magnus Olofson from the Vasa Museum. An effort to secure Vasa for the future is under way, in cooperation with the Royal Institute of Technology and other institutions around the globe. To deal with the problem of the inevitable deterioration of the ship, the main hall of the Vasa Museum is kept at a temperature of 18–20 °C (64–68 °F) and a humidity level of 53%. Different methods have been tried to slow destruction by acidic compounds. Small objects have been sealed in plastic containers filled with an inert atmosphere of nitrogen gas, to prevent further reactions between sulfides and oxygen. The ship itself has been treated with cloth saturated in a basic liquid to neutralize the low pH, but this is only a temporary solution as acid is continuously produced. The original bolts rusted away after the ship sank, but were replaced with modern ones that were galvanized and covered with epoxy resin. Despite this, the newer bolts also started to rust and were releasing iron into the wood, which accelerated the deterioration. ## Legacy Vasa has become a popular and widely recognized symbol for a historical narrative about the Swedish stormaktstiden ("the Great Power-period") in the 17th century, and about the early development of a European nation state. Within the disciplines of history and maritime archaeology the wrecks of large warships from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries have received particularly widespread attention as perceived symbols of past greatness of the state of Sweden. Among these wrecks, Vasa is the best-known example, and has become recognized internationally, not least through intentional use of the ship as a symbol for marketing Sweden abroad. The name Vasa has in Sweden become synonymous with sunken vessels that are considered to be of great historical importance, and these are usually described, explained and valued in relation to Vasa itself. The Swedish maritime archaeologist Carl-Olof Cederlund, who has been active in the various Vasa-projects, has described the phenomenon as regalskepps-syndromet, "the royal ship syndrome" (after the term used in the 17th century for the largest warships in the Swedish navy). He associates the "syndrome" to a nationalist aspect of the history of ideas and traditional perceptions about hero-kings and glory through war. The focus of this historical theory lies on the "great periods" in "our [Swedish] history" and shares many similarities with the nationalist views of the Viking era in the Nordic countries and the praising of Greek and Roman Antiquity in the Western world in general. Cederlund has stressed the ritualized aspects of the widely publicized salvage in 1961 and has compared the modern Vasa Museum with "a temple in the Classical sense of the word". The placement of the museum on Djurgården, traditional crown property, and its focus on "the King's ship" has led him to suggest a description of it as "The Temple of the Royal Ship". ### Literature and popular culture Vasa's unique status has drawn considerable attention and captured the imagination of more than two generations of scholars, tourists, model builders, and authors. Though historically unfounded, the popular perception of the building of the ship as a botched and disorganized affair (dubbed "the Vasa-syndrome") has been used by many authors of management literature as an educational example of how not to organize a successful business. In The Tender Ship, Manhattan Project engineer Arthur Squires used the Vasa story as an opening illustration of his thesis that governments are usually incompetent managers of technology projects. The Vasa Museum has co-sponsored two versions of a documentary about the history and recovery of the ship, both by documentary filmmaker Anders Wahlgren. The second version was shown in the museum and released on VHS and DVD with narration in 16 languages. In late 2011, a third Vasa-film premiered on Swedish television, with a longer running time and a considerably larger budget (with over 7.5 million kronor provided by SVT). An educational computer game was made and is used in the museum and on its website to explain the fundamentals of 17th-century ship construction and stability. Several mass-produced model kits and countless custom-built models of the ship have been made. In 1991, a 308-tonne (303-long-ton; 340-short-ton) pastiche reproduction of the ship was built in Tokyo to serve as a 650-passenger sightseeing ship. Vasa has inspired many works of art, including a gilded Disney-themed parody of the pilaster sculptures on the ship's quarter galleries. Being a popular tourist attraction, Vasa'' is used as a motif for various souvenir products such as T-shirts, mugs, refrigerator magnets, and posters. Commercially produced replicas of many of the objects found on the ship belonging to people on board, such as drinking glasses, plates, spoons, and even a backgammon game, have been made. ## See also - Batavia - Kronan - Mary Rose - HMS Royal George - List of world's largest wooden ships
23,277,306	Akutan Zero	1,167,587,637	Japanese fighter arcraft	[ "20th-century aircraft shootdown incidents", "Aleutian Islands campaign", "Individual aircraft of World War II" ]	The Akutan Zero, also known as Koga's Zero (古賀のゼロ) and the Aleutian Zero, was a type 0 model 21 Mitsubishi A6M Zero Japanese fighter aircraft piloted by Petty Officer Tadayoshi Koga, that crash-landed on Akutan Island, Alaska Territory, during World War II. It was found intact by the Americans in July 1942 and became the first Zero acquired by the United States during the war that could be restored to airworthy condition. It was repaired and flown by American test pilots. As a result of information gained from these tests, American tacticians were able to devise ways to defeat the Zero, which was the Imperial Japanese Navy's primary fighter plane throughout the war. The Akutan Zero has been described as "a prize almost beyond value to the United States", and "probably one of the greatest prizes of the Pacific War". Japanese historian and lieutenant general Masatake Okumiya stated that the acquisition of the Akutan Zero "was no less serious" than the Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway, and that it "did much to hasten Japan's final defeat". Conversely, John Lundstrom is among those who challenge "the contention that it took dissection of Koga's Zero to create tactics that beat the fabled airplane". The Akutan Zero was destroyed in a training accident in 1945. Parts of it are preserved in several museums in the United States. ## Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter The Second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937. Attacks by Chinese fighter planes on Japanese bombers led the Japanese to develop the concept of fighter escorts. The limited range of the Mitsubishi A5M "Claude" fighter used to escort the bombers caused the Japanese Navy Air staff to commission the Mitsubishi A6M Zero as a long-range land- and carrier-based fighter. The Zero, which first flew in 1939, was exceedingly agile and lightweight, with maneuverability and range superior to any other fighter in the world at that time. In 1940 Claire Lee Chennault, leader of the Flying Tigers, wrote a report to warn his home country of the Zero's performance. However, United States Department of War analysts rejected the Chennault report as "arrant nonsense" and concluded the performance attributed to the Zero was an aerodynamic impossibility. With the coming of war, the U.S. fighting services learned better; the Zero's maneuverability outperformed any Allied fighter it encountered for the first two years of the war. According to American flying ace William N. Leonard, "In these early encounters and on our own we were learning the folly of dogfighting with the Zero". To achieve this dogfighting agility, however, Japanese engineers had traded off durability. The Zero was very lightly built; it had no armor and no self-sealing fuel tanks. According to American author Jim Rearden, "The Zero was probably the easiest fighter of any in World War II to bring down when hit ... The Japanese ... were not prepared to or weren't capable of building more advanced fighters in the numbers needed to cope with increasing numbers and quality of American fighters". The Zero was the primary Japanese Navy fighter throughout the war. During the war, the Japanese manufactured roughly 10,500 Zeros. Nine Zeros were shot down during the attack on Pearl Harbor. From these wrecks, the Allies learned that the Zero lacked armor and self-sealing fuel tanks, but little else about its capabilities. The Zero's flight performance characteristics—crucial to devising tactics and machinery to combat it—remained a mystery. Prior to recovery of the Akutan Zero, technical information from three other downed Zeros was available to the Allies. One Zero (serial number 5349), piloted by Hajime Toyoshima, crashed on Melville Island in Australia following the bombing of Darwin. The Zero was heavily damaged, and Toyoshima became Australia's first Japanese prisoner of the Pacific war. Another Zero, piloted by Yoshimitsu Maeda, crashed near Cape Rodney, New Guinea. The team sent to recover the plane erred when they chopped off the wings, severing the wing spars and rendering the hulk unflyable. The third came from China, where Gerhard Neumann was able to reconstruct a working Zero. He used a partly intact Zero (serial number 3372) that had landed in Chinese territory, repaired with salvaged pieces from other downed Zeros. However, bad conditions and the long delivery time from China prevented Neumann's Zero from reaching the United States for testing until after the recovery of the Akutan Zero. ## Petty Officer Koga's final mission In June 1942, as part of the Japanese Midway operation, the Japanese attacked the Aleutian islands, off the south coast of Alaska. A Japanese task force led by Admiral Kakuji Kakuta bombed Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island twice, once on June 3 and again the following day. Tadayoshi Koga (September 10, 1922 – June 4, 1942), a 19-year-old flight petty officer first class, was launched from the Japanese aircraft carrier Ryūjō as part of the June 4 raid. Koga was part of a three-plane section; his wingmen were Chief Petty Officer Makoto Endo and Petty Officer Tsuguo Shikada. Koga and his comrades attacked Dutch Harbor, and are believed to be the three Zeroes that shot down an American PBY-5A Catalina flying boat piloted by Bud Mitchell and strafed its survivors in the water, killing Mitchell and all six of his crewmen. In the process, Koga's plane (serial number 4593) was damaged by small arms fire. Tsuguo Shikada, one of Koga's wingmen, published an account in 1984 in which he claimed the damage to Koga's plane occurred while his section was making an attack against two American Catalinas anchored in the bay. This account omits any mention of shooting down Mitchell's PBY. Both American and Japanese records contradict his claims; there were no PBYs in the bay that day. However, his claims do match American records from the attack against Dutch Harbor the previous day (June 3). Rearden noted, "It seems likely that in the near half-century after the event Shikada's memory confused the raids of June 3 and June 4 ... It also seems likely that in his interview, Shikada employed selective memory in not mentioning shooting down Mitchell's PBY and then machine-gunning the crew on the water". It is not known who fired the shot that brought down Koga's plane, although numerous individuals have claimed credit. Photographic evidence strongly suggests it was hit by ground fire. Members of the 206th Coast Artillery Regiment, which had both 3-inch anti-aircraft guns and .50 caliber machine guns in position defending Dutch Harbor, claimed credit, in addition to claims made by United States Navy ships that were present. Physical inspection of the plane revealed it was hit with small arms fire: .50 caliber bullet holes and smaller, from both above and below. ### Crash The fatal shot severed the return oil line, and Koga's plane immediately began trailing oil. Koga reduced speed to keep the engine from seizing for as long as possible. > The three Zeros flew to Akutan Island, 25 miles east of Dutch Harbor, which had been designated for emergency landings. Waiting near the island was a Japanese submarine assigned to pick up downed pilots. At Akutan, the three Zeros circled a grassy flat half a mile inland from Broad Bight. Shikada thought the ground was firm beneath the grass, but in his second pass he noticed water glistening. He suddenly realized Koga should make a belly landing. But by then Koga had lowered his landing gear and was almost down. The plane's landing gear mired in the water and mud, causing the plane to flip upside down and skid to a stop. Although the aircraft survived the landing nearly intact, Petty Officer Koga died instantly on impact, probably from a broken neck or a blunt-force blow to his head. Koga's wingmen, circling above, had orders to destroy any Zeros that crash-landed in enemy territory, but as they did not know if Koga was still alive, they could not bring themselves to strafe his plane. They decided to leave without firing on it. The Japanese submarine stationed off Akutan Island to pick up pilots searched for Koga in vain before being driven off by the destroyer USS Williamson. ## Recovery The crash site, which was out of sight of standard flight lanes and not visible by ship, remained undetected and undisturbed for over a month. On July 10, 1942, an American PBY Catalina piloted by Lieutenant William "Bill" Thies spotted the wreckage. Thies's Catalina had been patrolling by dead reckoning and had become lost. On spotting the Shumagin Islands, he reoriented his plane and began to return to Dutch Harbor by the most direct course; over Akutan Island. Machinist Mate Albert Knack, who was the plane captain (note: the term "plane captain" in US Navy usage refers to an aircraft's assigned maintenance crew chief, not the pilot-in-command), spotted Koga's wreck. Thies's plane circled the crash site for several minutes, noted its position on the map, and returned to Dutch Harbor to report it. Thies persuaded his commanding officer, Paul Foley, to let him return with a salvage team. The next day (July 11), the team flew out to inspect the wreck. Navy photographer's mate Arthur W. Bauman took pictures as they worked. Thies's team extracted Koga's body from the plane by having Knack (the smallest crew member) crawl up inside the plane and cut his safety harness with a knife. They searched it for anything with intelligence value, and buried Koga in a shallow grave near the crash site. Thies returned with his team to Dutch Harbor, where he reported the plane as salvageable. The next day (July 12), a salvage team under Lieutenant Robert Kirmse was dispatched to Akutan. This team gave Koga a Christian burial in a nearby knoll and set about recovering the plane, but the lack of heavy equipment (which they had been unable to unload after the delivery ship lost two anchors) frustrated their efforts. On July 15, a third recovery team was dispatched. This time, with proper heavy equipment, the team was able to free the Zero from the mud and haul it overland to a nearby barge, without further damaging it. The Zero was taken to Dutch Harbor, turned right-side up, and cleaned. The Akutan Zero was loaded onto the USS St. Mihiel and transported to Seattle, arriving on August 1. From there, it was transported by barge to Naval Air Station North Island near San Diego where repairs were carefully carried out. These repairs "consisted mostly of straightening the vertical stabilizer, rudder, wing tips, flaps, and canopy. The sheared-off landing struts needed more extensive work. The three-blade Sumitomo propeller was dressed and re-used." The Zero's red Hinomaru roundel was repainted with the American blue-circle-white-star insignia. The whole time, the plane was kept under 24-hour military police guard in order to deter would-be souvenir hunters from damaging the plane. The Zero was fit to fly again on September 20. ## Analysis Data from the captured Zero had been transmitted to the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) and Grumman Aircraft. After careful study, Roy Grumman decided that he could match or surpass the Zero in most respects, except in range, without sacrificing pilot armor, self-sealing tanks and fuselage structure. The new F6F Hellcat would compensate for the extra weight with additional power. On September 20, 1942, two months after the Zero's capture, Lieutenant Commander Eddie R. Sanders took the Akutan Zero up for its first test flight. He made 24 test flights between September 20 and October 15. According to Sanders' report: > These flights covered performance tests such as we do on planes undergoing Navy tests. The very first flight exposed weaknesses of the Zero which our pilots could exploit with proper tactics ... immediately apparent was the fact that the ailerons froze up at speeds above 200 knots so that rolling maneuvers at those speeds were slow and required much force on the control stick. It rolled to the left much easier than to the right. Also, its engine cut out under negative acceleration due to its float-type carburetor. We now had the answer for our pilots who were being outmaneuvered and unable to escape a pursuing Zero: Go into a vertical power dive, using negative acceleration if possible to open the range while the Zero's engine was stopped by the acceleration. At about 200 knots, roll hard right before the Zero pilot could get his sights lined up. In early 1943, the Zero was transferred from Naval Air Station North Island to Anacostia Naval Air Station. The Navy wished to make use of the expertise of the NACA Langley Research Center in flight instrumentation, and it was flown to Langley on March 5, 1943, for the installation of the instrumentation. While there, it underwent aerodynamic tests in the Full-Scale Wind Tunnel under conditions of strict secrecy. This work included wake surveys to determine the drag of aircraft components; tunnel scale measurements of lift, drag, control effectiveness; and sideslip tests. After its return to the Navy, it was flight tested by Frederick M. Trapnell, the Anacostia Naval Air Station director of flight testing. He flew the Akutan Zero in performance maneuvers while Sanders simultaneously flew American planes performing identical maneuvers, simulating aerial combat. Following these, USN test pilot Lieutenant Melvin C. "Boogey" Hoffman conducted more dogfighting tests between himself flying the Akutan Zero and recently commissioned USN pilots flying newer Navy aircraft. Later in 1943, the aircraft was displayed at Washington National Airport as a war prize. In 1944, it was recalled to North Island for use as a training plane for rookie pilots being sent to the Pacific. A model 52 Zero, captured during the liberation of Guam, was later used as well. Data and conclusions from these tests were published in Informational Intelligence Summary 59, Technical Aviation Intelligence Brief \#3, Tactical and Technical Trends \#5 (published prior to the first test flight), and Informational Intelligence Summary 85. These results tend to somewhat understate the Zero's capabilities. ## Consequences Data from the captured aircraft were submitted to the Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) and Grumman for study in 1942. The U.S. carrier-borne fighter plane that succeeded the Grumman F4F Wildcat, the F6F, was tested in its first experimental mode as the XF6F-1 prototype with an under-powered Wright R-2600 Twin Cyclone 14-cylinder, two-row radial engine on 26 June 1942. Shortly before the XF6F-1's first flight, and based on combat accounts of encounters between the F4F Wildcat and A6M Zero, on 26 April 1942, BuAer directed Grumman to install the more powerful 18-cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp radial engine—already powering Chance Vought's Corsair design since its beginnings in 1940—in the second XF6F-1 prototype. Grumman complied by redesigning and strengthening the F6F airframe to incorporate the 2,000 hp (1,500 kW) R-2800-10 engine, driving a three-bladed Hamilton Standard propeller. With this combination Grumman estimated the XF6F-3's performance would increase by 25% over that of the XF6F-1. This first Double Wasp-equipped Hellcat airframe, bearing BuAer serial number 02982, first flew on 30 July 1942. The F6F-3 subtype had been designed with specific "Wildcat vs Zero" input from Battle of the Coral Sea and Battle of Midway veteran F4F pilots such as Jim Flatley and Jimmy Thach, respectively, among several others, obtained during a meeting with Grumman Vice President Jake Swirbul at Pearl Harbor on 23 June 1942, with the first production F6F-3 making its first flight just over three months later, on October 3, 1942. While the captured Zero's tests did not drastically influence the Hellcat's design, they did give knowledge of the Zero's handling characteristics, including its limitations in rolling right and diving. That information, together with the improved capabilities of the Hellcat, were credited with helping American pilots "tip the balance in the Pacific". American aces Kenneth A. Walsh and R. Robert Porter, among others, credited tactics derived from this knowledge with saving their lives. James Sargent Russell, who commanded the PBY Catalina squadron that discovered the Zero and later rose to the rank of admiral, noted that Koga's Zero was "of tremendous historical significance". William N. Leonard concurred, describing it thus: "The captured Zero was a treasure. To my knowledge, no other captured machine has ever unlocked so many secrets at a time when the need was so great." Some historians dispute the degree to which the Akutan Zero influenced the outcome of the air war in the Pacific. For example, the Thach Weave, a tactic created by John Thach and used with great success by American airmen against the Zero, was devised by Thach prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, based on intelligence reports on the Zero's performance in China. > The capture and flight tests of Koga's Zero is usually described as a tremendous coup for the Allies as it revealed the secrets of that mysterious aircraft and led directly to its downfall. According to this viewpoint, only then did Allied pilots learn how to deal with their nimble opponents. The Japanese could not agree more ... Yet those naval pilots who fought the Zero at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal without the benefit of test reports would beg to differ with the contention that it took dissection of Koga's Zero to create tactics that beat the fabled airplane. To them the Zero did not long remain a mystery plane. Word quickly circulated among the combat pilots as to its particular attributes. Indeed on 6 October while testing the Zero, Akutan Zero test pilot Frederick M. Trapnell made a highly revealing statement: 'The general impression of the airplane is exactly as originally created by intelligence—including the performance'. Nine wrecked Mitsubishi A6M Zeros were recovered from Pearl Harbor shortly after the attack in December 1941, and United States Office of Naval Intelligence, along with BuAer had them studied, and then shipped to the Experimental Engineering Department at Dayton, Ohio in 1942. It was noted that the experimental Grumman XF6F-1s then under-going testing in June 1942 and the Zero had "wings integrated with the fuselage," a design feature not normally practiced in American aircraft production at that time. The Akutan Zero was destroyed during a training accident in February 1945. While the Zero was taxiing for a take-off, a Curtiss SB2C Helldiver lost control and rammed into it. The Helldiver's propeller sliced the Zero into pieces. From the wreckage, William N. Leonard salvaged several gauges, which he donated to the National Museum of the United States Navy. The Alaska Heritage Museum and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum also have small pieces of the Zero. American author Jim Rearden led a search on Akutan in 1988 in an attempt to repatriate Koga's body. He located Koga's grave, but found it empty. Rearden and Japanese businessman Minoru Kawamoto conducted a records search. They found that Koga's body had been exhumed by an American Graves Registration Service team in 1947, and re-buried on Adak Island, further down the Aleutian chain. The team, unaware of Koga's identity, marked his body as unidentified. The Adak cemetery was excavated in 1953, and 236 bodies were returned to Japan. The body buried next to Koga (Shigeyoshi Shindo) was one of 13 identified; the remaining 223 unidentified remains were cremated and interred in Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery in Japan. It is probable that Koga was one of them.
201,180	HMS Ark Royal (91)	1,168,437,804	1938 British aircraft carrier	[ "1937 ships", "2002 archaeological discoveries", "Aircraft carriers of the Royal Navy", "Maritime incidents in November 1941", "Ships built on the River Mersey", "Ships sunk by German submarines in World War II", "World War II aircraft carriers of the United Kingdom", "World War II shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea" ]	HMS Ark Royal (pennant number 91) was an aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy that was operated during the Second World War. Designed in 1934 to fit the restrictions of the Washington Naval Treaty, Ark Royal was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, England, and completed in November 1938. Her design differed from previous aircraft carriers. Ark Royal was the first ship on which the hangars and flight deck were an integral part of the hull, instead of an add-on or part of the superstructure. Designed to carry a large number of aircraft, she had two hangar deck levels. She was used during a period that first saw the extensive use of naval air power; several carrier tactics were developed and refined aboard Ark Royal. Ark Royal operated in some of the most active naval theatres of the Second World War. She was involved in the first aerial U-boat kills of the war, operations off Norway, the search for the German battleship Bismarck, and the Malta Convoys. Ark Royal survived several near misses and gained a reputation as a 'lucky ship'. She was torpedoed on 13 November 1941 by the and sank the following day. One of her 1,488 crew members was killed. Her sinking was the subject of several inquiries, with investigators keen to know how the carrier was lost in spite of efforts to save the ship and tow her to the naval base at Gibraltar. They found that several design flaws contributed to the loss, which were rectified in new British carriers. The wreck was discovered in December 2002 by an American underwater survey company using sonar mounted on an autonomous underwater vehicle, under contract from the BBC for the filming of a documentary about the ship, at a depth of about 3,300 feet (1,000 m) and approximately 30 nautical miles (56 km; 35 mi) from Gibraltar. ## Design In 1923, the Admiralty prepared a 10-year building programme which included an aircraft carrier and 300 aircraft for the Fleet Air Arm. The economic downturn following the First World War caused it to be postponed. In 1930, the Director of Naval Construction, Sir Arthur Johns, began to update the plans for the carrier by incorporating recently developed technology. His aim was to increase the number of aircraft carried by shortening the landing and take-off distances of aircraft using arrestor gear and compressed steam catapults respectively, which would make more deck space available for storage and aircraft preparation. Along with the inclusion of two hangar decks, this allowed Ark Royal to carry up to 72 aircraft, although the development of larger and heavier aircraft during the carrier's construction meant that the actual number carried was between 50 and 60. Ark Royal featured an enclosed hangar design where the flight deck was the 'strength deck' and was strongly built with .75in (19mm) thick Ducol steel plating. The two hangar decks were thus enclosed within the hull girder, which also gave splinter protection to the hangars. The machinery spaces were protected by 4.5-inch (11.4 cm) belt armour. Three lifts moved aircraft between the hangars and the flight deck. Another feature was the length and height of the flight deck. At 800 feet (240 m), the flight deck was 118 feet (36 m) longer than the keel; the latter dictated by the length of Royal Navy drydocks in Gibraltar and Malta. Due to the twin hangar decks, the flight deck rose to 66 feet (20 m) above the waterline. The Washington and London Naval treaties had restricted warship displacement for a number of nations after the end of the Great War and were both to expire by the end of 1936. With a potential naval arms race developing between Britain, Japan and Italy, the British government sought a second treaty, which included limiting the maximum displacement of an aircraft carrier to 23,000 long tons (23,000 t). Ark Royal would have to fit this anticipated limit; to conserve weight, armour plating was limited to the belt, engine rooms, and magazines, while welding instead of rivetting 65% of the hull saved 500 long tons (510 t). Installation of an armoured flight deck was not possible, as the weight would have placed Ark Royal above the proposed limit, while reducing her endurance and stability. The ship was designed with a three-layer side protection system based upon a void-liquid-void scheme very similar to that used on the King George V-class battleships, and was designed to protect against torpedoes with up to a 750-pound (340 kg) warhead. The ship was fitted with six boilers, which powered three Parsons geared turbines. The turbines were connected via three driveshafts to three propellers 16 feet (4.9 m) in diameter, to produce a maximum theoretical speed of 30 knots (56 km/h; 35 mph). Speed was important, as with catapults and arrestor gear, Ark Royal would have to turn into the wind to launch and recover aircraft. To avoid endangering other ships with the frequent course changes associated with flight operations, Ark Royal would have to break away from accompanying ships, and catch up on completion. Additionally, as the carrier was not armed for ship-to-ship combat, speed was her main protection against enemy warships. ## Construction The deteriorating international situation by 1933, typified by Germany's rearmament and the expansion of Japan and Italy, convinced the British to announce funds for the carrier's construction in the 1934 budget proposals. The plans were finished by November 1934 and were tendered in February 1935 to Cammell Laird and Company Ltd., which calculated the cost of the hull at £1,496,250 () and the main machinery at approximately £500,000 (). The overall cost was estimated to be over £3 million (equivalent to £ million in ), making Ark Royal the most expensive non-battleship ordered by the Royal Navy. Construction began on Job No. 1012 when Ark Royal's keel was laid down on 16 September 1935. Ark Royal spent nearly two years in the builder's yard before being launched on 13 April 1937 by Lady Maud Hoare, wife of Sir Samuel Hoare, then First Lord of the Admiralty. The bottle of champagne thrown against Ark Royal's bows did not smash until the fourth attempt. The carrier spent a year fitting out, was handed over to her first commander, Captain Arthur Power, on 16 November 1938, and was commissioned on 16 December. Although intended for the Far East, events in Europe during the carrier's construction, including the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 and the Spanish Civil War in 1936, caused the Admiralty to mark her for deployment with the Home and Mediterranean Fleets. After her crew joined at the end of 1938, Ark Royal underwent sea trials to prepare for service, during which the carrier proved capable of sailing above her theoretical speed, reaching over 31 knots (57 km/h; 36 mph) and in trials during May 1938 Ark Royal achieved 31.2 knots (57.8 km/h; 35.9 mph) with 103,012 shaft horsepower (76,816 kW) at a deep displacement of 27,525 long tons (27,967 t). ## Armament and aircraft Ark Royal's armament was designed with anti-aircraft warfare in mind, as aircraft were expected to be the main threat; ships and submarines could be outrun or dealt with by escorts. Her main armament was sixteen quick-firing 4.5-inch (110 mm) dual purpose guns in eight double turrets, four on each side of the hull, controlled by four Directors using the High Angle Control System. The original design placed the turrets low on the hull, but was later altered to locate them just below the flight deck, which increased each turret's field of fire. Six 8-barrelled 2-pounder (40-millimetre (1.57 in)) "pom-pom" guns were located on the flight deck, in front of and behind the superstructure island, while eight 4-barrelled .50-inch (12.7 mm) machine guns were installed on small projecting platforms to the front and rear of the flight deck. Sixteen Fleet Air Arm squadrons were posted aboard Ark Royal during her career; an average of five squadrons at any time. On entering service, most of Ark Royal's squadrons were equipped with either Blackburn Skuas—used as fighters and dive bombers—or Fairey Swordfish, for reconnaissance and torpedo bombing. From April 1940, squadrons equipped with Skuas were upgraded to Fairey Fulmars; like their predecessors, these were used as fighters and bombers. On occasion, the carrier operated Blackburn Roc fighter-bombers (from April 1939 – October 1940) and Fairey Albacore torpedo bombers (during October 1941); these were replacement aircraft used to boost squadron numbers. In June 1940, Ark Royal was host to 701 Naval Air Squadron, a training squadron which operated Supermarine Walrus reconnaissance amphibians. ## Service history ### With the hunter-killer groups The outbreak of the Second World War on 3 September 1939 had been presaged by Germany's U-boat fleet taking up positions off the British coast, where they could intercept British shipping. Within hours of the war starting, the passenger ship SS Athenia was torpedoed by , the first of over 65,000 tons of shipping sunk by U-boats during the first week of the war. Ark Royal was deployed with the Home Fleet in the North Western Approaches as part of a "hunter-killer" group, consisting of a flotilla of destroyers and other anti-submarine vessels grouped around an aircraft carrier; either Courageous, Hermes or Ark Royal. Carrier-borne aircraft could increase the area searched for U-boats, but made the carriers tempting targets. On 14 September, Ark Royal received a distress call from SS Fanad Head, which was 200 nautical miles (230 mi; 370 km) away under pursuit from the surfaced U-30. Ark Royal launched aircraft to aid the merchant ship, but was spotted by , which launched two torpedoes. Lookouts spotted the torpedo tracks and Ark Royal turned towards the attack, reducing her cross-section and causing the torpedoes to miss and explode harmlessly astern. Three F-class destroyers escorting the carrier began to depth charge U-39, and forced her to the surface. The German crew abandoned ship before U-39 sank—the first U-boat lost during the war. Ark Royal's aircraft reached Fanad Head, which was in the hands of a German boarding party. The Skuas unsuccessfully attacked U-30: two crashed when caught by the blast of their own bombs. The U-boat escaped after rescuing the boarding party and the pilots of the downed aircraft (both observers had drowned), and torpedoing the Fanad Head. Ark Royal returned to base in Loch Ewe, where she and her crew were inspected by Winston Churchill. The sinking of U-39 was hailed as important to morale. However, the failed attack on Ark Royal, and the successful attack on Courageous on 17 September, convinced the Admiralty it was too dangerous to risk aircraft carriers in this way, and carrier-centred hunter-killer groups were abandoned. ### Another near miss On 25 September 1939, Ark Royal helped rescue the submarine Spearfish, which had been damaged by German warships off Horn Reefs, in the Kattegat. While returning to port with Spearfish and the battleships Nelson and Rodney on 26 September, the ships were located by three Luftwaffe Dornier Do 18 seaplanes. Ark Royal launched three Blackburn Skuas to disperse them; one Dornier was shot down in an event propagandised as first British aerial kill of the war (later it was learned that the pilot of a Fairey Battle achieved the first kill. The air commander aboard Ark Royal—aware that the surviving Dorniers would report the location of the British ships—ordered the aircraft to be secured and the anti-aircraft weapons readied. Four Junkers Ju 88 bombers of the Luftwaffe bomber wing KG 30 soon appeared: three were driven away by anti-aircraft fire, but the fourth launched a 2,200-pound (1,000 kg) bomb at the carrier. Ark Royal turned hard to starboard, heeling over and avoiding the bomb, which landed in the ocean 100 feet (30 m) off her starboard bow and sent a spout of water over the ship. The German pilots did not see if the carrier had been hit, and a reconnaissance flight later located the two battleships, but not Ark Royal. Based on this information, the Germans incorrectly claimed that Ark Royal had sunk. To prove the German propaganda false before it had a negative effect on Britain's allies, Winston Churchill reassured United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that the carrier was undamaged and invited the US naval attaché to view Ark Royal in dock. The British naval attaché in Rome was instructed to assure Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini that the ship was still in service. This was an embarrassment for Goebbels and Nazi propaganda. ### Hunting the Graf Spee In October 1939, Ark Royal was redeployed to Freetown to operate off the African coast in the hunt for the German commerce raider Admiral Graf Spee. The carrier was assigned to Force K, and sailed with the battlecruiser Renown to the South Atlantic. On 9 October, aircraft from Ark Royal spotted the German tanker Altmark, which supplied Graf Spee. The tanker was disguised as the US vessel Delmar, which fooled the British into passing her by. On 5 November, Ark Royal captured the German merchant SS Uhenfels, which was attempting to reach Germany. The ship was later taken into British service as a cargo ship and renamed Empire Ability. Several neutral merchant ships were also spotted by the carrier's aircraft, twice causing crews to believe they were under attack and abandon ship. A note explaining the situation was dropped in a bag to a Norwegian vessel's crew, and they re-boarded; an attempt to repeat this exercise with a Belgian crew failed when the bag was dropped down the ship's funnel. On December 14, 1939, Graf Spee had put into Montevideo to repair damage received during the battle of the River Plate. Two Royal Navy cruisers followed the raider, and patrolled the harbour entrance while reporting Graf Spee's position to the fleet. Ark Royal and Renown were dispatched to join the British ships outside the harbour, but as they were 36 hours away, the British naval attaché came up with a plan to make the Germans believe that the two capital ships had already arrived. An order for fuel for Ark Royal was placed at Buenos Aires, 140 miles (230 km) west of Montevideo. This was leaked to the press, passed on to the German embassy in Montevideo, and given to Graf Spee's captain, Hans Langsdorff. This contributed to Langsdorff's decision to scuttle his ship. ### Return to the fleet With Graf Spee sunk, Ark Royal remained in the Atlantic for a short time before escorting the damaged heavy cruiser Exeter back to Devonport Dockyard, where they arrived in February. Following this, Ark Royal proceeded to Portsmouth to take on supplies and personnel, before sailing to Scapa Flow. On arrival, she transferred her Blackburn Skuas to Naval Air Station Hatston to strengthen the anchorage's defences. Ark Royal was then assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet for exercises, departing Scapa Flow on 31 March 1940 and heading for Alexandria with the aircraft carrier Glorious. The carriers arrived in the Eastern Mediterranean on 8 April, but the exercises were cancelled a day later. The ships sailed to Gibraltar to await orders. German forces had invaded Norway as part of Operation Weserübung on 9 April, and had secured sections of the coast. Attempts by the Royal Navy to operate in support of British troops were unsuccessful; air attacks had overwhelmed the ships, sinking Gurkha and nearly sinking Suffolk. Realising that the British ships required air cover, but aware that the Norwegian coast was outside the range of British land-based aircraft, the Admiralty recalled Ark Royal and Glorious from the Mediterranean on 16 April. ### Norwegian campaign Ark Royal and Glorious arrived at Scapa Flow on 23 April 1940 and were immediately redeployed as part of Operation DX, sailing to Norway with the cruisers Curlew and Berwick and screened by the destroyers Hyperion, Hereward, Hasty, Fearless, Fury and Juno. This was the first time the Royal Navy had deployed carriers with the primary purpose of providing fighter protection for other warships. The ships took up position on 25 April off the coast; Ark Royal positioned 120 nautical miles (220 km; 140 mi) offshore to reduce the chance of air attacks. The carrier's aircraft conducted anti-submarine patrols, provided fighter support for other ships, and carried out strikes against shipping and shore targets. Ark Royal returned to Scapa Flow on 27 April to refuel and replace lost and damaged aircraft, before heading back on the same day with the battleship Valiant as escort. During the return, Ark Royal came under air attack from German Junkers Ju 88 and Heinkel He 111 bombers operating from Norway. The carrier was undamaged, and resumed position on 29 April. By this point, the British high command had realised that they could not hold the Germans in southern Norway. The evacuation of Allied troops from Molde and Åndalsnes began, with Ark Royal providing air cover from 30 April. On 1 May, the Germans tried to sink the carrier, with numerous air attacks through the day. Ark Royal's fighters and a heavy anti-aircraft barrage drove off the enemy, and although several bombs were dropped at the carrier, none hit. The evacuations of Molde and Andalsnes were completed on 3 May, and the carrier was recalled to Scapa Flow to refuel and rearm. While in port, Captain Arthur Power left the ship for a promotion to the Admiralty, and was replaced by Captain Cedric Holland. On return to Norway, Ark Royal was told to provide air cover for operations around Narvik, including the landing of French troops on 13 May. She was joined on 18 May by the carriers Glorious and Furious. Despite these efforts, it was clear by the end of May that French forces were on the verge of collapse and Norway was a sideshow compared to the German advance to the English Channel. Operation Alphabet was instigated to move Allied troops from Narvik to Britain. Ark Royal and Glorious—screened by the destroyers Highlander, Diana, Acasta, Ardent, and Acheron—sailed from Scapa Flow on 1 June to cover the evacuation, which commenced the next day. Ark Royal carried out air patrols and bombing raids from 3–6 June, before redeploying to Narvik on 7 June. The next day, Glorious, Acasta and Ardent were sunk by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau while heading back to Britain. Ark Royal's aircraft failed to locate the German ships, which had returned to Trondheim. The last evacuation convoy left Narvik on 9 June. Before the British ships could withdraw, a raid on Trondheim located Scharnhorst. An attack by Ark Royal's Skuas took place at midnight on 13 June. The attack was a disaster: the escort destroyers Antelope and Electra collided while Ark Royal was launching aircraft in fog and returned to England for repairs, eight of the fifteen attacking Skuas were shot down, while Scharnhorst escaped damage. Ark Royal returned to Scapa Flow the following day, and was reassigned to the Mediterranean Fleet. ### Mediterranean deployment Ark Royal left Scapa Flow with the battlecruiser Hood and three destroyers, arriving at Gibraltar on 23 June 1940. Here she joined Force H, under Sir James Somerville. After the capitulation of France there was concern that a French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir might fall under Axis control and tip the balance of power in the Mediterranean, affecting the whole war. Ark Royal's captain, Cedric Holland, had been the British naval attaché in Paris, and was sent to negotiate the surrender or scuttling of the French fleet. Force H was deployed outside the harbour, and when the French admirals refused to agree to the offered terms, opened fire on the French ships. During the attack on Mers-el-Kébir, Ark Royal's aircraft provided targeting information for the British ships. The French battleship Strasbourg escaped, despite attacks by Swordfish from Ark Royal. Two days after the attack, aircraft from Ark Royal incapacitated the French battleship Dunkerque, which had been beached in the initial attack. Having reduced the possibility of a French challenge in the Mediterranean, Force H prepared for attacks on Italian targets, and sailed from Gibraltar on 8 July. The force was attacked by Italian bombers within eight hours of departing, and although Force H escaped damage, Somerville cancelled the raids and ordered the fleet to Gibraltar. During July, the British colony of Malta came under attack from the Italian air force, with Force H ordered to deliver Hawker Hurricanes to reinforce the island's air defences. Force H was deployed from 31 July – 4 August, with the carrier Argus used to deliver the aircraft, while Ark Royal provided air cover for the fleet. On 2 August, Ark Royal launched a successful air attack against the Italian air base at Cagliari. Force H remained at Gibraltar until 30 September, when it escorted reinforcements for Admiral Andrew Cunningham's fleet to Alexandria. En route, diversionary attacks were planned on Italian air bases at Elmas and Cagliari to direct attention from both the reinforcement operation and a supply convoy sailing to Malta. The attacks were successfully carried out on 1 October, and the fleet reached Alexandria without significant attention from the Italian air force. From Alexandria, Ark Royal was detached and sent to West Africa to support British attempts to encourage Vichy French colonies to switch allegiance to the Free French. During negotiations, several Free French aircraft flew from Ark Royal, but their aircrews were arrested at Dakar. Negotiations failed, and bombers from Ark Royal were directed against military installations during the unsuccessful British attempt to take Dakar by force. Ark Royal then returned to Britain for refit, docking in Liverpool on 8 October after being escorted by Fortune, Forester and Greyhound. The refit—which lasted until 3 November—included repairs to her machinery and the installation of a new flight deck barrier. Next, Ark Royal—accompanied by Barham, Berwick and Glasgow—sailed for Gibraltar, arriving on 6 November. They were deployed with the rest of Force H to escort convoys from Gibraltar to Alexandria and Malta, performing several runs before being assigned to Operation Collar, one of 35 convoys to support Malta between 1940 and 1942, on 25 November. An Italian fleet—led by the battleships Giulio Cesare and Vittorio Veneto—was dispatched to intercept the convoy. The Italian fleet was detected by a reconnaissance aircraft from Ark Royal and the carrier launched Swordfish torpedo bombers while the capital ships of Force H turned to meet the enemy. During the engagement, the Battle of Cape Spartivento, the Italian destroyer Lanciere was damaged, although it is uncertain if torpedoes from the bombers or British gunfire were responsible. The British mistook Lanciere for a cruiser, while the Italian commanders received incorrect reports that the cruiser Bolzano had been hit. British attacks failed to damage any other Italian ships or sink the disabled destroyer, and a retaliatory attack by the Italian air force saw Ark Royal as the subject of multiple bombing runs, none of which hit. The battle had no clear result, although the British convoy reached its destination unscathed. On 14 December 1940, Ark Royal and Force H were redeployed from Gibraltar to the Atlantic to search the Azores for commerce raiders. Ark Royal returned to the Mediterranean on 20 December, and escorted the battleship Malaya and merchant ships from Malta until 27 December. Force H then became involved in Operation Excess, a plan to move convoys through the Mediterranean to support the Western Desert Force, which was trying to push Italian land forces from Egypt into Libya. Over the next month, British control of the Mediterranean theatre was weakened, particularly by the entry of the Luftwaffe and the near-loss of the aircraft carrier Illustrious. The Mediterranean Fleet was under pressure from Axis forces in the Eastern Mediterranean, while the British port at Gibraltar was likely to be lost if the Spanish chose to ally with the Germans instead of remaining neutral. To relieve the Mediterranean Fleet, while demonstrating British strength to the Spanish, the Admiralty and Admiral Cunningham planned to use Ark Royal's Swordfish bombers in raids against Italian targets, supported by bombardment from heavy fleet units. The first bombing, on 2 January against the Tirso Dam in Sardinia, was unsuccessful but Ark Royal's Swordfish bombers were more successful on 6 January, when they bombed the port city of Genoa. The carrier's aircraft also covered the battlecruiser Renown and battleship Malaya while they shelled the port in Operation Grog. On 9 January, Ark Royal launched aircraft to bomb an oil refinery at La Spezia, and to lay mines in the harbour. Both operations were successful. ### Searching for Scharnhorst and Gneisenau In early February 1941, the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau headed into the Atlantic during Operation Berlin on the orders of Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, commander of the German Navy. They were to disrupt Allied shipping and draw capital ships from other areas. On 8 March, Force H and Ark Royal were ordered to the Canary Islands to search for the battleships, and to cover convoys crossing from the United States. Ark Royal used her aircraft to search for captured ships returning to Germany under the control of prize crews. Three ships were located on 19 March: two scuttled themselves, while the third—SS Polykarp— reached France. On the evening of 21 March 1941 a Fairey Fulmar from Ark Royal stumbled across Scharnhorst and Gneisenau at sea. Because of a radio malfunction, the crew had to return to Ark Royal to report, by which time the German ships had escaped under fog. The next day, Ark Royal re-established air patrols in the hope of re-locating the raiders. During the day, a catapult malfunction destroyed a Fairey Swordfish; flinging the fuselage into the sea ahead of the carrier. Unable to stop, Ark Royal ran over the Swordfish and was overhead when the aircraft's depth charges detonated. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau reached Brest without British harassment, while Ark Royal returned to Gibraltar for repairs, arriving on 24 March. ### Malta convoys and Operation Tiger Ark Royal spent April alternating between covering convoys and delivering aircraft to Malta and forays into the Atlantic to hunt commerce raiders. By May 1941, Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps were driving through North Africa towards the Suez Canal, pushing the Western Desert Force before them. With British forces close to collapse and strategic locations threatened, the British High Command risked sending a reinforcement convoy across the Mediterranean to Alexandria. The convoy consisted of five large transport ships, escorted by Ark Royal, the battlecruiser Renown, the battleship Queen Elizabeth, the cruisers Sheffield, Naiad, Fiji, and Gloucester, and screened by destroyers of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla. Prior to Ark Royal's departure, Captain Holland left to recuperate from stress and poor health, and was replaced by Captain Loben Maund. The convoy left Gibraltar on 6 May, and was detected by Italian aircraft. The convoy—limited to 14 knots (26 km/h; 16 mph) and escorted by so many capital ships—was such a tempting target that Italian and German aircraft were mobilised. The British convoy came under air attack on 8 May, first by the Italian air force, then the German Luftwaffe. Over the day, 12 of Ark Royal's Fairey Fulmars (the maximum number available) drove off over 50 aircraft, with the assistance of targeting information from Sheffield's radar and anti-aircraft fire from the escorts. During the initial waves, one Fulmar was lost, killing Flight Lieutenant Rupert Tillard and Lieutenant Mark Somerville; another was destroyed with the aircrew recovered, while several others were damaged. Consequently, only seven were able to face the main Luftwaffe force of 34 aircraft, while an attack just before dark was driven off by two aircraft and heavy fire from the ships. The convoy survived without serious damage: the only casualties were to mines, with the Empire Song sunk and New Zealand Star damaged but able to reach port. Ark Royal underwent another aerial attack on 12 May, during her return to Gibraltar. Later that month, she and fellow aircraft carrier Furious delivered Hawker Hurricanes to support Malta. ### Hunting the Bismarck On 18 May 1941, the German battleship Bismarck and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen began Operation Rheinübung by breaking into the Atlantic to raid shipping. After sinking the battlecruiser Hood and damaging the battleship Prince of Wales during the Battle of the Denmark Strait, Bismarck shook off her pursuers and headed for the French Atlantic coast. Ark Royal, Renown, and Sheffield—accompanied by destroyers Faulknor, Foresight, Forester, Fortune, Foxhound, and Fury—were dispatched to the Atlantic on 23 May to search for the battleship. On 26 May, a Swordfish from Ark Royal located Bismarck and began to shadow her, while the Home Fleet was mobilised to pursue. At the time of detection, the British ships were 130 nmi (240 km; 150 mi) away and would not catch Bismarck before she reached Saint-Nazaire, putting her safely under the air cover of the Luftwaffe once in range and while being repaired at the Normandie drydock. Fifteen Swordfish bombers were armed with torpedoes and sent to delay the ship. Sheffield, also shadowing Bismarck, was between Ark Royal and Bismarck. The aircraft mistook the British cruiser for their target and fired torpedoes. The torpedoes were fitted with unreliable magnetic detonators, which caused most to explode on contact with the water, while Sheffield evaded the rest. After realising his mistake, one of the pilots signalled 'Sorry for the kipper' to Sheffield. On return to the carrier, the Swordfish were re-armed with contact-detonator warhead torpedoes, and launched at 19:15 for a second attack; locating and attacking Bismarck just before sunset. Three torpedoes hit the battleship: two detonated forward of the engine rooms, while the third struck the starboard steering compartment and jammed her rudder in a 15° port turn. Bismarck was forced to sail in circles until a combination of alternating propeller speeds was found which would keep her on a reasonably steady course which, in the prevailing force 8 wind and sea state, forced her to sail towards the British warships with almost no manoeuvring capability. The German battleship suffered heavy attack during the night of 26–27 May, and sank at 10:39 hours on 27 May. ### Escorting the Malta convoys Ark Royal and the ships of Force H returned to Gibraltar on 29 May 1941. Despite the boost in Allied morale from the sinking of the battleship Bismarck, the war in the Mediterranean was going against the Allies. Greece and Crete had fallen to the Axis Powers, and the Afrika Korps was preparing to launch a final push into Egypt. Malta remained an important stronghold in the Mediterranean, but was coming under increased pressure from Italian and German air attacks, and could no longer be supplied from the east since the Battle of Crete. Ark Royal was pressed into service, delivering aircraft to Malta during several supply runs throughout June and July, and escorting the convoys of Operation Substance in July and Operation Halberd in September. Despite some losses, the convoys succeeded in keeping Malta supplied and fighting. The continued Allied presence in Malta was a considerable problem for Rommel in Africa, who was losing as much as 1⁄3 of his supplies from Italy to submarines and bombers based there. Adolf Hitler decided to send a flotilla of U-boats into the Mediterranean to attack Allied shipping, against the advice of Großadmiral Raeder. ## Final voyage and sinking On 10 November 1941, Ark Royal ferried more aircraft to Malta before returning to Gibraltar. Admiral Somerville had been warned of U-boats off the Spanish coast, and reminded Force H to be vigilant. Also at sea was Friedrich Guggenberger's , which had received a report that Force H was returning to Gibraltar. On 13 November, at 15:40, the sonar operator aboard the destroyer Legion detected an unidentified sound, but assumed it was the propellers of a nearby destroyer. One minute later, Ark Royal was struck amidships by a torpedo, between the fuel bunkers and bomb store, and directly below the bridge island. The explosion caused Ark Royal to shake, hurled loaded torpedo-bombers into the air, and killed 44 year old Able Seaman Edward Mitchell, the only man to die in the sinking. The torpedo punched a 130 ft × 30 ft (40 m × 9 m) hole in the ship's bottom and starboard side below the water-line after running deep and hitting the bilge keel, inboard of the side protection system. The hit caused flooding of the starboard boiler room, main switchboard, oil tanks, and over 106 feet (32 m) of the ship's starboard bilge. The explosion knocked out all internal communications and the starboard power train, causing the rear half of the ship to lose power. Immediately after the torpedo strike, Captain Maund ordered the engines to full stop, but with the communications knocked out had to send a runner to the engine room. The ship's continued motion enlarged the hole in the hull, and by the time Ark Royal stopped she had taken on a great deal of water and begun to list to starboard, reaching 18° from centre within 20 minutes. Considering the list of the carrier, and the fact that other carriers, including Courageous and Glorious, had sunk rapidly with heavy loss of life, Maund gave the order to abandon ship. The crew were assembled on the flight deck to determine who would remain on board to try to save the ship while Legion came alongside to take off the rest. As a result, comprehensive damage control measures were not initiated until 49 minutes after the attack. The flooding spread unchecked, exacerbated by covers and hatches left open during evacuation of the lower decks. Water spread to the centreline boiler room, which started to flood from below, and power was lost shipwide when the boiler uptakes became choked; Ark Royal had no backup diesel generators. About half an hour after the explosion, the carrier appeared to stabilise. Admiral Somerville, determined to save Ark Royal, ordered damage control parties back to the carrier before taking the battleship Malaya to Gibraltar to organise salvage efforts. The damage control parties re-lit a boiler, restoring power to the bilge pumps. The destroyer Laforey came alongside to provide power and additional pumps, while Swordfish aircraft from Gibraltar flew overhead to supplement anti-submarine patrols. The tug Thames arrived from Gibraltar at 20:00 and attached a tow line to Ark Royal, but the flooding had caused the ship to list more severely. Rising water reached the boiler room fan flat, an uninterrupted compartment running the width of the ship. This forced the shutdown of the restored boiler. The list reached 20° between 02:05 and 02:30, and when 'abandon ship' was declared again at 04:00, had reached 27°. Ark Royal's complement had been evacuated to Legion by 04:30; with the exception of Mitchell, there were no fatalities. The 1,487 officers and crew were transported to Gibraltar. The list reached 45° before Ark Royal capsized and sank at 06:19 on 14 November. Witnesses reported the carrier rolling to 90°, where she remained for three minutes before inverting. Ark Royal then broke in two, the aft sinking within a couple of minutes, followed by the bow. ### Investigation A Board of Inquiry was established to investigate the loss. Based on its findings, Captain Loben Maund was court-martialled in February 1942. He was found guilty on two counts of negligence: one of failing to ensure that properly constituted damage control parties had remained on board after the general evacuation, and one of failing to ensure the ship was in a sufficient state of readiness to deal with possible damage. The board tempered their judgement with an acknowledgement that a high standard was being expected of Maund, and that he was primarily concerned with the welfare of his crew. The Bucknill Committee, which had been set up to investigate the loss of major warships, also produced a report. This report said that the lack of backup power sources was a major design failure, which contributed to the loss: Ark Royal depended on electricity for much of her operation, and once the boilers and steam-driven dynamos were knocked out, the loss of power made damage control difficult. The committee recommended the design of the bulkheads and boiler intakes be improved to decrease the risk of widespread flooding in boiler rooms and machine spaces, while the uninterrupted boiler room flat was criticised. The design flaws were rectified in the Illustrious- and Implacable-class carriers, under construction at the time. The Board of Inquiry closed its report with the observation that Ark Royal had sunk 22 nautical miles (25 mi; 41 km) east of Europa Point, the southernmost tip of Gibraltar. This was accepted as the wreck location for 60 years. ## Rediscovery The location of the wreck was undetermined until mid-December 2002, when the wreck was discovered by an underwater survey company, C & C Technologies, Inc, using a sonar-equipped autonomous underwater vehicle, 30 nautical miles (35 mi; 56 km) from Gibraltar, at about 3,300 feet (1,000 m) depth. The company had been contracted by the BBC as part of a documentary on maritime archaeology related to major battles of the Royal Navy. The Ark Royal wreck lies in two main pieces with the stern section sitting upright and the bow section upside down. 66 feet (20 m) of the bow is separated from the rest of the ship's hull. A large debris field, which includes the funnel and bridge island, parts of the ship that came loose as the carrier sank, and aircraft from the hangars, lies between the two hull sections. Analysis revealed that the port side of the ship hit the seabed first. The wreck was found further east than expected. Researchers originally thought the wreck had been carried by currents farther into the Mediterranean as she sank—that the ship had travelled eastwards underwater before reaching the seabed. The presence near the hull pieces of other debris, including a Swordfish bomber that was tipped off the flight deck before the ship rolled, proved this false. If the current had pushed the hull pieces any significant distance sideways as they sank, debris would have been spread over a much wider area. It seems though that eastward currents had affected her progress towards Gibraltar during the time she was under tow. Study of the wreck also showed that restarting the engines to provide power increased the stresses placed on the hull, adding to the flooding. Once power was then lost, it was impossible to prevent the ship from sinking—her fate was more the result of design flaws than of the actions of her captain.
613,055	1954 Guatemalan coup d'état	1,173,194,002	CIA-backed deposition of Jacobo Árbenz	[ "1950s coups d'état and coup attempts", "1954 in Guatemala", "1954 in the United States", "Central Intelligence Agency operations", "Cold War conflicts", "Cold War in Latin America", "Cold War intelligence operations", "Conflicts in 1954", "Covert operations", "False flag operations", "Guatemalan Revolution", "June 1954 events in North America", "Military coups in Guatemala", "United States involvement in regime change" ]	The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état (Golpe de Estado en Guatemala de 1954) was the result of a CIA covert operation code-named PBSuccess. It deposed the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and ended the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944–1954. It installed the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas, the first in a series of U.S.-backed authoritarian rulers in Guatemala. The Guatemalan Revolution began in 1944, after a popular uprising toppled the military dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. Juan José Arévalo was elected president in Guatemala's first democratic election. He introduced a minimum wage and near-universal suffrage, and turned Guatemala into a democracy. Arévalo was succeeded in 1951 by Árbenz, who instituted land reforms which granted property to landless peasants. The Guatemalan Revolution was disliked by the United States federal government, which was predisposed during the Cold War to see it as communist. This perception grew after Árbenz had been elected and formally legalized the communist Guatemalan Party of Labour. The United Fruit Company (UFC), whose highly profitable business had been marginally affected by the slight softening of highly exploitative labor practices in Guatemala, engaged in an influential lobbying campaign to persuade the U.S. to overthrow the Guatemalan government. U.S. President Harry Truman authorized Operation PBFortune to topple Árbenz in 1952, which was a precursor to PBSuccess. Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected U.S. president in 1952, promising to take a harder line against communism, and his staff members John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles had significant links to the United Fruit Company. The U.S. federal government drew exaggerated conclusions about the extent of communist influence among Árbenz's advisers, and Eisenhower authorized the CIA to carry out Operation PBSuccess in August 1953. The CIA armed, funded, and trained a force of 480 men led by Carlos Castillo Armas. After U.S. efforts to criticize and isolate Guatemala internationally, Armas' force invaded Guatemala on 18 June 1954, backed by a heavy campaign of psychological warfare. This included a radio station which broadcast anti-government propaganda and a version of military events favorable to the rebellion, claiming to be genuine news, as well as air bombings of Guatemala City and a naval blockade. The invasion force fared poorly militarily, and most of its offensives were defeated. However, psychological warfare and the fear of a U.S. invasion intimidated the Guatemalan Army, which eventually refused to fight. Árbenz briefly and unsuccessfully attempted to arm civilians to resist the invasion, before resigning on 27 June. Castillo Armas became president ten days later, following negotiations in San Salvador. Described as the definitive deathblow to democracy in Guatemala, the coup was widely criticized internationally, and strengthened the long-lasting anti-U.S. sentiment in Latin America. Attempting to justify the coup, the CIA launched Operation PBHistory, which sought evidence of Soviet influence in Guatemala among documents from the Árbenz era, but found none. Castillo Armas quickly assumed dictatorial powers, banning opposition parties, imprisoning and torturing political opponents, and reversing the social reforms of the revolution. Nearly four decades of civil war followed, as leftist guerrillas fought the series of U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes whose brutalities include a genocide of the Maya peoples. ## Historical background ### Monroe Doctrine U.S. President James Monroe's foreign policy doctrine of 1823 warned the European powers against further colonization in Latin America. The stated aim of the Monroe Doctrine was to maintain order and stability, and to ensure that U.S. access to resources and markets was not limited. Historian Mark Gilderhus states that the doctrine also contained racially condescending language, which likened Latin American countries to squabbling children. While the U.S. did not initially have the power to enforce the doctrine, over the course of the 19th century many European powers withdrew from Latin America, allowing the U.S. to expand its sphere of influence throughout the region. In 1895, President Grover Cleveland laid out a more militant version of the doctrine, stating that the U.S. was "practically sovereign" on the continent. Following the Spanish–American War in 1898, this aggressive interpretation was used to create a U.S. economic empire across the Caribbean, such as with the 1903 treaty with Cuba that was heavily tilted in the U.S.' favor. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt believed that the U.S. should be the main beneficiary of production in Central America. The U.S. enforced this hegemony with armed interventions in Nicaragua (1912–33), and Haiti (1915–34). The U.S. did not need to use its military might in Guatemala, where a series of dictators were willing to accommodate the economic interests of the U.S. in return for its support for their regimes. Guatemala was among the Central American countries of the period known as a banana republic. From 1890 to 1920, control of Guatemala's resources and its economy shifted away from Britain and Germany to the U.S., which became Guatemala's dominant trade partner. The Monroe Doctrine continued to be seen as relevant to Guatemala, and was used to justify the coup in 1954. ### Authoritarian governments and the United Fruit Company Following a surge in global coffee demand in the late 19th century, the Guatemalan government made several concessions to plantation owners. It passed legislation that dispossessed the communal landholdings of the indigenous population and allowed coffee growers to purchase it. Manuel Estrada Cabrera, President of Guatemala from 1898 to 1920, was one of several rulers who made large concessions to foreign companies, including the United Fruit Company (UFC). Formed in 1899 by the merger of two large U.S. corporations, the new entity owned large tracts of land across Central America, and in Guatemala controlled the railroads, the docks, and the communication systems. By 1900 it had become the largest exporter of bananas in the world, and had a monopoly over the Guatemalan banana trade. Journalist and writer William Blum describes UFC's role in Guatemala as a "state within a state". The U.S. government was also closely involved with the Guatemalan state under Cabrera, frequently dictating financial policies and ensuring that American companies were granted several exclusive rights. When Cabrera was overthrown in 1920, the U.S. sent an armed force to make certain that the new president remained friendly to it. Fearing a popular revolt following the unrest created by the Great Depression, wealthy Guatemalan landowners lent their support to Jorge Ubico, who won an uncontested election in 1931. Ubico's regime became one of the most repressive in the region. He abolished debt peonage, replacing it with a vagrancy law which stipulated that all landless men of working age needed to perform a minimum of 100 days of forced labor annually. He authorized landowners to take any actions they wished against their workers, including executions. Ubico was an admirer of European fascist leaders such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, but had to ally with the U.S. for geopolitical reasons, and received substantial support from this country throughout his reign. A staunch anti-communist, Ubico reacted to several peasant rebellions with incarcerations and massacres. By 1930 the UFC had built an operating capital of 215 million U.S. dollars, and had been the largest landowner and employer in Guatemala for several years. Ubico granted it a new contract, which was immensely favorable to the company. This included 200,000 hectares (490,000 acres) of public land, an exemption from all taxes, and a guarantee that no other company would receive any competing contract. Ubico requested the UFC to cap the daily salary of its workers at 50 U.S. cents, so that workers in other companies would be less able to demand higher wages. ### Guatemalan Revolution and presidency of Arévalo The repressive policies of the Ubico government resulted in a popular uprising led by university students and middle-class citizens in 1944. Ubico fled, handing over power to a three-person junta which continued Ubico's policies until it too was toppled, by the October Revolution that aimed to transform Guatemala into a liberal democracy. The largely free election that followed installed a philosophically conservative university professor, Juan José Arévalo, as the President of Guatemala. Arévalo's administration drafted a more liberal labor code, built health centers, and increased funding to education. Arévalo enacted a minimum wage, and created state-run farms to employ landless laborers. He also cracked down on the communist Guatemalan Party of Labour (Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo, PGT) and in 1945 criminalized all labor unions in workplaces with fewer than 500 workers. By 1947, the remaining unions had grown strong enough to pressure him into drafting a new labor code, which made workplace discrimination illegal and created health and safety standards. However, Arévalo refused to advocate land reform of any kind, and stopped short of drastically changing labor relations in the countryside. Despite Arévalo's anti-communism, the U.S. was suspicious of him, and worried that he was under Soviet influence. The communist movement did grow stronger during Arévalo's presidency, partly because he released its imprisoned leaders, and also through the strength of its teachers' union. Another cause for U.S. worry was Arévalo's support of the Caribbean Legion. The Legion was a group of progressive exiles and revolutionaries, whose members included Fidel Castro, that aimed to overthrow U.S.-backed dictatorships across Central America. The government also faced opposition from within the country; Arévalo survived at least 25 coup attempts during his presidency. A notable example was an attempt in 1949 led by Francisco Arana, which was foiled in an armed shootout between Arana's supporters and a force led by Arévalo's defense minister Jacobo Árbenz. Arana was among those killed, but details of the coup attempt were never made public. Other sources of opposition to Arévalo's government were the right-wing politicians and conservatives within the military who had grown powerful during Ubico's dictatorship, as well as the clergy of the Catholic Church. ### Presidency of Árbenz and land reform The largely free elections of 1950 were won by the popular Árbenz, and represented the first transfer of power between democratically elected leaders in Guatemala. Árbenz had personal ties to some members of the communist PGT, which was legalized during his government, and a couple of members played a role in drafting the new president's policies. Nonetheless, Árbenz did not try to turn Guatemala into a communist state, instead choosing a moderate capitalist approach. The PGT too committed itself to working within the existing legal framework to achieve its immediate objectives of emancipating peasants from feudalism and improving workers' rights. The most prominent component of Árbenz's policy was his agrarian reform bill. Árbenz drafted the bill himself, having sought advice from economists across Latin America. The focus of the law was on transferring uncultivated land from large landowners to poor laborers, who would then be able to begin viable farms of their own. The official title of the agrarian reform bill was Decree 900. It expropriated all uncultivated land from landholdings that were larger than 673 acres (272 ha). If the estates were between 224 acres (91 ha) and 672 acres (272 ha), uncultivated land was to be expropriated only if less than two-thirds of it was in use. The owners were compensated with government bonds, the value of which was equal to that of the land expropriated. The value of the land itself was what the owners had declared it to be in their tax returns in 1952. Of the nearly 350,000 private landholdings, only 1,710 were affected by expropriation. The law was implemented with great speed, which resulted in some arbitrary land seizures. There was also some violence, directed at landowners, as well as at peasants that had minor landholdings. By June 1954, 1,400,000 acres (570,000 ha) of land had been expropriated and distributed. Approximately 500,000 individuals, or one-sixth of the population, had received land by this point. Contrary to the predictions made by detractors, the law resulted in a slight increase in Guatemalan agricultural productivity, and in an increase in cultivated area. Purchases of farm machinery also increased. Overall, the law resulted in a significant improvement in living standards for many thousands of peasant families, the majority of whom were indigenous people. Historian Greg Grandin sees the law as representing a fundamental power shift in favor of the hitherto marginalized. ## Genesis and prelude ### United Fruit Company lobbying By 1950, the United Fruit Company's annual profits were 65 million U.S. dollars, twice as large as the revenue of the government of Guatemala. The company was the largest landowner in Guatemala, and virtually owned Puerto Barrios, Guatemala's only port to the Atlantic Ocean, allowing it to make profits from the flow of goods through the port. Because of its long association with Ubico's government, Guatemalan revolutionaries saw the UFC as an impediment to progress after 1944. This image was reinforced by the company's discriminatory policies against the native population. Owing to its size, the reforms of Arévalo's government affected the UFC more than other companies. Among other things, the new labor code allowed UFC workers to strike when their demands for higher wages and job security were not met. The company saw itself as being specifically targeted by the reforms, and refused to negotiate with the numerous sets of strikers, despite frequently being in violation of the new laws. The company's troubles were compounded with the passage of Decree 900 in 1952. Of the 550,000 acres (220,000 ha) that the company owned, only 15 percent was being cultivated; the rest was idle, and thus came under the scope of the agrarian reform law. The UFC responded by intensively lobbying the U.S. government. Several Congressmen criticized the Guatemalan government for not protecting the interests of the company. The Guatemalan government replied that the company was the main obstacle to progress in the country. American historians observed that "[to] the Guatemalans it appeared that their country was being mercilessly exploited by foreign interests which took huge profits without making any contributions to the nation's welfare". In 1953, 200,000 acres (81,000 ha) of uncultivated land was expropriated by the government, which paid 2.99 U.S. dollars per acre (7.39 U.S. dollars per hectare), twice what the company had paid when it bought the property. More expropriation occurred soon after, bringing the total to over 400,000 acres (160,000 ha), at the rate which UFC had valued its property for tax purposes. The company was unhappy with losing the land, and the level of profit resulting from the sale, resulting in further lobbying in Washington, particularly through U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had close ties to the company. The UFC also began a public relations campaign to discredit the Guatemalan government, hiring Edward Bernays, who mounted a concerted misinformation campaign for several years which portrayed the company as the victim of a "communist" Guatemalan government. The company stepped up its efforts after Dwight Eisenhower was elected U.S. president in 1952. These included commissioning a research study from a firm known to be hostile to social reform, which produced a 235-page report that was highly critical of the Guatemalan government. Historians have stated that the report was full of "exaggerations, scurrilous descriptions and bizarre historical theories" but it nonetheless had a significant impact on the members of Congress who read it. Overall, the company spent over half a million dollars to convince lawmakers and the American public that the Guatemalan government needed to be overthrown. ### Operation PBFortune As the Cold War developed and the Guatemalan government clashed with U.S. corporations on an increasing number of issues, the U.S. government grew increasingly suspicious of the Guatemalan Revolution. In addition, the Cold War predisposed the Truman administration to see the Guatemalan government as communist. Arévalo's support for the Caribbean Legion also worried the Truman administration, which saw it as a vehicle for communism, rather than as the anti-dictatorial force it was conceived as. Until the end of its term, the Truman administration had relied on purely diplomatic and economic means to try to reduce the perceived communist influence. The U.S. had refused to sell arms to the Guatemalan government after 1944; in 1951 it began to block all weapons purchases by Guatemala. The U.S.'s worries over communist influence increased after the election of Árbenz in 1951 and his enactment of Decree 900 in 1952. In April 1952 Anastasio Somoza García, the dictator of Nicaragua, made his first state visit to the U.S. He made several public speeches praising the U.S., and was awarded a medal by the New York City government. During a meeting with Truman and his senior staff, Somoza said that if the U.S. gave him the arms, he would "clean up Guatemala". The proposal did not receive much immediate support, but Truman instructed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to follow up on it. The CIA contacted Carlos Castillo Armas, a Guatemalan army officer who had been exiled from the country in 1949 following a failed coup attempt against President Arévalo. Believing that Castillo Armas would lead a coup with or without their assistance, the CIA decided to supply him with weapons and 225,000 U.S. dollars. The CIA considered Castillo Armas sufficiently corrupt and authoritarian to be well suited to lead the coup. The coup was planned in detail over the next few weeks by the CIA, the UFC, and Somoza. The CIA also contacted Marcos Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic; the two U.S.-backed dictators were supportive of the plan, and agreed to contribute some funding. Although PBFortune was officially approved on 9 September 1952, various planning steps had been taken earlier in the year. In January 1952, officers in the CIA's Directorate of Plans compiled a list of "top flight Communists whom the new government would desire to eliminate immediately in the event of a successful anti-Communist coup". The CIA plan called for the assassination of over 58 Guatemalans, as well as the arrest of many others. The CIA put the plan into motion in late 1952. A freighter that had been borrowed from the UFC was specially refitted in New Orleans and loaded with weapons under the guise of agricultural machinery, and set sail for Nicaragua. However, the plan was terminated soon after: accounts of its termination vary. Some sources state that the State Department discovered the plan when a senior official was asked to sign a certain document, while others suggest that Somoza was indiscreet. The eventual outcome was that Secretary of State Dean Acheson called off the operation. The CIA continued to support Castillo Armas; it paid him a monthly retainer of 3000 U.S. dollars, and gave him the resources to maintain his rebel force. ### Eisenhower administration During his successful campaign for the U.S. presidency, Dwight Eisenhower pledged to pursue a more proactive anti-communist policy, promising to roll back communism, rather than contain it. Working in an atmosphere of increasing McCarthyism in government circles, Eisenhower was more willing than Truman to use the CIA to depose governments the U.S. disliked. Although PBFortune had been quickly aborted, tension between the U.S. and Guatemala continued to rise, especially with the legalization of the communist PGT, and its inclusion in the government coalition for the elections of January 1953. Articles published in the U.S. press often reflected this predisposition to see communist influence; for example, a New York Times article about the visit to Guatemala by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda highlighted his communist beliefs, but neglected to mention his reputation as the greatest living poet in Latin America. Several figures in Eisenhower's administration, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother CIA Director Allen Dulles, had close ties to the United Fruit Company. The Dulles brothers had been partners of the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, and in that capacity had arranged several deals for the UFC. Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith would later become a director of the company, while Eisenhower's personal assistant Ann C. Whitman was the wife of UFC public relations director Edward Whitman. These personal connections meant that the Eisenhower administration tended to conflate the interests of the UFC with that of U.S. national security interests, and made it more willing to overthrow the Guatemalan government. The success of the 1953 CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran also strengthened Eisenhower's belief in using the agency to effect political change overseas. Historians and authors writing about the 1954 coup have debated the relative importance of the role of the United Fruit Company and the worries about communist influence (whether or not these were grounded in reality) in the U.S.'s decision to instigate the coup in 1954. Several historians have maintained that the lobbying of the UFC, and the expropriation of its lands, were the chief motivation for the U.S., strengthened by the financial ties of individuals within the Eisenhower administration to the UFC. Others have argued that the overthrow was motivated primarily by U.S. strategic interest; the knowledge of the presence of a small number of communists close to Árbenz led the U.S. to reach incorrect conclusions about the extent of communist influence. Yet others have argued that the overthrow was part of a larger tendency within the U.S. to oppose nationalist movements in the Third World. Both the role of the UFC and that of the perception of communist influence continue to be cited as motivations for the U.S.'s actions today. ## Operation PBSuccess ### Planning The CIA operation to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz, code-named Operation PBSuccess, was authorized by Eisenhower in August 1953. The operation was granted a budget of 2.7 million U.S. dollars for "psychological warfare and political action". The total budget has been estimated at between 5 and 7 million dollars, and the planning employed over 100 CIA agents. In addition, the operation recruited scores of individuals from among Guatemalan exiles and the populations of the surrounding countries. The plans included drawing up lists of people within Árbenz's government to be assassinated if the coup were to be carried out. Manuals of assassination techniques were compiled, and lists were also made of people whom the junta would dispose of. These were the CIA's first known assassination manuals, and were reused in subsequent CIA actions. The State Department created a team of diplomats who would support PBSuccess. It was led by John Peurifoy, who took over as Ambassador to Guatemala in October 1953. Another member of the team was William D. Pawley, a wealthy businessman and diplomat with extensive knowledge of the aviation industry. Peurifoy was a militant anti-communist, and had proven his willingness to work with the CIA during his time as United States Ambassador to Greece. Under Peurifoy's tenure, relations with the Guatemalan government soured further, although those with the Guatemalan military improved. In a report to John Dulles, Peurifoy stated that he was "definitely convinced that if [Árbenz] is not a communist, then he will certainly do until one comes along". Within the CIA, the operation was headed by Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner. The field commander selected by Wisner was former U.S. Army Colonel Albert Haney, then chief of the CIA station in South Korea. Haney reported directly to Wisner, thereby separating PBSuccess from the CIA's Latin American division, a decision which created some tension within the agency. Haney decided to establish headquarters in a concealed office complex in Opa-locka, Florida. Codenamed "Lincoln", it became the nerve center of operation PBSuccess. The CIA operation was complicated by a premature coup on 29 March 1953, with a futile raid against the army garrison at Salamá, in the central Guatemalan department of Baja Verapaz. The rebellion was swiftly crushed, and a number of participants were arrested. Several CIA agents and allies were imprisoned, weakening the coup effort. Thus the CIA came to rely more heavily on the Guatemalan exile groups and their anti-democratic allies in Guatemala. The CIA considered several candidates to lead the coup. Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, the conservative candidate who had lost the 1950 election to Árbenz, held favor with the Guatemalan opposition but was rejected for his role in the Ubico regime, as well as his European appearance, which was unlikely to appeal to the majority mixed-race mestizo population. Another popular candidate was the coffee planter Juan Córdova Cerna, who had briefly served in Arévalo's cabinet before becoming the legal adviser to the UFC. The death of his son in an anti-government uprising in 1950 turned him against the government, and he had planned the unsuccessful Salamá coup in 1953 before fleeing to join Castillo Armas in exile. Although his status as a civilian gave him an advantage over Castillo Armas, he was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1954, taking him out of the reckoning. Thus it was Castillo Armas, in exile since the failed 1949 coup and on the CIA's payroll since the aborted PBFortune in 1951, who was to lead the coming coup. Castillo Armas was given enough money to recruit a small force of mercenaries from among Guatemalan exiles and the populations of nearby countries. This band was called the Army of Liberation. The CIA established training camps in Nicaragua and Honduras and supplied them with weapons as well as several bombers. The U.S. signed military agreements with both those countries prior to the invasion of Guatemala, allowing it to move heavier arms freely. The CIA trained at least 1,725 foreign guerillas plus thousands of additional militants as reserves. These preparations were only superficially covert: the CIA intended Árbenz to find out about them, as a part of its plan to convince the Guatemalan people that the overthrow of Árbenz was a fait accompli. Additionally, the CIA made covert contact with a number of church leaders throughout the Guatemalan countryside, and persuaded them to incorporate anti-government messages into their sermons. ### Caracas conference and U.S. propaganda While preparations for Operation PBSuccess were underway, Washington issued a series of statements denouncing the Guatemalan government, alleging that it had been infiltrated by communists. The State Department also asked the Organization of American States to modify the agenda of the Inter-American Conference, which was scheduled to be held in Caracas in March 1954, requesting the addition of an item titled "Intervention of International Communism in the American Republics", which was widely seen as a move targeting Guatemala. On 29 and 30 January 1954, the Guatemalan government published documents containing information leaked to it by a member of Castillo Armas' team who had turned against him. Lacking in original documents, the government had engaged in poor forgery to enhance the information it possessed, undermining the credibility of its charges. A spate of arrests followed of allies of Castillo Armas within Guatemala, and the government issued statements implicating a "Government of the North" in a plot to overthrow Árbenz. Washington denied these allegations, and the U.S. media uniformly took the side of their government; even publications which had until then provided relatively balanced coverage of Guatemala, such as The Christian Science Monitor, suggested that Árbenz had succumbed to communist propaganda. Several Congressmen also pointed to the allegations from the Guatemalan government as proof that it had become communist. At the conference in Caracas, the various Latin American governments sought economic aid from the U.S., as well as its continuing non-intervention in their internal affairs. The U.S. government's aim was to pass a resolution condemning the supposed spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere. The Guatemalan foreign minister Guillermo Toriello argued strongly against the resolution, stating that it represented the "internationalization of McCarthyism". Despite support among the delegates for Toriello's views, the anti-communist resolution passed with only Guatemala voting against, because of the votes of dictatorships dependent on the U.S. and the threat of economic pressure applied by John Dulles. Although support among the delegates for Dulles' strident anti-communism was less strong than he and Eisenhower had hoped for, the conference marked a victory for the U.S., which was able to make concrete Latin American views on communism. The U.S. had stopped selling arms to Guatemala in 1951 while signing bilateral defense agreements and increasing arms shipments to neighboring Honduras and Nicaragua. The U.S. promised the Guatemalan military that it too could obtain arms—if Árbenz were deposed. In 1953, the State Department aggravated the U.S. arms embargo by thwarting the Árbenz government's arms purchases from Canada, Germany, and Rhodesia. By 1954 Árbenz had become desperate for weapons, and decided to acquire them secretly from Czechoslovakia, which would have been the first time that a Soviet bloc country shipped weapons to the Americas, an action seen as establishing a communist beachhead in the Americas. The weapons were delivered to Guatemala at the Atlantic port of Puerto Barrios by the Swedish freight ship , which sailed from Szczecin in Poland. The U.S. failed to intercept the shipment despite imposing an illegal naval quarantine on Guatemala. However "Guatemalan army officers" quoted in The New York Times said that "some of the arms ... were duds, worn out, or entirely wrong for use there". The CIA portrayed the shipment of these weapons as Soviet interference in the United States' backyard; it was the final spur for the CIA to launch its coup. U.S. rhetoric abroad also had an effect on the Guatemalan military. The military had always been anti-communist, and Ambassador Peurifoy had applied pressure on senior officers since his arrival in Guatemala in October 1953. Árbenz had intended the secret shipment of weapons from the Alfhem to be used to bolster peasant militias, in the event of army disloyalty, but the U.S. informed army chiefs of the shipment, forcing Árbenz to hand them over to the military, and deepening the rift between him and his top generals. ### Psychological warfare Castillo Armas' army of 480 men was not large enough to defeat the Guatemalan military, even with U.S.-supplied aircraft. Therefore, the plans for Operation PBSuccess called for a campaign of psychological warfare, which would present Castillo Armas' victory as a fait accompli to the Guatemalan people, and would force Árbenz to resign. The propaganda campaign had begun well before the invasion, with the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) writing hundreds of articles on Guatemala based on CIA reports, and distributing tens of thousands of leaflets throughout Latin America. The CIA persuaded friendly governments to screen video footage of Guatemala that supported the U.S. version of events. As part of the psychological warfare, the U.S. Psychological Strategy Board authorized a "Nerve War Against Individuals" to instill fear and paranoia in potential loyalists and other potential opponents of the coup. This campaign included death threats against political leaders deemed loyal or deemed to be communist, and the sending of small wooden coffins, non-functioning bombs, and hangman's nooses to such people. The US bombing was also intended to have psychological consequences with E. Howard Hunt of the CIA saying "What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign, to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops, much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland, Belgium and Poland”. Alfhem's success in evading the quarantine led to Washington escalating its intimidation of Guatemala through its navy. On 24 May, the U.S. launched Operation Hardrock Baker, a naval blockade of Guatemala. Ships and submarines patrolled the Guatemalan coasts, and all approaching ships were stopped and searched; these included ships from Britain and France, violating international law. However Britain and France did not protest very strongly, hoping that in return the U.S. would not interfere with their efforts to subdue rebellious colonies in the Middle East. The intimidation was not solely naval; on 26 May one of Castillo Armas' planes flew over the capital, dropping leaflets that exhorted people to struggle against communism and support Castillo Armas. The most wide-reaching psychological weapon was the radio station Voice of Liberation. It began broadcasting on 1 May 1954, carrying anti-communist propaganda, telling its listeners to resist the Árbenz government and support the liberating forces of Castillo Armas. The station claimed to be broadcasting from deep within the jungles of the Guatemalan hinterland, a message which many listeners believed. In actuality, the broadcasts were concocted in Miami by Guatemalan exiles, flown to Central America, and broadcast through a mobile transmitter. The Voice of Liberation made an initial broadcast that was repeated four times, after which it took to transmitting two-hour bulletins twice a day. The transmissions were initially only heard intermittently in Guatemala City; a week later, the CIA significantly increased their transmitting power, allowing clear reception in the Guatemalan capital. The radio broadcasts have been given a lot of credit by historians for the success of the coup, owing to the unrest they created throughout the country. They were unexpectedly assisted by the outage of the government-run radio station, which stopped transmitting for three weeks while a new antenna was being fitted. These transmissions continued throughout the conflict, broadcasting exaggerated news of rebel troops converging on the capital, and contributing to massive demoralization among both the army and the civilian population. ### Castillo Armas' invasion Castillo Armas' force of 480 men had been split into four teams, ranging in size from 60 to 198. On 15 June 1954 these four forces left their bases in Honduras and El Salvador, and assembled in various towns just outside the Guatemalan border. The largest force was supposed to attack the Atlantic harbor town of Puerto Barrios, while the others attacked the smaller towns of Esquipulas, Jutiapa, and Zacapa, the Guatemalan army's largest frontier post. The invasion plan quickly faced difficulties; the 60-man force was intercepted and jailed by Salvadoran policemen before it got to the border. At 8:20 am on 18 June 1954, Castillo Armas led his invading troops over the border. Ten trained saboteurs preceded the invasion, with the aim of blowing up railways and cutting telegraph lines. At about the same time, Castillo Armas' planes flew over a pro-government rally in the capital. The U.S. Psychological Strategy Board ordered the bombing of the Matamoros Fortress in downtown Guatemala City, and a U.S. P-47 warplane flown by a mercenary pilot bombed the city of Chiquimula. Castillo Armas demanded Árbenz's immediate surrender. The invasion provoked a brief panic in the capital, which quickly decreased as the rebels failed to make any striking moves. Bogged down by supplies and a lack of transportation, Castillo Armas' forces took several days to reach their targets, although their planes blew up a bridge on 19 June. When the rebels did reach their targets, they met with further setbacks. The force of 122 men targeting Zacapa were intercepted and decisively beaten by a garrison of 30 Guatemalan soldiers, with only 30 men escaping death or capture. The force that attacked Puerto Barrios was dispatched by policemen and armed dockworkers, with many of the rebels fleeing back to Honduras. In an effort to regain momentum, the rebel planes tried air attacks on the capital. These attacks caused little material damage, but they had a significant psychological impact, leading many citizens to believe that the invasion force was more powerful than it actually was. The rebel bombers needed to fly out of the Nicaraguan capital of Managua; as a result, they had a limited payload. A large number of them substituted dynamite or Molotov cocktails for bombs, in an effort to create loud bangs with a lower payload. The planes targeted ammunition depots, parade grounds, and other visible targets. Early in the morning on 27 June 1954, a CIA Lockheed P-38M Lightning attacked Puerto San José and dropped napalm bombs on the British cargo ship, SS Springfjord, which was on charter to the U.S. company W.R. Grace and Company Line, and was being loaded with Guatemalan cotton and coffee. This incident cost the CIA one million U.S. dollars in compensation. On 22 June, another plane bombed the Honduran town of San Pedro de Copán; John Dulles claimed the attack had been conducted by the Guatemalan air force, thus avoiding diplomatic consequences. The handful of bombers that the rebel forces had begun with were shot down by the Guatemalan army within a few days, causing Castillo Armas to demand more from the CIA. Eisenhower quickly agreed to provide these additional planes, bolstering the rebel force. William Pawley had a crucial role to play in the delivery of these aircraft. ### Guatemalan response The Árbenz government originally meant to repel the invasion by arming the military-age populace, workers' militias, and the Guatemalan Army. Resistance from the armed forces, as well as public knowledge of the secret arms purchase, compelled the President to supply arms only to the Army. From the beginning of the invasion, Árbenz was confident that Castillo Armas could be defeated militarily and expressed this confidence in public. But he was worried that a defeat for Castillo Armas would provoke a direct invasion by the U.S. military. This also contributed to his decision not to arm civilians initially; lacking a military reason to do so, this could have cost him the support of the army. Carlos Enrique Díaz, the chief of the Guatemalan armed forces, told Árbenz that arming civilians would be unpopular with his soldiers, and that "the army [would] do its duty". Árbenz instead told Díaz to select officers to lead a counter-attack. Díaz chose a corps of officers who were all regarded to be men of personal integrity, and who were loyal to Árbenz. On the night of 19 June, most of the Guatemalan troops in the capital region left for Zacapa, joined by smaller detachments from other garrisons. Árbenz stated that "the invasion was a farce", but worried that if it was defeated on the Honduran border, Honduras would use it as an excuse to declare war on Guatemala, which would lead to a U.S. invasion. Because of the rumours spread by the Voice of Liberation, there were worries throughout the countryside that a fifth column attack was imminent; large numbers of peasants went to the government and asked for weapons to defend their country. They were repeatedly told that the army was "successfully defending our country". Nonetheless, peasant volunteers assisted the government war effort, manning roadblocks and donating supplies to the army. Weapons shipments dropped by rebel planes were intercepted and turned over to the government. The Árbenz government also pursued diplomatic means to try to end the invasion. It sought support from El Salvador and Mexico; Mexico declined to get involved, and the Salvadoran government merely reported the Guatemalan effort to Peurifoy. Árbenz's largest diplomatic initiative was in taking the issue to the United Nations Security Council. On 18 June the Guatemalan foreign minister petitioned the council to "take measures necessary ... to put a stop to the aggression", which he said Nicaragua and Honduras were responsible for, along with "certain foreign monopolies which have been affected by the progressive policy of my government". The Security Council looked at Guatemala's complaint at an emergency session on 20 June. The debate was lengthy and heated, with Nicaragua and Honduras denying any wrongdoing, and the U.S. stating that Eisenhower's role as a general in World War II demonstrated that he was against imperialism. The Soviet Union was the only country to support Guatemala. When the U.S. and its allies proposed referring the matter to the Organization of American States, the Soviet Union vetoed the proposal. Guatemala continued to press for a Security Council investigation; the proposal received the support of Britain and France, but on 24 June it was vetoed by the U.S., the first time it did so against its allies. The U.S. accompanied this with threats to the foreign offices of both countries that the U.S. would stop supporting their other initiatives. UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld called the U.S. position "the most serious blow so far aimed at the [United Nations]". A fact-finding mission was set up by the Inter-American Peace Committee; Washington used its influence to delay the entry of the committee until the coup was complete and a military dictatorship installed. ### Árbenz's resignation Árbenz was initially confident that his army would quickly dispatch the rebel force. The victory of a small garrison of 30 soldiers over the 180 strong rebel force outside Zacapa strengthened his belief. By 21 June, Guatemalan soldiers had gathered at Zacapa under the command of Colonel Víctor M. León, who was believed to be loyal to Árbenz. León told Árbenz that the counter-attack would be delayed for logistical reasons, but assured him not to worry, as Castillo Armas would be defeated very soon. Other members of the government were not so certain. Army Chief of Staff Parinello inspected the troops at Zacapa on 23 June, and returned to the capital believing that the army would not fight. Afraid of a U.S. intervention in Castillo Armas' favor, he did not tell Árbenz of his suspicions. PGT leaders also began to have their suspicions; acting secretary general Alvarado Monzón sent a member of the central committee to Zacapa to investigate. He returned on 25 June, reporting that the army was highly demoralized, and would not fight. Monzón reported this to Árbenz, who quickly sent another investigator. He too returned the same report, carrying an additional message for Árbenz from the officers at Zacapa—asking the President to resign. The officers believed that given U.S. support for the rebels, defeat was inevitable, and Árbenz was to blame for it. He stated that if Árbenz did not resign, the army was likely to strike a deal with Castillo Armas, and march on the capital with him. During this period, Castillo Armas had begun to intensify his aerial attacks, with the extra planes that Eisenhower had approved. They had limited material success; many of their bombs were surplus material from World War II, and failed to explode. Nonetheless, they had a significant psychological impact. On 25 June, the same day that he received the army's ultimatum, Árbenz learned that Castillo Armas had scored what later proved to be his only military victory, defeating the Guatemalan garrison at Chiquimula. Historian Piero Gleijeses has stated that if it were not for U.S. support for the rebellion, the officer corps of the Guatemalan army would have remained loyal to Árbenz because, although they were not uniformly his supporters, they were more wary of Castillo Armas, and also had strong nationalist views. As it was, they believed that the U.S. would intervene militarily, leading to a battle they could not win. On the night of 25 June, Árbenz called a meeting of the senior leaders of the government, the political parties, and the labor unions. Colonel Díaz was also present. The President told them that the army at Zacapa had abandoned the government, and that the civilian population needed to be armed in order to defend the country. Díaz raised no objections, and the unions pledged several thousand troops between them. When the troops were mustered the next day, only a few hundred showed up. The civilian population of the capital had fought alongside the Guatemalan Revolution twice before—during the popular uprising of 1944, and again during the attempted coup of 1949—but on this occasion the army, intimidated by the United States, refused to fight. The union members were reluctant to fight both the invasion and their own military. Seeing this, Díaz reneged on his support of the President, and began plotting to overthrow Árbenz with the assistance of other senior army officers. They informed Peurifoy of this plan, asking him to stop the hostilities in return for Árbenz's resignation. Peurifoy promised to arrange a truce, and the plotters went to Árbenz and informed him of their decision. Árbenz, utterly exhausted and seeking to preserve at least a measure of the democratic reforms that he had brought, agreed without demur. After informing his cabinet of his decision, he left the presidential palace at 8 pm on 27 June 1954, having taped a resignation speech that was broadcast an hour later. In it, he stated that he was resigning in order to eliminate the "pretext for the invasion", and that he wished to preserve the gains of the October Revolution of 1944. He walked to the nearby Mexican Embassy, seeking political asylum. Two months later he was granted safe passage out of the country, and flew to exile in Mexico. Some 120 Árbenz loyalists or communists were also allowed to leave, and the CIA stated that none of the assassination plans contemplated by the CIA were actually implemented. On June 30, 1954 the CIA began a comprehensive destruction process of documents related to Operation PBSuccess. When an oversight committee of the United States Senate in 1975 investigated the history of the CIA's assassinations program and requested information about the CIA's assassination program as part of Operation PBSuccess, the CIA stated it had lost all such records. Journalist Annie Jacobsen states that the CIA claim of no assassinations having taken place is doubtful. In May 1997, the CIA stated it had rediscovered some of its documents that it had said were lost. The names of assassination targets had all been redacted, which made it impossible to verify whether any of the people on the CIA assassination list were actually killed as part of the operation. ### Military governments Immediately after the President announced his resignation, Díaz announced on the radio that he was taking over the presidency, and that the army would continue to fight against the invasion of Castillo Armas. He headed a military junta which also consisted of Colonels Elfego Hernán Monzón Aguirre and Jose Angel Sánchez. Two days later Ambassador Peurifoy told Díaz that he had to resign because, in the words of a CIA officer who spoke to Díaz, he was "not convenient for American foreign policy". Peurifoy castigated Díaz for allowing Árbenz to criticize the United States in his resignation speech; meanwhile, a U.S.-trained pilot dropped a bomb on the army's main powder magazine, in order to intimidate the colonel. Soon after, Díaz was overthrown by a rapid bloodless coup led by Colonel Monzón, who was more pliable to U.S. interests. Díaz later stated that Peurifoy had presented him with a list of names of communists, and demanded that all of them be shot by the next day; Díaz had refused, turning Peurifoy further against him. On 17 June, the army leaders at Zacapa had begun to negotiate with Castillo Armas. They signed a pact, the Pacto de Las Tunas, three days later, which placed the army at Zacapa under Castillo Armas, in return for a general amnesty. The army returned to its barracks a few days later, "despondent, with a terrible sense of defeat". Although Monzón was staunchly anti-communist and repeatedly spoke of his loyalty to the U.S., he was unwilling to hand over power to Castillo Armas. The fall of Díaz had led Peurifoy to believe that the CIA should make way and let the State Department play the lead role in negotiating with the new government of Guatemala. The State Department asked Óscar Osorio, the dictator of El Salvador, to invite all players for talks in San Salvador. Osorio agreed, and Monzón and Castillo Armas arrived in the Salvadoran capital on 30 June. Peurifoy initially remained in Guatemala City, to avoid the appearance of a heavy U.S. role, but he was forced to travel to San Salvador when the negotiations came close to breaking down on the first day. In the words of John Dulles, Peurifoy's role was to "crack some heads together". Neither Monzón nor Castillo Armas could have remained in power without U.S. support, and thus Peurifoy was able to force an agreement, which was announced at 4:45 am on 2 July. Under the agreement, Castillo Armas and his subordinate Major Enrique Trinidad Oliva joined the three-person junta headed by Monzón, who remained president. On 7 July Colonels Dubois and Cruz Salazar, Monzón's supporters on the junta, resigned, according to the secret agreement they had made without Monzón's knowledge. Outnumbered, Monzón also resigned, allowing Castillo Armas to be unanimously elected president of the junta. The two colonels were paid 100,000 U.S. dollars apiece for their cooperation. The U.S. promptly recognized the new government on 13 July. Soon after taking office as president, Castillo Armas faced a coup from young army cadets, who were unhappy with the army's surrender to him. The coup was crushed, leaving 29 dead and 91 wounded. Elections were held in early October, from which all political parties were barred. Castillo Armas was the only candidate; he won the election with 99% of the vote, completing his transition into power. ### Reactions The Guatemalan coup d'état was reviled internationally. Le Monde of Paris and The Times of London attacked the United States' coup as a "modern form of economic colonialism". In Latin America, public and official opinion was sharply critical of the U.S., and for many Guatemala became a symbol of armed resistance to U.S. hegemony. Former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee called it "a plain act of aggression". When Allen Dulles described the coup as a victory of "democracy" over communism and claimed that the situation in Guatemala was "being cured by the Guatemalans themselves", a British official remarked that "in places, it might almost be Molotov speaking about ... Czechoslovakia or Hitler speaking about Austria". UN Secretary General Hammarskjöld said that the paramilitary invasion with which the U.S. deposed Guatemala's elected government was a geopolitical action that violated the human rights stipulations of the United Nations Charter. Even the usually pro-U.S. newspapers of West Germany condemned the coup. Kate Doyle, the Director of the Mexico Project of the National Security Archives, described the coup as the definitive deathblow to democracy in Guatemala. The coup had broad support among U.S. politicians. Historian Piero Gleijeses writes that the foreign policy of both Republican and Democratic parties expressed an intransigent assertion of U.S. hegemony over Central America, making them predisposed to seeing communist threats where none existed. Thus Eisenhower's continuation of the Monroe Doctrine had continued bipartisan support. The coup met with strong negative reactions in Latin America; a wave of anti-United States protests followed the overthrow of Árbenz. These sentiments persisted for several decades afterwards; historians have pointed to the coup as a reason for the hostile reception given to U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon when he visited Latin America four years later. A State Department study found that negative public reactions to the coup had occurred in eleven Latin American countries, including a few that were otherwise pro-American. Historian John Lewis Gaddis states that knowledge of the CIA's role in coups in Iran and Guatemala gave the agency "an almost mythic reputation throughout Latin America and the Middle East as an instrument with which the United States could depose governments it disliked, whenever it wished to do so". ## Aftermath ### Operation PBHistory Operation PBHistory was an effort by the CIA to analyze documents from the Árbenz government to justify the 1954 coup after the fact, in particular by finding evidence that Guatemalan communists had been under the influence of the Soviet Union. Because of the quick overthrow of the Árbenz government, the CIA believed that the administration would not have been able to destroy any incriminating documents, and that these could be analyzed to demonstrate Árbenz's supposed Soviet ties. The CIA also believed this would help it better understand the workings of Latin American communist parties, on which subject the CIA had very little real information. A final motivation was that international responses to the coup had been very negative, even among allies of the U.S., and the CIA wished to counteract this anti-U.S. sentiment. The operation began on 4 July 1954 with the arrival of four CIA agents in Guatemala City, led by a specialist in the structure of communist parties. Their targets included Árbenz's personal belongings, police documents, and the headquarters of the Guatemalan Party of Labour. Although the initial search failed to find any links to the Soviet Union, the CIA decided to extend the operation, and on 4 August a much larger team was deployed, with members from many government departments, including the State Department and the USIA. The task force was given the cover name Social Research Group. To avoid confrontation with Guatemalan nationalists, the CIA opted to leave the documents in Guatemalan possession, instead funding the creation of a Guatemalan intelligence agency that would try to dismantle the communist organizations. Thus the National Committee of Defense Against Communism (Comité de Defensa Nacional Contra el Comunismo) was created on 20 July, and granted a great deal of power over military and police functions. The personnel of the new agency were also put to work analyzing the same documents. The document-processing phase of the operation was terminated on 28 September 1954, having examined 500,000 documents. There was tension between the different U.S. government agencies about using the information; the CIA wished to use it to subvert communists, the USIA for propaganda. The CIA's leadership of the operation allowed it to retain control over any documents deemed necessary for clandestine operations. A consequence of PBHistory was the opening of a CIA file on Argentine communist Ernesto Che Guevara. In the subsequent decade, the documents gathered were used by the authors of several books, most frequently with covert CIA assistance, which described the Guatemalan Revolution and the 1954 coup in terms favorable to the CIA. Despite the efforts of the CIA, both international and academic reaction to U.S. policy remained highly negative. Even books partially funded by the CIA were somewhat critical of its role. PBHistory failed in its chief objective of finding convincing evidence that the PGT had been instruments of the Soviet Union, or even that it had any connection to Moscow whatsoever. The Soviet description of the coup, that the U.S. had crushed a democratic revolution to protect the United Fruit Company's control over the Guatemalan economy, became much more widely accepted. Historian Mark Hove stated that "Operation PBHistory proved ineffective because of 'a new, smoldering resentment' that had emerged in Latin America over US intervention in Guatemala." ### Political legacy The 1954 coup had significant political fallout both inside and outside Guatemala. The relatively easy overthrow of Árbenz, coming soon after the similar overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister in 1953, made the CIA overconfident in its abilities, which led to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion to overthrow the Cuban government in 1961. Throughout the years of the Guatemalan Revolution, both United States policy makers and the U.S. media had tended to believe the theory of a communist threat. When Árbenz had announced that he had evidence of U.S. complicity in the Salamá incident, it had been dismissed, and virtually the entire U.S. press portrayed Castillo Armas' invasion as a dramatic victory against communism. The press in Latin America were less restrained in their criticism of the U.S., and the coup resulted in lasting anti-United States sentiment in the region. Among the civilians living in Guatemala City during the coup was a 25-year-old Che Guevara. After a couple of abortive attempts to fight on the side of the government, Guevara took shelter at the embassy of Argentina, before eventually being granted safe passage to Mexico, where he would join the Cuban Revolution. His experience of the Guatemalan coup was a large factor in convincing him "of the necessity for armed struggle ... against imperialism", and would inform his successful military strategy during the Cuban Revolution. Árbenz's experience during the Guatemalan coup also helped Fidel Castro's Cuban regime in thwarting the CIA invasion. Within Guatemala, Castillo Armas worried that he lacked popular support, and thus tried to eliminate all opposition. He promptly arrested several thousand opposition leaders, branding them communists, repealed the constitution of 1945, and granted himself virtually unbridled power. Concentration camps were built to hold the prisoners when the jails overflowed. Acting on the advice of Allen Dulles, Castillo Armas detained a number of citizens trying to flee the country. He also created the National Committee of Defense Against Communism, with sweeping powers of arrest, detention, and deportation. Over the next few years, the committee investigated nearly 70,000 people. An insurgency in opposition to the junta soon developed. The government responded with a campaign of harsh suppression. Thousands were imprisoned arbitrarily, with few ever facing trial. Many were executed; "disappeared"; tortured; or maimed. At Finca Jocatán, in the vicinity of Tiquisate, where the first private sector union in the country had been founded at the start of the revolution in 1944, an estimated 1000 United Fruit workers were executed in the immediate aftermath of the coup. Castillo Armas outlawed all labor unions, peasant organizations, and political parties, except for his own, the National Liberation Movement (Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, MLN), which was the ruling party until 1957, and remained influential for decades after. Castillo Armas' dependence on the officer corps and the mercenaries who had put him in power led to widespread corruption, and the Eisenhower administration was soon subsidizing the Guatemalan government with many millions of U.S. dollars. Castillo Armas also reversed the agrarian reforms of Árbenz, leading the U.S. embassy to comment that it was a "long step backwards" from the previous policy. Castillo Armas was assassinated in 1957. The UFC did not profit from the coup; although it regained most of its privileges, its profits continued to decline, and it was eventually merged with another company to save itself from bankruptcy. Despite the influence which some of the local Catholic Church leaders had in the coup, anti-Catholic restrictions which had been enforced under previous governments in Guatemala would resume by the 1960s, as many anti-communist governments felt the Church had too much sympathy towards socialist parties. ### Civil War The rolling-back of the progressive policies of the civilian governments resulted in a series of leftist insurgencies in the countryside, beginning in 1960. This triggered the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War between the U.S.-backed military government of Guatemala and the leftist insurgents, who frequently had a large degree of popular support. The largest of these movements was led by the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, which at its largest point had 270,000 members. During the civil war, atrocities against civilians were committed by both sides; 93% of these violations were committed by the U.S.-backed military, which included a genocidal scorched-earth campaign against the indigenous Maya population in the 1980s. The violence was particularly severe during the presidencies of Ríos Montt and Lucas García. Numerous other human rights violations were committed, including massacres of civilian populations, rape, aerial bombardment, and forced disappearances. Gleijeses wrote that Guatemala was "ruled by a culture of fear", and that it held the "macabre record for human rights violations in Latin America". These violations were partially the result of a particularly brutal counter-insurgency strategy adopted by the government. The ideological narrative that the 1954 coup had represented a battle against communism was often used to justify the violence in the 1980s. Historians have attributed the violence of the civil war to the 1954 coup, and the "anti-communist paranoia" that it generated. The civil war came to an end in 1996, with a peace accord between the guerrillas and the government of Guatemala, which included an amnesty for the fighters on both sides. The civil war claimed the lives of an estimated 200,000 civilians in all. ### Apologies U.S. President Bill Clinton apologized to the nation of Guatemala in March 1999 for the atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed dictatorships. The apology occurred during a meeting in Guatemala which involved leaders from various sectors of the country's society, including indigenous people and women. Clinton stated "For the United States it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake." The apology came soon after the release of a truth commission report that documented U.S. support for the military forces that committed genocide. In May 2011, the Guatemalan government signed an agreement with Árbenz's surviving family to restore his legacy and publicly apologize for the government's role in ousting him. This included a financial settlement to the family. The formal apology was made at the National Palace by Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom on 20 October 2011, to Jacobo Árbenz Villanova, the son of the former president, and a Guatemalan politician. Colom stated, "It was a crime to Guatemalan society and it was an act of aggression to a government starting its democratic spring." The agreement established several forms of reparation for the next of kin of Árbenz Guzmán. ## See also - History of the Central Intelligence Agency - Operation Kufire - Operation Kugown - Operation Washtub - Plausible deniability - United States involvement in regime change - 1953 Iranian coup d'état
12,485,050	White-rumped swallow	1,170,432,632	Species of bird	[ "Birds described in 1817", "Birds of Argentina", "Birds of Bolivia", "Birds of Brazil", "Birds of Paraguay", "Birds of Uruguay", "Tachycineta", "Taxa named by Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot", "Taxonomy articles created by Polbot" ]	The white-rumped swallow (Tachycineta leucorrhoa) is a species of bird in the family Hirundinidae. First described and given its binomial name by French ornithologist Louis Vieillot in 1817, it was for many years considered a subspecies of the Chilean swallow. The species is monotypic with no known population variations. It has a white streak, or streak above its lores (the region between a bird's eye and nostrils), which can be used to differentiate it from the Chilean swallow. The lores, ear coverts, tail, and wings are black, with white tips on the inner secondaries, tertials, and greater coverts of the wings. The rest of the are a glossy blue. Its underparts and underwing-coverts are white, in addition to the rump, as the name suggests. The sexes are similar, and the juvenile is duller and browner with a dusky breast. This species usually builds its nest in holes in trees or dead snags or under or in artificial structures like fence posts and the eaves of buildings. The white-rumped swallow is solitary and nests in distributed pairs during the breeding season. The breeding season is from October to December in Brazil and from October to February in neighboring Argentina. Usually, only one brood with four to seven eggs is laid, although a second one will occasionally be laid. The female incubates the eggs over a period usually between 15 and 16 days, with the fledging usually occurring between 21 and 25 days after hatching. This swallow is found in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. Its natural habitats are: - dry savanna, - pastureland, - the edge of forests, - subtropical or tropical seasonally wet or flooded lowland grassland. It is classified as a least-concern species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Its population is increasing and it may benefit from the increase in availability of artificial nest sites. The shiny cowbird is an occasional brood parasite of the white-rumped swallow. ## Taxonomy and etymology The white-rumped swallow was first formally described as Hirundo leucorrhoa by French ornithologist Louis Vieillot in 1817 in his Nouveau Dictionnaire d'Histoire Naturelle. Subsequently, it was moved to its current genus, Tachycineta, which was created in 1850 by Jean Cabanis. The binomial name is derived from Ancient Greek. Tachycineta is from takhukinetos, "moving quickly", and the specific leucorrhoa is from leukos, "white", and orrhos, "rump". The species was formerly considered a subspecies of the Chilean swallow, most likely due to the similarity in morphology and calls. It is occasionally placed in the genus Iridoprocne with the tree swallow, mangrove swallow, white-winged swallow, and Chilean swallow. A study of the mitochondrial DNA of Tachycineta supports the split, although studies do show that the white-rumped swallow forms a superspecies, leucorrhoa, with the Chilean swallow. This species is monotypic, with no known subspecies. This swallow is named for its white rump but it is also sometimes called the white-browed swallow, due to its white supraloral streak. ## Description The white-rumped swallow measures 13 centimetres (5.1 in) in length and weighs 17–21 grams (0.60–0.74 oz). It has an average wingspan of 115.7 millimetres (4.56 in). It has a white supraloral streak, a white streak above its eye, and black lores and ear coverts. The lores and ear-coverts have a blue-green gloss. It has black wings, with white tips on its inner secondaries, tertials, and greater wing-coverts. The white tips erode with age. The tail is black and has a shallow fork. The white-rumped swallow also has, as the name implies, a white rump. The rump is not totally white; it has some fine shaft streaks. The rest of the upperparts, in addition to the crown, nape, and forehead, are a glossy blue. These features, when this bird is not breeding, are more greenish-blue. The underparts and underwing-coverts are white. The bill, legs, and feet are black, and the irides are brown. The sexes are alike, and the juvenile can be distinguished by its dusky breast and the fact that it is duller and more brownish. This swallow is similar to the Chilean swallow but can be differentiated by the Chilean swallow's lack of a supraloral white streak. The Chilean swallow also seems to keep its glossy blue upperparts when not breeding. The white-rumped swallow is, in addition, larger than the Chilean swallow. The song of the white-rumped swallow is often described as a soft gurgling or a broken warble. It usually sings while flying at dawn. The call is described as a quick and toneless zzt. The alarm note it uses is short and harsh. ## Distribution This swallow is native to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. It inhabits open and semi-open country near water, the edge of woodland, and human settlements. It also occurs in dry savannas, degraded former forest, and both subtropical and tropical seasonally flooded grassland. It is additionally known to occur in the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay. During the austral winter, the birds in the southern population usually move to the northern parts of its range. This bird can be found at altitudes ranging from sea level to 1,100 metres (3,600 ft). ## Behaviour After the breeding season, the white-rumped swallow forms flocks that sometimes consist of hundreds of individuals. These flocks frequently consist of both the white-rumped swallow and other species of swallows. ### Breeding The white-rumped swallow builds nests in holes or crevices in a tree or dead snag. It also builds them in artificial structures like holes in fence posts or under eaves, typically under those of abandoned buildings. This swallow will sometimes reuse favourable nest sites, which has a positive effect on fledgling survival. It occasionally nests in abandoned nests of the firewood-gatherer. The nests themselves are usually made of plant fibres and lined with hair and feathers. This swallow is solitary and, during the breeding season, is scattered in pairs. Pairs can be seen to fight and chase each other at the nest site. This swallow displays nest prospecting behaviour, visiting potential future nesting sites. Nest prospecting is a behaviour recorded in both breeding and non-breeding individuals, and occurs both after the failure or success of a nest and while the bird is actively nesting. After a nest failure, the average distance an individual travels during a prospecting visit increases dramatically, from about 121 metres (397 ft) to about 5.1 kilometres (3.2 mi). Nest prospecting seems to occur more frequently in individuals with a smaller clutch size. Male visits to other nests could be to care for extra-pair young, although it does not explain female visits. Extra-pair young, or young with parents outside of the breeding pair, account for about 56 percent of all offspring. The breeding season of the white-rumped swallow is from October to December in Brazil, and from October to February in Argentina. During this period, one brood is usually laid, although it will occasionally lay a second brood. On average, 58 percent of nests will fledge at least one chick. The clutch is usually four to seven eggs that transition from pinkish-white when laid to pure white. The eggs measure 19.6 by 13.7 millimetres (0.77 in × 0.54 in) and weigh 1.9 grams (0.067 oz) on average. Clutch size and egg size are noted to usually decrease as the breeding season progresses. Late-season nestlings also weigh less than early-season nestlings. It takes 15 to 16 days for the female to incubate the clutch. About 58 percent of the broods hatch synchronously, although the hatching sometimes lasts over four days. On average, 78 percent of the eggs will hatch. The fledging period is 21 to 25 days, with about 95 percent of the nestlings fledging. The white-rumped swallow, on average, lives for 2.12 years. The male lives slightly longer than the female. ### Diet The white-rumped swallow is an aerial insectivore that usually feeds alone or in small groups, feeding on flies, beetles, flying ants, Orthoptera, and Lepidoptera. It usually feeds close over water, pastures, and open woodland. Occasionally skimming the ground, its flight is fast and direct. It follows humans and other animals, and can usually be seen near humans and animals that are disturbing insects. ## Parasites The shiny cowbird is a brood parasite that occasionally lays its eggs in the nest of white-rumped swallow. After a shiny cowbird fledges, it exhibits behaviour that causes it to be fed more, much to the detriment of white-rumped swallow nestlings. About six percent of nests are affected by this. This swallow has been known to lose nests to the southern house wren, a subspecies of the house wren. ## Conservation status The white-rumped swallow is classified as a least-concern species by the IUCN. This is due to its large range, estimated to be 5,580,000 square kilometres (2,150,000 sq mi), its increase in population, and its large population. Increase in the availability of artificial nest sites may benefit this bird, and could be a factor in its increasing population. It is described as being fairly common in its range.
44,667	Battle of Hastings	1,168,591,444	Battle between English and Normans in 1066	[ "1066 in England", "Battles involving England", "Battles involving the Anglo-Saxons", "Battles involving the Normans", "Conflicts in 1066", "Hastings", "History of East Sussex", "History of Sussex", "Military history of Hastings", "Military history of Sussex", "Norman conquest of England", "Registered historic battlefields in England", "William the Conqueror" ]	The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066 between the Norman-French army of William, the Duke of Normandy, and an English army under the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson, beginning the Norman Conquest of England. It took place approximately 7 mi (11 km) northwest of Hastings, close to the present-day town of Battle, East Sussex, and was a decisive Norman victory. The background to the battle was the death of the childless King Edward the Confessor in January 1066, which set up a succession struggle between several claimants to his throne. Harold was crowned king shortly after Edward's death, but faced invasions by William, his own brother Tostig, and the Norwegian King Harald Hardrada (Harold III of Norway). Hardrada and Tostig defeated a hastily gathered army of Englishmen at the Battle of Fulford on 20 September 1066, and were in turn defeated by Harold at the Battle of Stamford Bridge five days later. The deaths of Tostig and Hardrada at Stamford Bridge left William as Harold's only serious opponent. While Harold and his forces were recovering, William landed his invasion forces in the south of England at Pevensey on 28 September 1066 and established a beachhead for his conquest of the kingdom. Harold was forced to march south swiftly, gathering forces as he went. The exact numbers present at the battle are unknown as even modern estimates vary considerably. The composition of the forces is clearer: the English army was composed almost entirely of infantry and had few archers, whereas only about half of the invading force was infantry, the rest split equally between cavalry and archers. Harold appears to have tried to surprise William, but scouts found his army and reported its arrival to William, who marched from Hastings to the battlefield to confront Harold. The battle lasted from about 9 am to dusk. Early efforts of the invaders to break the English battle lines had little effect. Therefore, the Normans adopted the tactic of pretending to flee in panic and then turning on their pursuers. Harold's death, probably near the end of the battle, led to the retreat and defeat of most of his army. After further marching and some skirmishes, William was crowned as king on Christmas Day 1066. There continued to be rebellions and resistance to William's rule, but Hastings effectively marked the culmination of William's conquest of England. Casualty figures are hard to come by, but some historians estimate that 2,000 invaders died along with about twice that number of Englishmen. William founded a monastery at the site of the battle, the high altar of the abbey church supposedly placed at the spot where Harold died. ## Background In 911, the Carolingian ruler Charles the Simple allowed a group of Vikings to settle in Normandy under their leader Rollo. Their settlement proved successful, and they quickly adapted to the indigenous culture, renouncing paganism, converting to Christianity, and intermarrying with the local population. Over time, the frontiers of the duchy expanded to the west. In 1002, King Æthelred II married Emma, the sister of Richard II, Duke of Normandy. Their son Edward the Confessor spent many years in exile in Normandy, and succeeded to the English throne in 1042. This led to the establishment of a powerful Norman interest in English politics, as Edward drew heavily on his former hosts for support, bringing in Norman courtiers, soldiers, and clerics and appointing them to positions of power, particularly in the Church. Edward was childless and embroiled in conflict with the formidable Godwin, Earl of Wessex, and his sons, and he may also have encouraged Duke William of Normandy's ambitions for the English throne. ### Succession crisis in England King Edward's death on 5 January 1066 left no clear heir, and several contenders laid claim to the throne of England. Edward's immediate successor was the Earl of Wessex, Harold Godwinson, the richest and most powerful of the English aristocrats and son of Godwin, Edward's earlier opponent. Harold was elected king by the Witenagemot of England and crowned by Ealdred, the Archbishop of York, although Norman propaganda claimed that the ceremony was performed by Stigand, the uncanonically elected Archbishop of Canterbury. Harold was at once challenged by two powerful neighbouring rulers. Duke William claimed that he had been promised the throne by King Edward and that Harold had sworn agreement to this. Harald Hardrada of Norway also contested the succession. His claim to the throne was based on an agreement between his predecessor Magnus the Good and the earlier King of England Harthacnut, whereby, if either died without heir, the other would inherit both England and Norway. William and Harald Hardrada immediately set about assembling troops and ships for separate invasions. ### Tostig and Hardrada's invasions In early 1066, Harold's exiled brother Tostig Godwinson raided southeastern England with a fleet he had recruited in Flanders, later joined by other ships from Orkney. Threatened by Harold's fleet, Tostig moved north and raided in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. He was driven back to his ships by the brothers Edwin, Earl of Mercia and Morcar, Earl of Northumbria. Deserted by most of his followers, he withdrew to Scotland, where he spent the middle of the year recruiting fresh forces. Hardrada invaded northern England in early September, leading a fleet of more than 300 ships carrying perhaps 15,000 men. Hardrada's army was further augmented by the forces of Tostig, who supported the Norwegian king's bid for the throne. Advancing on York, the Norwegians occupied the city after defeating a northern English army under Edwin and Morcar on 20 September at the Battle of Fulford. ## English army and Harold's preparations The English army was organised along regional lines, with the fyrd, or local levy, serving under a local magnate – whether an earl, bishop, or sheriff. The fyrd was composed of men who owned their own land, and were equipped by their community to fulfil the king's demands for military forces. For every five hides, or units of land nominally capable of supporting one household, one man was supposed to serve. It appears that the hundred was the main organising unit for the fyrd. As a whole, England could furnish about 14,000 men for the fyrd, when it was called out. The fyrd usually served for two months, except in emergencies. It was rare for the whole national fyrd to be called out; between 1046 and 1065 it was only done three times, in 1051, 1052, and 1065. The king also had a group of personal armsmen, known as housecarls, who formed the backbone of the royal forces. Some earls also had their own forces of housecarls. Thegns, the local landowning elites, either fought with the royal housecarls or attached themselves to the forces of an earl or other magnate. The fyrd and the housecarls both fought on foot, with the major difference between them being the housecarls' superior armour. The English army does not appear to have had a significant number of archers. Harold had spent mid-1066 on the south coast with a large army and fleet waiting for William to invade. The bulk of his forces were militia who needed to harvest their crops, so on 8 September Harold dismissed the militia and the fleet. Learning of the Norwegian invasion he rushed north, gathering forces as he went, and took the Norwegians by surprise, defeating them at the Battle of Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Harald Hardrada and Tostig were killed, and the Norwegians suffered such great losses that only 24 of the original 300 ships were required to carry away the survivors. The English victory came at great cost, as Harold's army was left in a battered and weakened state, and far from the south. ## William's preparations and landing William assembled a large invasion fleet and an army gathered from Normandy and the rest of France, including large contingents from Brittany and Flanders. He spent almost nine months on his preparations, as he had to construct a fleet from nothing. According to some Norman chronicles, he also secured diplomatic support, although the accuracy of the reports has been a matter of historical debate. The most famous claim is that Pope Alexander II gave a papal banner as a token of support, which only appears in William of Poitiers's account, and not in more contemporary narratives. In April 1066 Halley's Comet appeared in the sky, and was widely reported throughout Europe. Contemporary accounts connected the comet's appearance with the succession crisis in England. William mustered his forces at Saint-Valery-sur-Somme, and was ready to cross the English Channel by about 12 August. But the crossing was delayed, either because of unfavourable weather or to avoid being intercepted by the powerful English fleet. The Normans crossed to England a few days after Harold's victory over the Norwegians, following the dispersal of Harold's naval force, and landed at Pevensey in Sussex on 28 September. A few ships were blown off course and landed at Romney, where the Normans fought the local fyrd. After landing, William's forces built a wooden castle at Hastings, from which they raided the surrounding area. More fortifications were erected at Pevensey. ### Norman forces at Hastings The exact numbers and composition of William's force are unknown. A contemporary document claims that William had 776 ships, but this may be an inflated figure. Figures given by contemporary writers for the size of the army are highly exaggerated, varying from 14,000 to 150,000. Modern historians have offered a range of estimates for the size of William's forces: 7,000–8,000 men including 1,000–2,000 cavalry; 10,000–12,000 men; 10,000 men including 3,000 cavalry; or 7,500 men. The army consisted of about one half infantry, one quarter cavalry, and one quarter archers or crossbowmen. Later lists of companions of William the Conqueror are extant, but most are padded with extra names; only about 35 named individuals can be reliably identified as having been with William at Hastings. The main armour was chainmail hauberks, usually knee-length, with slits to allow riding, some with sleeves to the elbows. Some hauberks may have been made of scales attached to a tunic, with the scales made of metal, horn or hardened leather. Headgear was usually a conical metal helmet with a vertical band guarding the bridge of the nose. Horsemen and infantry carried shields. The infantryman's shield was usually round and made of wood with metal reinforcement. Horsemen changed to a kite-shaped shield and were usually armed with a lance. The couched lance, carried tucked against the body under the right arm, was relatively new and probably not used at Hastings, as the terrain was unfavourable for long cavalry charges. Both infantry and cavalry usually fought with a straight sword, long and double-edged. The infantry could also use javelins and long spears. Some of the cavalry may have used a mace instead of a sword. Archers would have used a self bow or a crossbow, and most would not have had armour. ## Harold moves south After defeating his brother Tostig and Harald Hardrada in the north, Harold left much of his forces in the north, including Morcar and Edwin, and marched the rest of his army south to deal with the threatened Norman invasion. It is unclear when Harold learned of William's landing, but it was probably during the march. Harold stopped in London for about a week before Hastings, so it is likely that he spent about a week on his march south, averaging about 27 mi (43 km) per day, for the approximately 200 mi (320 km). Harold camped at Caldbec Hill on the night of 13 October, near a "hoar-apple tree", about 8 mi (13 km) from William's castle at Hastings. Some of the early contemporary French accounts mention an emissary or emissaries sent by Harold to William, which is likely, though nothing came of it. Although Harold attempted to surprise the Normans, William's scouts reported the English arrival to the duke. The exact events preceding the battle are obscure, with contradictory accounts in the sources, but all agree that William's army advanced from his castle towards the enemy. Harold had taken a defensive position at the top of Senlac Hill (present-day Battle, East Sussex), about 6 mi (9.7 km) from William's castle at Hastings. ### English forces at Hastings The exact number of soldiers in Harold's army at Hastings is unknown, as contemporary records do not give reliable figures. Some Norman sources give 400,000 to 1,200,000 on Harold's side, while English sources seem to underestimate Harold's army, perhaps to make the English defeat seem less devastating. Recent historians have suggested figures of between 5,000 and 13,000, while most argue for a figure of 7,000–8,000 English troops. These men would have been a mix of the fyrd and housecarls. Few individual Englishmen are known to have been present; about 20 named individuals can reasonably be assumed to have fought with Harold at Hastings, including Harold's brothers Gyrth and Leofwine and two other relatives. The English army consisted entirely of infantry. It is possible that some of the higher-class members of the army rode to battle, but then dismounted when battle was joined to fight on foot. The core of the army was made up of housecarls, full-time professional soldiers. Their armour consisted of a conical helmet, a mail hauberk, and a shield, which might be either kite-shaped or round. Most housecarls fought with the two-handed Danish battleaxe, but they could also carry a sword. The rest of the army was made up of levies from the fyrd, also infantry but more lightly armoured and not professionals. Most of the infantry would have formed part of the shield wall, in which the front ranks locked their shields together. Behind them would have been axemen and javelins as well as archers. ## Battle ### Background and location Because many of the primary accounts contradict each other at times, it is impossible to provide an authoritative description of the battle. The only undisputed facts are that fighting began at 9 am Saturday 14 October 1066 and that the battle lasted until dusk. Sunset on the day of the battle was at 4:54 pm, with the battlefield mostly dark by 5:54 pm and in full darkness by 6:24 pm. Moonrise that night was not until 11:12 pm, so once the sun set, there was little light on the battlefield. William of Jumièges reports that Duke William kept his army armed and ready against a surprise attack for the entire night before. The battle took place 7 mi (11 km) north of Hastings at the present-day town of Battle, between two hills – Caldbec Hill to the north and Telham Hill to the south. The area was heavily wooded, with a marsh nearby. The name traditionally given to the battle is unusual – there were several settlements much closer to the battlefield than Hastings. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle called it the battle "at the hoary apple tree". Within 40 years, the battle was described by the Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis as "Senlac", a Norman-French adaptation of the Old English word "Sandlacu", which means "sandy water". This may have been the name of the stream that crosses the battlefield. The battle was already being referred to as "bellum Haestingas" or "Battle of Hastings" by 1086, in the Domesday Book. The sun rose at 6:48 am that morning, with the day unusually bright. The weather conditions are not recorded. The precise route of the English army southward to the battlefield is not known. Several roads are possible: one, an old Roman road that ran from Rochester to Hastings has long been favoured because of a large coin hoard found nearby in 1876. Another possibility is the Roman road between London and Lewes and then over local tracks to the battlefield. Some accounts of the battle indicate that the Normans advanced from Hastings to the battlefield, but the contemporary account of William of Jumièges places the Normans at the site of the battle the night before. Most historians incline towards the former view, but M. K. Lawson argues that William of Jumièges's account is correct. ### Dispositions of forces and tactics Harold's forces deployed in a small, dense formation at the top of a steep slope, with their flanks protected by woods and marshy ground in front of them. The line may have extended far enough to be anchored on a nearby stream. The English formed a shield wall, with the front ranks holding their shields close together or even overlapping to provide protection from attack. Sources differ on the exact site that the English fought on: some sources state the site of the abbey, but some newer sources suggest it was Caldbec Hill. More is known about the Norman deployment. Duke William appears to have arranged his forces in three groups, or "battles", which roughly corresponded to their origins. The left units were the Bretons, along with those from Anjou, Poitou and Maine. This division was led by Alan the Red, a relative of the Breton count. The centre was held by the Normans, under the direct command of the duke and with many of his relatives and kinsmen grouped around the ducal party. The final division, on the right, consisted of the Frenchmen, along with some men from Picardy, Boulogne, and Flanders. The right was commanded by William fitzOsbern and Count Eustace II of Boulogne. The front lines were made up of archers, with a line of foot soldiers armed with spears behind. There were probably a few crossbowmen and slingers in with the archers. The cavalry was held in reserve, and a small group of clergymen and servants situated at the base of Telham Hill was not expected to take part in the fighting. William's disposition of his forces implies that he planned to open the battle with archers in the front rank weakening the enemy with arrows, followed by infantry who would engage in close combat. The infantry would create openings in the English lines that could be exploited by a cavalry charge to break through the English forces and pursue the fleeing soldiers. ### Beginning of the battle The battle opened with the Norman archers shooting uphill at the English shield wall, to little effect. The uphill angle meant that the arrows either bounced off the shields of the English or overshot their targets and flew over the top of the hill. The lack of English archers hampered the Norman archers, as there were few English arrows to be gathered up and reused. After the attack from the archers, William sent the spearmen forward to attack the English. They were met with a barrage of missiles, not arrows but spears, axes and stones. The infantry was unable to force openings in the shield wall, and the cavalry advanced in support. The cavalry also failed to make headway, and a general retreat began, blamed on the Breton division on William's left. A rumour started that the duke had been killed, which added to the confusion. The English forces began to pursue the fleeing invaders, but William rode through his forces, showing his face and yelling that he was still alive. The duke then led a counter-attack against the pursuing English forces; some of the English rallied on a hillock before being overwhelmed. It is not known whether the English pursuit was ordered by Harold or if it was spontaneous. Wace relates that Harold ordered his men to stay in their formations but no other account gives this detail. The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the death of Harold's brothers Gyrth and Leofwine occurring just before the fight around the hillock. This may mean that the two brothers led the pursuit. The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio relates a different story for the death of Gyrth, stating that the duke slew Harold's brother in combat, perhaps thinking that Gyrth was Harold. William of Poitiers states that the bodies of Gyrth and Leofwine were found near Harold's, implying that they died late in the battle. It is possible that if the two brothers died early in the fighting their bodies were taken to Harold, thus accounting for their being found near his body after the battle. The military historian Peter Marren speculates that if Gyrth and Leofwine died early in the battle, that may have influenced Harold to stand and fight to the end. ### Feigned flights A lull probably occurred early in the afternoon, and a break for rest and food would probably have been needed. William may have also needed time to implement a new strategy, which may have been inspired by the English pursuit and subsequent rout by the Normans. If the Normans could send their cavalry against the shield wall and then draw the English into more pursuits, breaks in the English line might form. William of Poitiers says the tactic was used twice. Although arguments have been made that the chroniclers' accounts of this tactic were meant to excuse the flight of the Norman troops from battle, this is unlikely as the earlier flight was not glossed over. It was a tactic used by other Norman armies during the period. Some historians have argued that the story of the use of feigned flight as a deliberate tactic was invented after the battle; however most historians agree that it was used by the Normans at Hastings. Although the feigned flights did not break the lines, they probably thinned out the housecarls in the English shield wall. The housecarls were replaced with members of the fyrd, and the shield wall held. Archers appear to have been used again before and during an assault by the cavalry and infantry led by the duke. Although 12th-century sources state that the archers were ordered to shoot at a high angle to shoot over the front of the shield wall, there is no trace of such an action in the more contemporary accounts. It is not known how many assaults were launched against the English lines, but some sources record various actions by both Normans and Englishmen that took place during the afternoon's fighting. The Carmen claims that Duke William had two horses killed under him during the fighting, but William of Poitiers's account states that it was three. ### Death of Harold Harold appears to have died late in the battle, although accounts in the various sources are contradictory. William of Poitiers only mentions his death, without giving any details on how it occurred. The Tapestry is not helpful, as it shows a figure holding an arrow sticking out of his eye next to a falling fighter being hit with a sword. Over both figures is a statement "Here King Harold has been killed". It is not clear which figure is meant to be Harold, or if both are meant. The earliest written mention of the traditional account of Harold dying from an arrow to the eye dates to the 1080s from a history of the Normans written by an Italian monk, Amatus of Montecassino. William of Malmesbury stated that Harold died from an arrow to the eye that went into the brain, and that a knight wounded Harold at the same time. Wace repeats the arrow-to-the-eye account. The Carmen states that Duke William killed Harold, but this is unlikely, as such a feat would have been recorded elsewhere. The account of William of Jumièges is even more unlikely, as it has Harold dying in the morning, during the first fighting. The Chronicle of Battle Abbey states that no one knew who killed Harold, as it happened in the press of battle. A modern biographer of Harold, Ian Walker, states that Harold probably died from an arrow in the eye, although he also says it is possible that Harold was struck down by a Norman knight while mortally wounded in the eye. Another biographer of Harold, Peter Rex, after discussing the various accounts, concludes that it is not possible to declare how Harold died. Harold's death left the English forces leaderless, and they began to collapse. Many of them fled, but the soldiers of the royal household gathered around Harold's body and fought to the end. The Normans began to pursue the fleeing troops, and except for a rearguard action at a site known as the "Malfosse", the battle was over. Exactly what happened at the Malfosse, or "Evil Ditch", and where it took place, is unclear. It occurred at a small fortification or set of trenches where some Englishmen rallied and seriously wounded Eustace of Boulogne before being defeated by the Normans. ### Reasons for the outcome Harold's defeat was probably due to several circumstances. One was the need to defend against two almost simultaneous invasions. The fact that Harold had dismissed his forces in southern England on 8 September also contributed to the defeat. Many historians fault Harold for hurrying south and not gathering more forces before confronting William at Hastings, although it is not clear that the English forces were insufficient to deal with William's forces. Against these arguments for an exhausted English army, the length of the battle, which lasted an entire day, shows that the English forces were not tired by their long march. Tied in with the speed of Harold's advance to Hastings is the possibility Harold may not have trusted Earls Edwin of Mercia and Morcar of Northumbria once their enemy Tostig had been defeated, and declined to bring them and their forces south. Modern historians have pointed out that one reason for Harold's rush to battle was to contain William's depredations and keep him from breaking free of his beachhead. Most of the blame for the defeat probably lies in the events of the battle. William was the more experienced military leader, and in addition the lack of cavalry on the English side allowed Harold fewer tactical options. Some writers have criticised Harold for not exploiting the opportunity offered by the rumoured death of William early in the battle. The English appear to have erred in not staying strictly on the defensive, for when they pursued the retreating Normans they exposed their flanks to attack. Whether this was due to the inexperience of the English commanders or the indiscipline of the English soldiers is unclear. In the end, Harold's death appears to have been decisive, as it signalled the break-up of the English forces in disarray. The historian David Nicolle said of the battle that William's army "demonstrated – not without difficulty – the superiority of Norman-French mixed cavalry and infantry tactics over the Germanic-Scandinavian infantry traditions of the Anglo-Saxons." ## Aftermath The day after the battle, Harold's body was identified, either by his armour or by marks on his body. His personal standard was presented to William, and later sent to the papacy. The bodies of the English dead, including some of Harold's brothers and housecarls, were left on the battlefield, although some were removed by relatives later. The Norman dead were buried in a large communal grave, which has not been found. Exact casualty figures are unknown. Of the Englishmen known to be at the battle, the number of dead implies that the death rate was about 50 per cent of those engaged, although this may be too high. Of the named Normans who fought at Hastings, one in seven is stated to have died, but these were all noblemen, and it is probable that the death rate among the common soldiers was higher. Although Orderic Vitalis's figures are highly exaggerated, his ratio of one in four casualties may be accurate. Marren speculates that perhaps 2,000 Normans and 4,000 Englishmen were killed at Hastings. Reports stated that some of the English dead were still being found on the hillside years later. Although scholars thought for a long time that remains would not be recoverable, due to the acidic soil, recent finds have changed this view. One skeleton that was found in a medieval cemetery, and originally was thought to be associated with the 13th century Battle of Lewes, now is thought to be associated with Hastings instead. One story relates that Gytha, Harold's mother, offered the victorious duke the weight of her son's body in gold for its custody, but was refused. William ordered that Harold's body be thrown into the sea, but whether that took place is unclear. Another story relates that Harold was buried at the top of a cliff. Waltham Abbey, which had been founded by Harold, later claimed that his body had been secretly buried there. Other legends claimed that Harold did not die at Hastings, but escaped and became a hermit at Chester. William expected to receive the submission of the surviving English leaders after his victory, but instead Edgar the Ætheling was proclaimed king by the Witenagemot, with the support of Earls Edwin and Morcar, Stigand, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Ealdred, the Archbishop of York. William therefore advanced on London, marching around the coast of Kent. He defeated an English force that attacked him at Southwark but was unable to storm London Bridge, forcing him to reach the capital by a more circuitous route. William moved up the Thames valley to cross the river at Wallingford, where he received the submission of Stigand. He then travelled north-east along the Chilterns, before advancing towards London from the north-west, fighting further engagements against forces from the city. The English leaders surrendered to William at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. William was acclaimed King of England and crowned by Ealdred on 25 December 1066, in Westminster Abbey. Despite the submission of the English nobles, resistance continued for several years. There were rebellions in Exeter in late 1067, an invasion by Harold's sons in mid-1068, and an uprising in Northumbria in 1068. In 1069 William faced more troubles from Northumbrian rebels, an invading Danish fleet, and rebellions in the south and west of England. He ruthlessly put down the various risings, culminating in the Harrying of the North in late 1069 and early 1070 that devastated parts of northern England. A further rebellion in 1070 by Hereward the Wake was also defeated by the king, at Ely. Battle Abbey was founded by William at the site of the battle. According to 12th-century sources, William made a vow to found the abbey, and the high altar of the church was placed at the site where Harold had died. More likely, the foundation was imposed on William by papal legates in 1070. The topography of the battlefield has been altered by subsequent construction work for the abbey, and the slope defended by the English is now much less steep than it was at the time of the battle; the top of the ridge has also been built up and levelled. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the abbey's lands passed to secular landowners, who used it as a residence or country house. In 1976 the estate was put up for sale and purchased by the government with the aid of some American donors who wished to honour the 200th anniversary of American independence. The battlefield and abbey grounds are currently owned and administered by English Heritage and are open to the public. The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered narrative of the events leading up to Hastings probably commissioned by Odo of Bayeux soon after the battle, perhaps to hang at the bishop's palace at Bayeux. In modern times annual reenactments of the Battle of Hastings have drawn thousands of participants and spectators to the site of the original battle. Some English veterans of the battle left England and joined the Varangian Guard in Constantinople. They fought the Normans again at the Battle of Dyrrhachium in 1081, and were defeated again in similar circumstances. ## See also - Ermenfrid Penitential
84,806	Dream of the Rarebit Fiend	1,172,938,907	Early 20th-century American comic strip	[ "1904 comics debuts", "1925 comics endings", "American comic strips", "Animated films based on comics", "Articles containing video clips", "Comic strips by Winsor McCay", "Comics about dreams", "Comics adapted into animated series", "Fantasy comics", "Films directed by Winsor McCay", "Gag-a-day comics", "Public domain comics" ]	Dream of the Rarebit Fiend is a newspaper comic strip by American cartoonist Winsor McCay, begun September 10, 1904. It was McCay's second successful strip, after Little Sammy Sneeze secured him a position on the cartoon staff of the New York Herald. Rarebit Fiend appeared in the Evening Telegram, a newspaper published by the Herald. For contractual reasons, McCay signed the strip with the pen name "Silas". The strip had no continuity or recurring characters, but a recurring theme: a character has a nightmare or other bizarre dream, usually after eating a Welsh rarebit—a cheese-on-toast dish. The character awakens in the closing panel and regrets having eaten the rarebit. The dreams often reveal unflattering sides of the dreamers' psyches—their phobias, hypocrisies, discomforts, and dark fantasies. This was in great contrast to the colorful fantasy dreams in McCay's signature strip Little Nemo, which he began in 1905. Whereas children were Nemos target audience, McCay aimed Rarebit Fiend at adults. The popularity of Rarebit Fiend and Nemo led to McCay gaining a contract in 1911 with William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers with a star's salary. His editor there thought McCay's highly skilled cartooning "serious, not funny", and had McCay give up comic strips in favor of editorial cartooning. McCay revived the strip in 1923–1925 as Rarebit Reveries, of which few examples have survived. A number of film adaptations of Rarebit Fiend have appeared, including Edwin S. Porter's live-action Dream of a Rarebit Fiend in 1906, and four pioneering animated films by McCay himself: How a Mosquito Operates in 1912, and 1921's Bug Vaudeville, The Pet, and The Flying House. The strip is said to have anticipated a number of recurring ideas in popular culture, such as marauding giant beasts damaging cities—as later popularized by King Kong and Godzilla. ## Overview Winsor McCay first produced Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in 1904, a year before the dream romps of his Little Nemo and a full generation before the artists of the Surrealist movement unleashed the unconscious on the public. The strip had no recurring characters, but followed a theme: after eating a Welsh rarebit, the day's protagonist would be subject to the darker side of his psyche. Typically, the strip would begin with an absurd situation which became more and more absurd until the Fiend—the dreamer—awakened in the final panel. Some situations were merely silly: elephants falling from the ceiling, or two women's mink coats having a fight. Other times, they could be more disturbing: characters finding themselves dismembered, buried alive from a first-person perspective or a child's mother being planted and becoming a tree. In some strips the Fiend was a spectator watching fantastic or horrible things happen to someone close to themself. The protagonists are typically, but not always, of America’s growing middle-class urban population whom McCay subjects to fears of public humiliation, or loss of social esteem or respectability, or just the uncontrollably weird nature of being. Rarebit Fiend was the only one of McCay's strips in which he approached social or political topics, or dealt with contemporary life. He addressed religious leaders, alcoholism, homelessness, political speeches, suicide, fashion, and other topics, whereas his other strips were fantasy or had seemingly vague, timeless backgrounds. The strip referenced contemporary events such as the 1904 election of Theodore Roosevelt; the recently built Flatiron Building (1902) and St. Regis Hotel (1904) in New York City; and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. The rarebit is a dish typically made with rich cheese thinned with ale and served melted on toast with cayenne and mustard mixed in. McCay used it despite its relative innocuousness: cultural theorist Scott Bukatman states rarebit was not the sort of dish a person would associate with having nightmares , thereby demonstrating his unfamiliarity with a belief long held - particularly in England - that the consumption of cheese - and more especially toasted cheese - was likely to cause unpleasant dreams. McCay's most famous character, Little Nemo, first appeared in the first year of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, on December 10, 1904. In 1905, McCay had Nemo appear in his own strip in the New York Herald. In comparison to Little Nemo, the artwork of the Rarebit Fiend strips had minimal backgrounds, and were usually done from a static perspective with the main characters often in a fixed position. The content of Rarebit Fiend played a much bigger role than it did in Little Nemo, whose focus was on beautiful visuals. The stories were self-contained, whereas the Nemo story continued from week to week. The dreams in Nemo were aimed at children, but Rarebit Fiend had adult-oriented subjects—social embarrassment, fear of dying or going insane, and so on. Some of the dreams in both strips were wish-fulfillment fantasies. Unlike most comic strips from the time, Rarebit Fiend is not (directly) humorous or escapist. The strips highlight readers' darker selves—hypocrisies, deceitfulness, phobias, and discomfort. They offer often biting social commentary and show marital, money, and religious matters in a negative light. McCay had an interest in pushing formal boundaries, and playful self-referentiality plays a role in many of the strips; characters sometimes refer to McCay's alter-ego "Silas" or to the reader. Though frequent in Rarebit Fiend, this self-referentiality does not appear in McCay's other strips. In contrast to the skilled artwork, the lettering in the dialogue balloons, as in McCay's other work, was awkward and could approach illegibility, especially in reproductions, where the artwork has normally been greatly reduced in size. McCay seemed to show little regard for the dialogue balloons, their content, and their placement in the composition. They tend to contain repetitive monologues expressing the increasing distress of the speakers, and show that McCay's gift was in the visual and not the verbal. ## Background McCay began cartooning in the 1890s and had a prolific output published in magazines and newspapers. He became known for his ability to draw quickly, a talent he often employed during chalk talks on the vaudeville stage (alongside the likes of Harry Houdini and W. C. Fields). Before Dream of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo, McCay had shown an interest in the topic of dreams. Some of his earlier works, numbering at least 10 regular comic strips, had titles such as Daydreams and It Was Only a Dream. McCay's were not the first dream-themed comic strips to be published: McCay's employer, the New York Herald, had printed at least three such strips, beginning with Charles Reese's Drowsy Dick in 1902. Psychoanalysis and dream interpretation had begun to enter the public consciousness with the 1900 publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. McCay first proposed a strip in which a tobacco fiend finds himself at the North Pole, unable to secure a cigarette and a light. In the last panel he awakens to find it a dream. The Herald asked McCay to make a series of the strip, but with a Welsh rarebit theme instead of tobacco, and McCay complied. The strip appeared in a Herald subsidiary, the Evening Telegram, and the Heralds editor required McCay to use a pseudonym for the strip work to keep it separate from his other work. McCay signed Rarebit Fiend strips as "Silas", a name he borrowed from a neighborhood garbage cart driver. After switching to William Randolph Hearst's New York American newspaper in 1911, McCay dropped the "Silas" pseudonym and signed his work with his own name. McCay married in 1891, and the marriage was not a happy one. According to McCay biographer John Canemaker, McCay depicts marriage in Rarebit Fiend as "a minefield of hypocrisy, jealousy, and misunderstanding". McCay was a short man, barely five feet (150 cm) tall. He was dominated by his wife, who stood as tall as he was. Images of small, shy men dominated by their taller or fatter wives appear frequently in Rarebit Fiend. Gigantism, with characters overwhelmed by rapidly growing elements, was another recurring motif, perhaps as compensation on McCay's part for a sense of smallness. McCay's brother Arthur had been put in a mental asylum, which may have inspired the themes of insanity that are common in the strip. Despite the strip's bleak view, McCay's work was so popular that William Randolph Hearst hired him in 1911 with a star's salary. Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane deemed McCay's work "serious, not funny", and had the cartoonist give up his comic strips (including Rarebit Fiend and Nemo) to work full-time illustrating editorials. ### Influences Scholars such as Claude Moliterni, Ulrich Merkl, Alfredo Castelli, and others have located possible influences. These include Edward Lear's popular The Book of Nonsense (1870), Gelett Burgess' The Burgess Nonsense Book (1901), Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) (particularly the pool of tears scene, which seems related to the flood of sweat in one early Rarebit Fiend strip), and a variety of dream cartoons and illustrations that appeared in various periodicals McCay was likely familiar with. The most probable influence on the strip was Welsh Rarebit Tales (1902) by Harle Oren Cummins. Cummins stated he drew inspiration for this collection of fifteen science fiction stories from nightmares brought on by eating Welsh rarebit and lobster. Several of McCay's post-Herald strips from 1911 and 1912 were even titled Dream of a Lobster Fiend. Other influences have been established: H. G. Wells, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy (1904), Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb" (1889), Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis (1896), Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Mark Twain's "The 1,000,000 Pound Bank-Note" (1893). McCay never acknowledged the influence of Sigmund Freud, whose The Interpretation of Dreams had been published in 1900. McCay scholar Ulrich Merkl says it was likely McCay was aware of the Viennese doctor's theories, as they had been widely reported and talked about in the New York newspaper world of which was McCay was a part. ## Publishing history Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was McCay's longest running comic strip. He made over 300 more Rarebit Fiend episodes than he made of the more famous Little Nemo. The first strip appeared on September 10, 1904, in the New York Herald, a few months after the first appearance of McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze. It was McCay's second successful newspaper strip, after Sammy Sneeze landed him a position on the cartooning staff of the Herald. Dream of the Rarebit Fiend ran in the Evening Telegram, which was published by the Herald at the time. The strip appeared two to three times a week. It typically filled a quarter of a newspaper page on weekdays, and half a page on Saturdays. The strip normally appeared in black-and-white, but 29 of the strips appeared in color throughout 1913, run weekly in the Herald. These were strips drawn between 1908 and 1911 which the Evening Telegram had neglected to print. McCay sometimes encouraged readers to submit dream ideas, to be sent care of the Herald to "Silas the Dreamer". McCay acknowledged the submissions he accepted with a "thanks to ..." on the strip beside his own signature. Among those credited were science fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback. Dream of the Rarebit Fiend initial run continued until 1911. It appeared again in various papers between 1911 and 1913 under other titles, such as Midsummer Day Dreams and It Was Only a Dream. From 1923 to 1925 McCay revived the strip under the title Rarebit Reveries. Though signed "Robert Winsor McCay Jr." (McCay's son), the strips appear to be in McCay's own hand, with the possible exception of the lettering. McCay had also signed some of his animation and editorial cartoons with his son's name. As of 2007 only seven examples of Rarebit Reveries were known, though it is nearly certain others were printed. ### Collections The earliest collection, titled Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, appeared in 1905 from Frederick A. Stokes and reprinted 61 of the strips. Dover Publications reprinted this collection in 1973 in a 10% enlarged edition with new introductory material. The Dover edition dropped the final strip from the original collection as it contained ethnic humor that the publisher believed would not be to the taste of a 1970s audience. Rarebit Fiend examples appear in Daydreams and Nightmares (Fantagraphics, 1988/2006; editor Richard Marschall), a collection of miscellaneous work by McCay. Checker Books reprinted many of the Rarebit Fiend strips over eight volumes of the series Winsor McCay: Early Works and in 2006 reprinted 183 of the color Saturday strips in Dream of the Rarebit Fiend: The Saturdays. The Checker books reprinted all but about 300 of the known Rarebit Fiend strips. In July 2007, German art historian Ulrich Merkl self-published a 17 in × 12 in (43.5 cm × 31 cm), 464-page volume called Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, reproducing 369 of the strips in full size. Previous reprintings of the strip reduced the strips to about a third of their originally published size, resulting in loss of detail and making the lettering hard to read. The size of the book made automatic binding impossible, so it had to be bound by hand. The book was limited to 1000 copies, and a DVD was included with scans of the 821 known installments of the strip, the complete text of the book, a catalogue raisonné of the strips, and a video of an example of McCay's animation. The sources of the strips were from Merkl's personal collection, the Cartoon Research Library of the Ohio State University, and microfilms purchased from the New York Public Library containing the complete New York Evening Journal run of the strip. Merkl has said that, on average, six hours were required per strip for scanning and restoration. The book also featured two essays by Italian comics editor Alfredo Castelli and one by Jeremy Taylor, former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. A few examples from Dream of the Rarebit Fiend were reprinted in Forgotten Fantasy: Sunday Comics 1900-1915, published in 2011 by Sunday Press Books. ISBN ## Other media McCay's work was very popular. It was adapted to film by McCay and others, and was optioned for Broadway. A "comic opera or musical extravanganza" called Dream of the Welsh Rarebit Fiend went unproduced, though McCay signed a contract to collaborate on it with music by Max Hirschfeld and lyrics by George Henry Payne and Robert Gilbert Welch. ### Film #### Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906) Film pioneer Edwin S. Porter produced a seven-minute live-action film adaptation called The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend in 1906 for the Edison Company. The Fiend was played by John P. Brawn, who is tormented by imps in his bed, which flies through the air and leaves him hanging from a steeple—a scene similar to that of an early strips that ran on January 28, 1905. #### Animation by McCay McCay produced four hand-drawn animated films based upon his Rarebit Fiend series: ##### How a Mosquito Operates (1912) Put together in December 1911, and released in 1912, McCay's second film (also known as The Story of a Mosquito) is one of the earliest examples of line-drawn animation. A giant top-hatted mosquito flies in through a window to feed on a man in bed, who tries in vain to defend himself. The mosquito drinks itself so full that it explodes. Rather than expanding like a balloon, the mosquito fills up in a naturalistic fashion according to its body structure. The idea for the film came from a Rarebit Fiend strip published on June 5, 1909. McCay biographer John Canemaker commends McCay for his ability to imbue the mosquito with character and a personality. ##### Bug Vaudeville (1921) The series title is pluralized for this film. In the fantasy Bug Vaudeville, a tramp comes out from a group of meticulously drawn trees and falls asleep, muttering that cheese cakes give him strange dreams. A series of bugs put on performance after performance against highly detailed and realistic backgrounds. The performance ends with a spider who grabs a silhouetted member of the audience and eats him whole. The film was released around September 12, 1921, and draws from McCay's experiences in the worlds of the circus and vaudeville. The film is presented as a vaudeville show, though without the stage interaction McCay used in Gertie the Dinosaur. Film critic Andrew Sarris praised Bug Vaudeville as his favorite of McCay's films for "the linear expressiveness of the drawings and the intuitive rhythm of the acts". Sarris wrote that a director like Federico Fellini "would be honored by such insight into the ritual of performance". ##### The Pet (1921) The series title is pluralized for this title. The Pet depicts a couple who adopt a mysterious animal with an insatiable appetite. It consumes its milk, the house cat, the house's furnishings, rat poison, and passing vehicles, including airplanes and a blimp, while growing larger and larger. As it wanders among the skyscrapers of the city a swarm of airplanes and zeppelins gather to bomb the beast. A Rarebit Fiend strip from March 8, 1905, inspired The Pet, which was released around September 19, 1921. The dark film was the last over which McCay had "total creative control", according to McCay biographer John Canemaker. Cartoonist Stephen R. Bissette called it "the first-ever 'giant monster attacking a city' motion picture ever made". ##### The Flying House (1921) Against the backdrop of the rapidly urbanizing United States of the 1910s and 1920s, one house from the artificial grid of modern, planned America takes flight in the dream of a woman who has feasted on Welsh rarebit. The Flying House is rendered in meticulous realistic detail. The house is conventional in every respect—until the viewer reaches the attic, where the woman's husband is seen tending an enormous engine. He attaches a propeller to a shaft out front of the house, and tells his wife that his actions are in reaction to their landlord's intention to evict them over nonpayment. He says he plans to "steal the house", and the couple fly away to find a place where their landlord will never find them—a swamp, the ocean, even the moon, where they are chased off by the Man in the Moon with a flyswatter. The film self-consciously directs the viewers to notice the quality and accuracy of the animation when the house takes off into space, calling attention to the "remarkable piece of animation which follows", accurately showing the revolutions of the Earth and Moon and the "beautiful constellation of Orion". In the end, the house is struck by a military rocket, bringing the nightmare to an end as the woman awakens in her bed. The title card reverts to the singular "Dream" for the series title and credits Winsor Selias McCay as the producer. The film was released on September 26, 1921, and was credited to McCay's son Robert, though Canemaker states it is unlikely the elder McCay was not involved. A 1921 New York Times review found the film "interesting because of its excellent workmanship and fantastic character" though it was "not as brightly humorous" as it could be. Film critic Richard Eder contrasted the film's realistic nightmarishness with the more innocent qualities that came to be associated with American cartoons. In 2011, animator Bill Plympton restored the film, using Kickstarter to fund the project. He had the film colorized, and actors Matthew Modine and Patricia Clarkson provided voices. ### Music The Edison Military Band performed a piece called "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend" on an Edison cylinder (Edison 9585) in 1907, written by Thomas W. Thurban. The music was likely inspired by Porter's 1906 film, and may have been intended to accompany it. The piece was written for an 18–20-piece band, and has been recorded numerous times. ## Legacy Rarebit Fiend set up a formula which McCay was to use in the better-known Little Nemo. A large number of the Nemo strips used ideas recycled from Rarebit Fiend, such as the October 31, 1907, "walking bed" episode, which was used in the July 26, 1908, episode of Little Nemo. Comics scholar Jeet Heer called Rarebit Fiend "perhaps the most bizarre newspaper feature in American history". Merkl notes examples of the strip presaging ideas and scenes in later media: the strip includes scenes in which a man kicks a dog, slaps a woman, beats a blind man, and throws another woman out a window, as in Luis Buñuel's film L'Age d'Or (1930); and giant characters let loose in the big city, climbing and damaging buildings and subway trains, as in King Kong (1933). Merkl compares the strip for March 9, 1907, in which a child's bedroom becomes a lion-infested jungle, to the 1950 Ray Bradbury story "The Veldt", and the strip from September 26, 1908, depicting a stretchable face, to Salvador Dalí's surrealist painting Soft self-portrait with fried bacon (1941) and the cosmetic surgeries in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Stephen R. Bissette compares a strip featuring elevators flying from buildings and other scenes to the 2005 Tim Burton take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The strip was most likely an influence on episodes of Frank King's early comic strip Bobby Make-Believe. Many scholars believe that Carl Barks, a professed fan of Little Nemo, was likely exposed to Rarebit Fiend, which appeared in The San Francisco Examiner, which Barks read growing up. Several episodes of Barks's Donald Duck strips appear to have taken their subjects from Rarebit Fiend. Many scenes from animated films by Tex Avery from between 1943 and 1954 are said to show clearly a Rarebit Fiend influence. Science fiction illustrator Frank R. Paul painted a number of pulp magazine covers influenced by Rarebit Fiend. Art Spiegelman paid parodic homage to Rarebit Fiend in his 1974 strip "Real Dream". In 1991, Rick Veitch began producing short comics based on his dreams. Beginning in 1994, he put out twenty-one issues of Roarin' Rick's Rare Bit Fiends from his own King Hell Press. John Ashbery published a poem titled "Dream of a Rarebit Fiend."
31,176,601	4 (Beyoncé album)	1,172,595,158	null	[ "2011 albums", "Albums produced by Beyoncé", "Albums produced by Diplo", "Albums produced by Jeff Bhasker", "Albums produced by Kanye West", "Albums produced by Kuk Harrell", "Albums produced by Ryan Tedder", "Albums produced by Switch (songwriter)", "Albums produced by Symbolyc One", "Albums produced by The-Dream", "Albums recorded at Record Plant (Los Angeles)", "Albums with cover art by Tony Duran", "Beyoncé albums", "Columbia Records albums" ]	4 is the fourth studio album by American singer Beyoncé. It was released on June 24, 2011, by Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records. Following a career hiatus that reignited her creativity, Beyoncé was inspired to create a record with a basis in traditional rhythm and blues that stood apart from contemporary popular music. Her collaborations with songwriters and record producers The-Dream, Tricky Stewart and Shea Taylor produced a mellower tone, developing diverse vocal styles and influences from funk, hip hop, and soul music. Severing professional ties with father and manager Mathew Knowles, Beyoncé eschewed the music of her previous releases in favor of an intimate, personal album. 4's lyrics emphasize monogamy, female empowerment and self-reflection, a result of Beyoncé considering a maturer message to contend artistic credibility. In May 2011, Beyoncé submitted seventy-two songs to Columbia Records for consideration, twelve of which appeared on the standard edition. 4 was promoted in mid-2011 by television performances and festival appearances, such as Beyoncé's headlining Glastonbury Festival set. The album received generally positive reviews by music critics; several publications included it on their year-end lists. It was her fourth consecutive album to debut at number one on the US Billboard 200, and it also reached number one in Brazil, Ireland, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. 4 spawned the international singles "Run the World (Girls)", "Best Thing I Never Had", "Party", "Love On Top" and "Countdown". "Love On Top" won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional R&B Performance at the 55th annual ceremony. As of November 2016, 4 had sold 5 million copies worldwide. ## Background and development Following the release of her third album I Am... Sasha Fierce (2008) and a world tour, Beyoncé took a career hiatus in 2010 "to live life [and] to be inspired by things again". During her hiatus, she "killed" Sasha Fierce, the alter-ego used in her previous studio album, as she felt she could now merge her two personalities. She severed professional ties with father and manager Mathew Knowles, who had guided her career since the 1990s with Destiny's Child, noting that the decision made her feel vulnerable. In an interview for Complex, Beyoncé expressed dissatisfaction with contemporary radio. She intended 4 to help change that status, commenting, "Figuring out a way to get R&B back on the radio is challenging ... With 4, I tried to mix R&B from the '70s and the '90s with rock 'n' roll and a lot of horns to create something new and exciting. I wanted musical changes, bridges, vibrata, live instrumentation and classic songwriting." On her website she wrote, "The album is definitely an evolution. It's bolder than the music on my previous albums because I'm bolder. The more mature I become and the more life experiences I have, the more I have to talk about. I really focused on songs being classics, songs that would last, songs that I could sing when I'm 40 and when I'm 60." Beyoncé also sought to make more artistic music, rather than purely commercially oriented songs. Although much of 4's inspiration came from "touring, travelling, watching rock bands and attending festivals", the album's early musical direction was influenced by Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, whose passion for music motivated Beyoncé. She worked with the band from Fela!, the Broadway musical based on Kuti's life. DJ Swivel, one of 4's engineers, later described how Kuti's use of percussion and horns influenced the track "End of Time". In 2015, The-Dream revealed that he and Beyoncé had composed a whole album based on Kuti's music, although this was scrapped in favor of creating 4, therefore explaining how "End of Time" became so heavily influenced. She also found additional influences in Earth, Wind & Fire, The Stylistics, Lauryn Hill, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson. She used hip hop for a "broader sound" and looked to bring soul singing back, stating, "I used a lot of the brassiness and grittiness in my voice that people hear in my live performances, but not necessarily on my records." ## Recording and production Three months into her hiatus in March 2010, Beyoncé began recording at her husband Jay-Z's Roc the Mic Studios in New York City. One song—"Party"—was recorded because she wanted to see what working relationship would develop with engineer DJ Swivel. Kanye West assisted the production of "Party" after Beyoncé was impressed by his work on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010). André 3000, the only featured artist on 4, contributed a rap verse to the song, which he recorded in Georgia. Six weeks later, in May 2010, she asked Swivel to work on the entire project. Concerning his working relationship with Beyoncé, he commented, "There was no 'We're doing this today.' It was a very kind of open project, where whatever she felt like recording at that time was what we'd work on. It was based on how she felt, her mood, and also her listening to the demos that writers would give us." With Swivel, she experimented with horns, drums, guitars and percussion instruments. Mostly inspired by the Fela! sessions, Swivel began to formulate beats using their own recordings and those from Fela! The project was moved to KMA Studios for a week and a half because Roc the Mic was not large enough. There they began recording "I Care", "Best Thing I Never Had" and "Rather Die Young", and completed "Party". They recorded the songs "Schoolin' Life", "1+1" and "Start Over" at Jungle City Studios in New York. MSR Studios was the final New York City-based studio used, and where most of 4 was recorded—only "Party" and "I Was Here" were recorded entirely at other studios. At MSR, Beyoncé emphasized the use of live instruments on songs such as "I Care" and "End of Time". Consequently, most of the instruments, including drums, keyboards, guitar and bass work, were recorded there and performed by Jeff Bhasker and Shea Taylor. Beyoncé asked Frank Ocean to write and record "I Miss You" at MSR, saying to Complex, "[Jay-Z] had a CD playing in the car one Sunday when we were driving to Brooklyn. I noticed his tone, his arrangements, and his storytelling. I immediately reached out to him—literally the next morning. I asked him to fly to New York and work on my record." After listening to each song, Beyoncé would often request the addition of specific instruments, leaving her production team to make the sounds cohesive. Her vocals were recorded through an Avalon Design 737 preamp and compressed in a 1176 Peak Limiter with a 4:1 ratio. After recording the lead vocals for a track, Swivel cut them in different ways and he and Beyoncé picked the best, then recording the backing vocals. Beyoncé composed her own vocal arrangements and harmonies for each song. Her microphones were carefully placed to achieve a blend of sounds with a clear quality. Swivel spoke of her work ethic in an interview for Sound on Sound: > She's so fast and good at what she does that you can't afford to waste time on anything, so if we're ready to record drums, for example, we're going to work with whatever we have available right there and then. That's why we worked in such great studios, because we know they have great gear, and we don't need to worry about renting gear. Part of my job as an engineer is to make sure the sessions are not only moving along, but moving along at her pace. After the move to MSR, Beyoncé and her production team began travelling. In the United Kingdom, they worked at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Wiltshire—particularly using Gabriel's multi-instrument room—to create "Love On Top". Soon after, Beyoncé joined Jay-Z in a Sydney mansion, as he was working on his collaboration album Watch the Throne (2011) with Kanye West. There they created a "primitive studio" using a microphone, a rig out and Pro Tools software to record. Sessions were also held in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Honolulu. In February 2011, MTV reported the project was nearing completion. 4 was mixed mostly at MixStar Studios in Virginia and mastered at Sterling Sound in New York City. The audio mastering was delayed by a week following the unexpected recording of "I Was Here". Diane Warren had played the song to Jay-Z during a telephone conversation, leading him to put Warren and Beyoncé in contact. In May 2011, Beyoncé submitted seventy-two songs in preparation for the album's release. According to Swivel, an eclectic range of songs were recorded, including ballads, "weird ethereal things" and 1990s R&B and Afrobeat-inspired songs. ## Music and lyrics The final cut of 4 comprises twelve tracks on the standard edition and eighteen on the deluxe edition—three of which are remixes of "Run the World (Girls)". Critics viewed 4 as a major departure from Beyoncé's previous catalogue, with a distinctive mellower sound. The album consists mostly of mid-tempo R&B songs, with 1970s funk, 1980s pop and 1990s soul influences. The second half was more eclectic, exploring a variety of genres including hard rock, reggae and adult contemporary. The Guardian complimented the album's divergence from the "layering [of] Euro-synths on pop-step woomphs" that characterize the music of Beyoncé's contemporaries. The balladry of the first half of 4 combines diverse vocal styles with the use of live instrumentation. "1+1" demonstrates Beyoncé's vocal-flexing over "magnificent guitar bombast" and a soft backing beat, while "Start Over", a mid tempo R&B ballad, uses a futuristic beat with electric elements and synthesizers. "I Miss You", with its "layers of atmospheric keyboards", ambient synthesizers and tinny 808 drums was sung in a half-whisper to exhibit intense emotion. "I Was Here", an understated pop-R&B ballad with indie rock inflections, primarily concerns self-reflection with dramatic vocals. On other songs, Beyoncé explores womanhood. "Best Thing I Never Had", 4's fourth track, was described as a moment of self-realization and a "female call to arms". With vocals that allude to a "wounded bird turned resilient lioness", the song is built on a "winkly piano riff and beefy bass drums". "Dance for You" conveys a more sexual tone through breathy vocals and blaring electric guitars. It forgoes her typical empowerment themes in favor of sensual imagery and comfort with one's partner. "Run the World (Girls)", a female empowerment anthem reminiscent of Beyoncé's more contemporary work on I Am... Sasha Fierce, uses an energetic sample of Major Lazer's "Pon de Floor". The song incorporates "layered melodics", most prominently a military marching drumbeat, while Beyoncé's near-chanted delivery encompasses her full vocal range. The tracks "Countdown" and "End of Time" were distinguished by their musical and lyrical experimentalism. "Countdown" was described as "everywhere on the genre map", although predominantly dancehall-led with a "bristling brass arrangement". Its chorus describes a relationship by counting backwards from ten, using a sample from Boyz II Men's "Uhh Ahh". "End of Time"'s pulsating, brass sound—reminiscent of a marching-band—was heavily influenced by Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti. Kuti's use of horns and percussion instruments was recreated and combined with elements of electronic music and synthesizers. "Lay Up Under Me" is also built on retro horns, featuring upbeat vocals, a sound Ryan Dombal of Pitchfork associated with Michael Jackson's 1979 album Off the Wall. Other tracks were noted for their retro stylization. "Rather Die Young" is a throwback to 1960s doo-wop and Philadelphia soul, with a slow tempo and modern drums. "Party" achieves a vintage aesthetic through minimalistic production, replete with heavy synthesizers and a 1980s smooth-funk groove. The song is unique for its conversation-like structure, in which Beyoncé and guest-vocalist André 3000 sing verses that allude to socialization at parties. Elements of Prince's style was found on "Schoolin' Life" and "1+1". "Schoolin' Life" is an uptempo funk song, with lyrics that advise the listener to live life to the fullest while cautioning them about the consequences of excess. The chorus of "1+1" was compared to "Purple Rain", with themes of sadness and resentment, the song uses soft background vocals and dense percussion. "Love On Top" was noted for its energetic key changes with a joyful tone, evoking the work of Michael and Janet Jackson. Its retro sound is marked by a melding of horns as well as sweet backing harmonies that are most prominent on its bridge and chorus. ## Release and promotion In an interview for Billboard, Beyoncé stated that despite having another concept for the album, she was ultimately influenced by her fans to name the album 4. She described the number four as being "special" to her, as her and Jay-Z's birthdays, several other family and friends' birthdays, and her wedding anniversary fall on the fourth day of the month. The cover of the standard edition was revealed on Beyoncé's website on May 18, 2011. Shot on the rooftop of the Hôtel Meurice in Paris, Beyoncé is looking into the distance with her arms raised over her head, wearing smokey eye makeup, thick gold cuffs and a fox-fur stole by cult French designer Alexandre Vauthier, embellished with Swarovski crystals by the Lesage embroidery house. The cover of the deluxe edition was shown on June 16, where Beyoncé is dressed in a tight-fitting blue-purple dress by French designer Maxime Simoens, holding her hands in her hair. For its artwork, she opted for clothing made by lesser-known designers. The promotional and interior-package images for 4 were shot at the same time. On May 18, 2011, 4's release date in the United States was confirmed on to be June 28. On June 7, the album was leaked onto the Internet in full; Beyoncé's legal representatives issued warnings to infringing websites and leaked tracks were soon removed from such sites. On June 9, Beyoncé responded to the leak through Facebook, commenting, "My music was leaked and while this is not how I wanted to present my new songs, I appreciate the positive response from my fans. When I record music I always think about my fans singing every note and dancing to every beat. I make music to make people happy and I appreciate that everyone has been so anxious to hear my new songs." Following this, reports circulated that Columbia Records executives hoped to cover their assets in fear that the album may be a commercial failure. Rumors had suggested that the label requested from Beyoncé to make changes to the record and reunite Destiny's Child, claims Columbia denied. In August 2013, NME reported that Sony Music were suing a 47-year-old man from Gothenburg for US\$233,000 concerning the leak of 4. The deluxe version was released simultaneously with the standard edition in several countries. In the United States, it was available exclusively through Target stores. Beyoncé made several appearances on television and in live shows to promote 4. She performed "Run the World (Girls)" for the first time on May 17, 2011, on Surprise Oprah! A Farewell Spectacular at the United Center in Chicago. She also performed the song at the 2011 Billboard Music Awards. On May 25, "1+1" was made available for download through the iTunes Store in the United States. The same day, "1+1" was performed at the American Idol final; she introduced it as her favorite song. In June, she performed at the Palais Nikaïa in Nice, Zénith de Lille, and the Galaxie in Amnéville. On June 26, Beyoncé was the closing act at the Glastonbury Festival 2011 in the United Kingdom. She was the first solo female artist to headline the Pyramid stage at the Glastonbury Festival in more than twenty years. A pre-taped performance of "Best Thing I Never Had" and "End of Time" at the Glastonbury Festival was broadcast during the 2011 BET Awards. The following day, Beyoncé's exclusive hour-long interview with Piers Morgan in London was broadcast on Piers Morgan Tonight. She also appeared on the finale of France's X Factor to perform "Run the World" and "Best Thing I Never Had". An MTV television special, Beyoncé: Year of 4, premiered on June 30, documenting Beyoncé's life during 4's production. On July 1, Beyoncé appeared on Good Morning America as part of its "Summer Concert Series" in New York City. She also projected images from 4 on a number of London's landmarks, including Madame Tussauds and Battersea Power Station. She then traveled to Scotland to perform at the T in the Park Festival on July 9, 2011. The next day, she performed at the Oxegen Festival in Ireland. On July 28, 2011, Beyoncé performed "1+1" and "Best Thing I Never Had" on The View; the latter was also performed on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon the same day. From August 16–19, Beyoncé held the 4 Intimate Nights with Beyoncé concerts at the Roseland Ballroom to a standing room only audience. Subsequently, the Live at Roseland: Elements of 4 DVD was released in November. "Love On Top" was sung at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards on August 28, Beyoncé finished the performance by unbuttoning her blazer and rubbing her stomach to confirm her pregnancy. A live performance of "Countdown" recorded in July was broadcast on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in November. ## Singles 4 was Beyoncé' first album that yielded no number-one singles in the United States, as no song from 4 reached the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100. "Run the World (Girls)" was released internationally as the lead single from 4 on April 21, 2011. It reached number twenty-nine on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and number eleven on the UK Singles Chart. "Best Thing I Never Had" followed on June 1, 2011. It fared much better on national charts, reaching number sixteen in the United States, number five in New Zealand and number three in the United Kingdom. "Party" was released as an urban contemporary single in the United States on August 30, 2011; its remix, featuring J. Cole, was released in the United States, Canada and some European countries on October 24, 2011. "Love On Top" was released in Australia as a contemporary hit radio single in September 2011; it was released in Italy, Belgium and the United States later. It topped the US Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs for seven consecutive weeks. "Countdown" was released in the United States and parts of Europe, beginning October 4, 2011. "I Care" was released exclusively in Italy on March 23, 2012. "End of Time" was released exclusively in the United Kingdom on April 23, 2012. ## Critical reception 4 received positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 73, based on 36 reviews. Michael Cragg of The Observer called it Beyoncé's "most accomplished album yet". Slant Magazine's Eric Henderson believed 4 succeeds vocally as an album of mostly intimate and slow-tempo ballads. Mikael Wood of Spin magazine applauded its ballads, mid-tempo songs, and evocations of late 1970s and early 1980s pop-soul. In his review for Rolling Stone, Jody Rosen wrote that Beyoncé eschews contemporary production styles for a more personal and idiosyncratic album. Jon Caramanica of The New York Times viewed it as a good showcase for Beyoncé as a torch singer, because she convincingly sings about heartbreak and the strong emotional effect of love. 'Pitchfork' critic Ryan Dombal found it easygoing, retro-informed, and engaging because it shows "one of the world's biggest stars exploring her talent in ways few could've predicted". AllMusic's Andy Kellman said that the quality of Beyoncé's singing and the songwriting compensate for the assorted arrangement of the songs. Uncut viewed it is an exceptional album in spite of occasionally trite lyrics. In a less enthusiastic review, Adam Markovitz of Entertainment Weekly said the first half of 4 is marred by boring ballads and the songwriting in general are not on-par with Beyoncé's vocal talent. In his review for The Guardian, Alexis Petridis was ambivalent towards the album's 1980s influence and argued that, despite well written songs, it is not very consequential. Time magazine's Claire Suddath said the songs lack lyrical substance, even though they are performed well. Greg Kot, writing in the Chicago Tribune, called 4 inconsistent, short, and unfinished. NME magazine's Hamish MacBain felt Beyoncé did not progress from her past work and that "even the OK bits here" sounded "uninspired". Tom Hull was more critical and gave the album a "C", lamenting the second half of songs' "overkill production" and believing the first half's ballads show that, while "every soul diva of her generation has dreamed of singing like Aretha Franklin ... only Beyoncé has had the ego to think she's done it." ### Accolades 4 was included on various publication's year-end lists. It was ranked as the best album of the year by The New Yorker, and came in the runner-up spot on lists produced by Spin and Amazon. The album was ranked within the top 10 by MSN, where it came in at number three, The Guardian and MTV, which placed it at number four, and the Chicago Sun-Times, which placed it at number six. The BBC ranked it at number seven, while The New York Times listed it as the 10th best album of the year. The album had strong showings on other lists, where it was placed number 13 by Consequence of Sound, number 18 by Stereogum, number 25 by Rolling Stone, number 39 by Spin, number 10 by Club Fonograma, number 34 by Pretty Much Amazing and number 27 by Pitchfork. 4 was included in NPR's Top 50 Favorite Albums of 2011, and was ranked at number 26 in the Pazz & Jops critics poll. It was listed at 37 on Rolling Stone's Women Who Rock: 50 Greatest Albums of All Time. Pitchfork ranked the album at 39 on their list of the Top 100 Best Albums of the decade thus far, with Kyle Kramer writing that 4 "avoided the trappings of safe, later-career bids, instead setting up the perfect platform for Beyoncé as the pop star, a queen for all the people." The album was included on Consequence of Sound's list of The 10 Best Summer Albums of All Time with Kenneth Partridge writing that "whether she's hopelessly heartbroken or crazy in love, Queen Bey works damn hard to make you feel exactly what she's feeling". 4 was named the greatest R&B album of the decade (2010s) by Rated R&B, and the second greatest pop album of the decade by Uproxx. On their ranking of the 200 best albums of the decade, Pitchfork listed 4 at number 31. For BrooklynVegan, it was the 29th best R&B/Rap project of the same period. 4 won R&B Album of the Year at the 2012 Billboard Music Awards and received nominations at the 2011 American Music Awards, the 2011 Soul Train Music Awards, the 38th People's Choice Awards, the 43rd NAACP Image Awards and the 2012 Grammis. At the 55th Annual Grammy Awards, "Love On Top" won the Best Traditional R&B Performance Award. ## Commercial performance On its first day of release, 4 sold around 20,000 copies in the United Kingdom. According to the Official Charts Company data, this was more than the combined sales of its three nearest challengers: Adele's 19 (2008) and 21 (2011) and Lady Gaga's Born This Way (2011). After a week of sales, 4 debuted atop the UK Albums Chart on July 4, 2011, with first-week sales of 89,211 copies, staying there for a second week with sales of 44,929 copies. By May 2013, it had sold 603,548 copies in the United Kingdom. 4 opened at number two on the Australian ARIA Charts, giving Beyoncé her highest chart debut there. 4 debuted at number three on the Canadian Albums Chart, selling 8,700 copies in its first week. It debuted at number two in France, selling 12,393 copies in its first week. According to the Japanese music charting site Oricon, the album debuted at number ten, selling 18,984 copies for the week ending July 11, 2011. In the United States, 4 debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, with first-week sales of 310,000 copies. This gave Beyoncé her fourth consecutive solo album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 album chart, making her the second female artist, after Britney Spears, and third artist overall, tied with Spears and DMX to have her first four studio albums debut atop the Billboard 200. 4's first-week sales became Beyoncé's lowest sales start with a studio album to date. Keith Caulfield of Billboard magazine noted that the album was not released during the festive season and that Beyoncé was so far lacking a hit single, which could help explain the album's softer entry. It marks the third-largest sales week of the year, after the number-one bows of Lady Gaga's Born This Way and Adele's 21. 4 became the ninth numerically titled album to top the chart since 1956. In its second week, the album remained at number one on the Billboard 200, despite a 63% sales decrease, selling 115,000 copies. It hence became the first album by Beyoncé to top the Billboard 200 albums chart for more than one week; an effort succeeded by her self-titled fifth studio album (2013) that remained there for three weeks. On August 1, 2011, the album was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), having shipped one million copies to retail stores. As of August 2022, the album is certified four-times platinum. As of December 2015, it had reached sales of 1.5 million copies in the United States. As of November 2016, it had sold over 5 million copies worldwide. ## Track listing ## Personnel Credits adapted from the liner notes of 4. Performance credits - Beyoncé – vocals, background vocals - André 3000 – vocals, background vocals - Luke Steele – background vocals - Kanye West – background vocals - Consequence – background vocals - Ryan Tedder – background vocals - Billy Kraven – background vocals Visuals and imagery - Tony Duran – photography - Neal Farinah – glam team - Greg Gex – photography - Ty Hunter – fashion director - Kimberly Kimble – glam team - Lisa Logan – glam team - Adam Larson – art director - Melina Matsoukas – creative consultant - Raquel Smith – stylist - Jenke Ahmed Taily – creative director - Francesca Tolot – glam team - Ellen Von Unwerth – photography Instruments - Pete Wolford – guitar - Nikki Glaspie – drums - Lee Blaske – strings - Drew Sayers – baritone, tenor - Chad Hugo – rhythm guitar - Kanye West – drums, keyboards, programming - Jeff Bhasker – keyboard, guitar solo, keyboards and drum programming - Rob Suchecki – guitar - Cole Kamen-Green – trumpet - Josiah Woodson – trumpet - Nick Videen – tenor, alto saxophone - Alex Asher – trombone - Morgan Price – baritone saxophone, tenor - Shea Taylor – alto saxophone, horns arrangement - Luke Steele – guitar - Robert "R.T." Taylor – guitar - Pat Thrall – guitar - Johnny Butler – tenor saxophone - Jack Daley – bass guitar - Ryan Tedder – drums, piano, additional programming - Brent Kutzle – cello, guitar, additional programming - Skyz Muzik – drums, piano, additional programming Technical and production' - The-Dream – production - Tricky Stewart – production - Beyoncé – production, vocal production - Jeff Bhasker – production - Shea Taylor – production - Babyface – production - Antonio Dixon – production - Symbolyc One – production - Caleb McCampbell – production - Kanye West – production - Luke Steele – production - Tom Coyne – mastering - Switch – production - Ryan Tedder – production - Brent Kutzle – production - Kuk Harrell – vocal production, vocal recording - Diplo – production - Carlos McKinney – production - Kaskade – mix, additional production - Jens Bergmark – mix production - Julian Napolitano – mix production - DJ Swivel – recording, vocal recording, mixing - Mark Gray – engineering assistant - Jason Sherwood – engineering assistant - Steven Dennis – engineering assistant - Pete Wolford – engineering assistant - Scott Barnett – engineering assistant - Tony Maserati – mixing - Val Brathwaite – mixing assistant - Ryan Kelly – engineering assistant - Serge Nudel – mixing assistant, engineering assistant - Gloria Kaba – engineering assistant - Şerban Ghenea – mixing - John Hanes – mixing engineer - Phil Seaford – mixing assistant - Gaylord Holomalia – engineering assistant - Christian Mochizuki – engineering assistant - Edwin Delahoz – engineering assistant - Justin Hergett – engineering assistant - Jon Castelli – engineering assistant - Ramón Rivas – engineering assistant - Chris Soper – engineering assistant - Smith Carlson – engineering assistant - Eric Aylands – engineering assistant - Jon Sher – engineering assistant ## Charts ### Weekly charts ### Monthly charts ### Year-end charts ### Decade-end charts ### All-time charts ## Certifications ## Release history ## See also - List of number-one albums of 2011 (Ireland) - List of number-one albums of 2011 (Spain) - List of number-one hits of 2011 (Switzerland) - List of UK Albums Chart number ones of the 2010s - List of UK R&B Albums Chart number ones of 2011 - List of Billboard 200 number-one albums of 2011 - List of Billboard number-one R&B albums of 2011
35,843,621	1860 Boden Professor of Sanskrit election	1,171,854,452	Professorial election at the University of Oxford	[ "1860 elections in the United Kingdom", "1860 in England", "19th century in Oxfordshire", "Bombay Native Infantry", "December 1860 events", "Elections in Oxford", "History of the University of Oxford", "India–United Kingdom relations", "Non-partisan elections", "Sanskrit", "University and college elections in the United Kingdom" ]	The election in 1860 for the position of Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford was a competition between two candidates offering different approaches to Sanskrit scholarship. One was Monier Williams, an Oxford-educated Englishman who had spent 14 years teaching Sanskrit to those preparing to work in British India for the East India Company. The other, Max Müller, was a German-born lecturer at Oxford specialising in comparative philology, the science of language. He had spent many years working on an edition of the Rig Veda (an ancient collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns) and had gained an international reputation for his scholarship. Williams, in contrast, worked on later material and had little time for the "continental" school of Sanskrit scholarship that Müller exemplified. Williams regarded the study of Sanskrit as a means to an end, namely the conversion of India to Christianity. In Müller's opinion, his own work, while it would assist missionaries, was also valuable as an end in itself. The election came at a time of public debate about Britain's role in India in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Opinions were divided on whether greater efforts should be made to convert India or whether to remain sensitive to local culture and traditions. Both men battled for the votes of the electorate (the Convocation of the university, consisting of over 3,700 graduates) through manifestos and newspaper correspondence. Williams laid great stress in his campaign on the intention of the original founder of the chair, that the holder should assist in converting India through dissemination of the Christian scriptures. Müller's view was that his work on the Rig Veda was of great value for missionary work, and published testimonials accordingly. He also wanted to teach wider subjects such as Indian history and literature to assist missionaries, scholars, and civil servants – a proposal that Williams criticised as not in accordance with the original benefactor's wishes. The rival campaigns took out newspaper advertisements and circulated manifestos, and different newspapers backed each man. Although generally regarded as superior to Williams in scholarship, Müller had the double disadvantage (in the eyes of some) of being German and having liberal Christian views. Some of the newspaper pronouncements in favour of Williams were based on a claimed national interest of having an Englishman as Boden professor to assist with the work of governing and converting India. Special trains to Oxford were provided on the day of the election, 7 December 1860, for non-resident members of Convocation to cast their votes. At the end of the hard-fought campaign, Williams won by a majority of over 220 votes. Thereafter, he helped to establish the Indian Institute at Oxford, received a knighthood, and held the chair until his death in 1899. Müller, although deeply disappointed by his defeat, remained in Oxford for the rest of his career, but never taught Sanskrit there. The 1860 election was the last time that Convocation chose the Boden professor, as this power was removed in 1882 as a result of reforms imposed by Parliament. As of 2017, the professorship is still in existence, and is now one of the last remaining Sanskrit professorships in the United Kingdom. ## Background The position of Boden professor at the University of Oxford was established by the bequest of Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Boden of the Bombay Native Infantry, who died in 1811. His will provided that on the death of his daughter (which occurred in 1827), his estate should pass to the university to fund a Sanskrit professorship. His purpose was to convert the people of India to Christianity "by disseminating a knowledge of the Sacred scriptures among them". The university statutes governing the chair provided that the professor should be chosen by the members of Convocation – all those who had obtained the Oxford degree of Master of Arts, whether or not they taught in the university – rather than by the professors and college fellows. At the time of the 1860 election, there were 3,786 members of Convocation. According to the religious historian Gwilym Beckerlegge, the professorship was regarded at the time as "prestigious and handsomely remunerated". An editorial in the British national newspaper The Times in 1860 said that the professorship was "one of the most important, most influential, and most widely known institutions at Oxford, not to say in the whole civilised world." It paid between £900 and £1,000 per year for life. The first Boden professor, Horace Hayman Wilson, was elected in 1832 and died on 8 May 1860. The election for his successor came at a time of public debate about the nature of British missionary work in India, particularly after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The East India Company, which controlled the British territories until they were absorbed into the British Empire in 1858, had had a general policy until 1813 of non-interference with Indian customs, including religion. Christian missionaries required a licence to proselytise. In practice, most could operate without a licence, except for Evangelicals, who were regarded as too radical in an age when Christians from other backgrounds were more prepared to be tolerant of other faiths. As the Evangelical movement grew in strength, it pressed for greater efforts to bring Christianity to India, and so the company relaxed its approach to missionaries in 1813. After 1858, the British government was reluctant to provoke further unrest by interference with local traditions and religion, but many of those charged with running India were themselves Evangelicals sympathetic to efforts to convert the country. As Beckerlegge has commented, "the furtherance of Christian mission had become inextricably bound up with attempts to define Britain's role in India and indeed to justify Britain's presence in India." The issue was whether Britain was there simply to govern India or to "civilise" it, and if the latter, whether to draw up or destroy India's existing culture and religion. Many of those who supported increased missionary work in India, says Beckerlegge, regarded the events of 1857 as "nothing less than a divine judgment" on Britain's failure to bring Christianity to the country. There were two schools of thought on whether Sanskrit should be taught for the purpose of assisting the administration and conversion of India, or for its own merits. The East India Company had provided instruction in Sanskrit to its employees at its college at Haileybury, Hertfordshire, and the College of Fort William in Calcutta, to educate them in local culture. For some, this led to an interest in Indian religion and culture as revealed in the Sanskrit texts. This was in contrast to the situation in continental Europe, where scholars examined Sanskrit as part of the "science of language", comparative philology, rather than for reasons of imperial administration. Fewer European scholars visited India, but many British Sanskritists had lived and worked there. Some British scholars in other fields had strong doubts in any event about Sanskrit, as a "crude linguistic forgery pieced out of Latin and Greek", or as proving little "except a thoroughly unwelcome kinship between Briton and Brahmin", in the words of the American academic Linda Dowling. ## Candidates Although five men indicated their intent to seek the chair in 1860 or were proposed in their absence, in the end the two who contested the election were Monier Williams and Max Müller. Williams (known later in life as Sir Monier Monier-Williams) was the son of an army officer and was born in India. He studied briefly at Balliol College, Oxford, before training at Haileybury for the civil service in India. The death of his brother in battle in India led to him to return to Oxford to complete his degree. He also studied Sanskrit with Wilson before teaching this and other languages at Haileybury from 1844 until 1858, when it closed following the Indian rebellion. He prepared an English–Sanskrit dictionary, at Wilson's prompting, which the East India Company published in 1851; his Sanskrit–English dictionary was supported by the Secretary of State for India. As the Dutch anthropologist Peter van der Veer has written, Williams "had an Evangelical zeal" in line with the views that had inspired Boden to establish the chair. Müller was from the German duchy of Anhalt-Dessau and took up Sanskrit at university as a fresh intellectual challenge after mastering Greek and Latin. At this time, Sanskrit was a comparatively new subject of study in Europe, and its connections with the traditional classical languages had attracted interest from those examining the nature and history of languages. He obtained his doctorate from Leipzig University in 1843, aged 19, and after a year studying in Berlin he began work in Paris on the first printed edition of the Rig Veda (an ancient collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns). What was supposed to be a brief visit to England for research in 1846 turned into a lifelong stay. The Prussian diplomat Baron von Bunsen and Wilson persuaded the directors of the East India Company to provide financial support for Oxford University Press to publish the Rig Veda. Müller settled in Oxford in 1848 and continued his Sanskrit research, becoming Taylorian Professor of Modern European Languages in 1854 after three years as the deputy professor; in this post he was paid £500 per year, half the stipend of the Boden chair. A British subject from 1855, he was elected a fellow of All Souls College in 1858, "an unprecedented honour for a foreigner at that time", in the words of his biographer, the Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Three other scholars indicated an intention to stand for the chair, or were nominated by others, but withdrew before the ballot. The candidacy of Edward Cowell, Professor of Sanskrit at the Government College in Calcutta, was announced in The Times on 28 May 1860, where it was said that Wilson had pronounced him "eminently qualified" to succeed him. He later wrote from India refusing to stand against Müller. Ralph Griffith, a former Boden scholar who was a professor at the Government Sanskrit College in Benares, announced his candidacy in August 1860, but withdrew in November. James R. Ballantyne, principal of the college in Benares, was proposed in June 1860 by friends based in England, who described him as the "chief of British Sanscrit scholars". ### Müller's manifesto Müller announced his candidacy on 14 May 1860, six days after Wilson's death. His submission to Convocation referred to his work in editing the Rig Veda, saying that without it missionaries could not fully learn about the teachings of Hinduism, which impeded their work. He therefore considered that he had "spent the principal part of my life in promoting the object of the Founder of the Chair of Sanskrit." He promised to work exclusively on Sanskrit, and said that he would provide testimonials from "the most eminent Sanskrit scholars in Europe and India" and from missionaries who had used his publications to help "overthrow the ancient systems of idolatry" in India. In due course, he was able to provide a list of missionary societies that had requested copies of the Rig Veda from the East India Company, including the Church Missionary Society and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. ### Williams's manifesto Williams declared his intention to stand for election on 15 May 1860, one day after Müller. In his written submission to Convocation, he emphasised his suitability for appointment in the light of Boden's missionary wishes. After giving details of his life and career, particularly his experience in Sanskrit obtained at Haileybury, he stated that for the past 14 years "the one idea of my life has been to make myself thoroughly conversant with Sanskrit, and by every means in my power to facilitate the study of its literature." He assured voters that, if elected, "my utmost energies shall be devoted to the one object which its Founder had in view;—namely 'The promotion of a more general and critical knowledge of the Sanskrit language, as a means of enabling Englishmen to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian religion.'" Unlike Müller, he regarded the study of Sanskrit "as chiefly a means to the missionary conversion of the Hindus rather than as an end in itself", as Dowling puts it. In this way, Dowling says, he could attempt to deflect attention from his "modest abilities in classical Sanskrit" when compared to Müller's "internationally acknowledged achievements". Moreover, the appeal to Boden's original intentions came during a period when Convocation tended to pay little attention to the expressed wishes of benefactors. ## Rival campaigns In August 1860, Müller wrote to the members of Convocation about his plans to teach a broad range of topics in addition to Sanskrit, including comparative philology, Indian history, and literature. Simply teaching the language "would be but a mean return" for Boden's generosity, he wrote. In this way, he would help to supply "efficient" missionaries, "useful" civil servants, and "distinguished" Boden scholars. In turn, Williams wrote that if Boden had left instructions that the man elected should be the one "most likely to secure a world-wide reputation for the Sanskrit Chair, I confess that I should have hesitated to prosecute my design." However, this was not the case and it would be "unjustifiable" in terms of the statutes governing the chair if the professor were to lecture on wider topics. In his view, the Vedic literature was "of less importance" and the philosophical literature was "very mystical and abstruse", whereas "the classical or modern" period (the laws, two heroic poems, and the plays) was the "most important". Reminding his readers that he had edited two Sanskrit plays, he stated that the literature of the third period constituted the Sanskrit scriptures, not ("as has hitherto been believed") the Veda, "still less the Rig Veda". He commented that Müller's edition of the Rig Veda was requiring "an expenditure of time, labour, money, and erudition far greater than was ever bestowed on any edition of the Holy Bible", adding that Boden did not intend to "aid in the missionary work by perpetuating and diffusing the obsolescent Vedic Scriptures." He said his own approach to Sanskrit scholarship, with his dictionaries and grammar books, was "suited to English minds", unlike Müller's "continental" and "philosophical" approach, which dealt with texts no longer relevant to modern Hindus that missionaries would not benefit from studying. In a letter to The Times published on 29 October 1860, Müller took issue with Williams. To the claim that it would be unjustifiable to teach history, philosophy, and other subjects as Boden professor, he quoted from one of Wilson's public lectures in which he had said that it had always been his intention to offer "a general view of the institutions and social condition, the literature, and religion of the Hindus." He noted that he had published in all three areas into which Williams divided Sanskrit literature, and disputed Williams's views on the relative importance of Vedic literature with reference to a review of one of his publications by Wilson. Williams, he said, "stands as yet alone" in asserting that the heroic poems and the plays, not the Vedas, were the real scriptures. He refused to accept Williams's estimate of the labour involved in the edition of the Rig Veda, and said that to compare his little effort with that carried out on the Bible was "almost irreverent". He concluded by attempting to rebut the claim that Boden would not have wanted the Vedic scriptures to be supported. He noted that the Bishop of Calcutta (George Cotton) had written that it was of "the greatest importance" for missionaries to study Sanskrit and its scriptures "to be able to meet the Pundits on their own ground", and that the bishop's view was that nothing could be more valuable in this work than Müller's edition, and Wilson's translation, of the Rig-Veda." After this letter, Williams complained about Müller conducting his campaign in the newspapers and misrepresenting what Williams was saying. Müller asked three professors and the Provost of Queen's College to consider the accuracy of his letter, and they pronounced in his favour. In Beckerlegge's view, all these replies and counter-replies did was "illustrate the increasingly heated tone of the exchanges" between the two men and their supporters. It was "as if the protagonists were prospective members of Parliament", in the words of one modern scholar. Terence Thomas, a British lecturer in religious studies, records "insults regarding the nationality of Max Müller and the proficiency of Monier Williams as a Sanskritist being bandied back and forth by their supporters." For example, one of the Boden scholars at Oxford, Robinson Ellis, said Williams had not been able to prove that he could read a Sanskrit text. When challenged, he later amended this to a claim that Williams could only read a text when he could compare it to another one, describing this as "mechanical labour which is paid for at the public libraries at Paris and Berlin at the rate of half a crown a year." Each had a committee of helpers; Williams had two, one in London, the other in Oxford. He spent over £1,000 on his campaign – as much as the Boden professor was paid in a year. In June 1860, Müller complained in a letter to his mother about having to write to each one of the "4,000 electors, scattered all over England"; he said that sometimes he wished he had not thought of standing for election, adding "if I don't win, I shall be very cross!". ## Supporters and newspapers According to Beckerlegge, there was a view held by many of those involved in the keenly fought struggle between Williams and Müller that more depended on the result than simply one man's career – missionary success or failure in India, "and even the future stability of British rule in this region" (in the light of events in India a few years previously) might depend on the abilities of the Boden professor. Victory would depend on each side's ability to persuade non-resident members of Convocation to return to Oxford to cast their votes. Each candidate had their supporters: Müller was backed by scholars of international merit, whereas Williams was able to call upon Oxford-based academics and those who had served in India as administrators or missionaries. Both candidates claimed support from Wilson – "as if the principle of apostolic succession was involved in the appointment", says Chaudhuri. The Times reported on 23 May that friends of Williams placed considerable weight upon a private letter to him from Wilson, "indicating Mr. Williams as his probable successor." In return, Wilson was revealed to have said "two months before his death" that "Mr. Max Müller was the first Sanskrit scholar in Europe". The source of this information was W. S. W. Vaux, of the British Museum, who described his conversation with Wilson in a letter to Müller in May 1860. In reply to Vaux's comment that he and others wanted Wilson's successor to be "the finest man we could procure", Vaux quoted Wilson as saying that "You will be quite right if your choice should fall on Max Müller." The Times published a list of leading supporters for each candidate on 27 June 1860, noting that many people were not declaring support for either "since they wish to see whether any person of real eminence announces himself from India". Müller was backed by Francis Leighton, Henry Liddell and William Thomson (the heads of the colleges of All Souls, Christ Church, and Queen's), Edward Pusey, William Jacobson and Henry Acland (the Regius Professors of Hebrew, of Divinity, and of Medicine) and others. Williams had the declared support of the heads of University and Balliol colleges (Frederick Charles Plumptre and Robert Scott), and fellows from ten different colleges. On 5 December 1860, two days before the election, friends of Müller took out an advertisement in The Times to list his supporters, in response to a similar record circulated on behalf of Williams. By then, Müller's list included the heads of 11 colleges or halls of the university, 27 professors, over 40 college fellows and tutors, and many non-resident members of the university including Samuel Wilberforce (the Bishop of Oxford) and Sir Charles Wood (the Secretary of State for India). A list published on the following day added the name of Charles Longley, Archbishop of York, to Müller's supporters. Overall, the public supporters for each candidate were about the same in number, but while Müller was backed by "all the noted Orientalists of Europe of the age", Williams's supporters "were not so distinguished", according to Chaudhuri. Newspapers and journals joined the debate, some in strong terms. One evangelical publication, The Record, contrasted the two candidates: Müller's writings were "familiar to all persons interested in literature, while they have destroyed confidence in his religious opinions"; Williams was described as "a man of sincere piety, and one who is likely, by the blessing of God on his labours, to promote the ultimate object which the founder of the Professorship had in view." Other newspapers highlighted the nationalities of the candidates; as Beckerlegge has put it, "voting for the Boden Chair was increasingly taking on the appearance of being a test of patriotism." The Homeward Mail (a London-based newspaper that concentrated on news from, and relating to, India) asked its readers whether they wanted "a stranger and a foreigner" to win, or "one of your own body". A writer in The Morning Post said that voters should "keep the great prizes of the English universities for English students". The Morning Herald said that it was "a question of national interest", since it would affect the education of civil servants and missionaries and therefore "the progress of Christianity in India and the maintenance of British authority in that empire". It anticipated that Britain would be ridiculed if it had to appoint a German to its leading academic Sanskrit position. Müller was not without support in the press. An editorial in The Times on 29 October 1860 called him "nothing more nor less than the best Sanscrit scholar in the world." It compared the situation to the 1832 election, when there had also been a choice between the best scholar (Wilson) and a good scholar "who was held to have made the most Christian use of the gift" (William Hodge Mill). Williams, it said, appeared as "the University man ... , the man sufficiently qualified for the post, and, above all, as the man in whose hands, it is whispered, the interests of Christianity will be perfectly safe." His proposal not to teach history, philosophy, mythology or comparative philology "seems to strip the subject very bare" and would, it thought, leave the post as "an empty chair". It stated that Müller "best answers to the terms of Colonel Boden's foundation." His field of study – the oldest period of Sanskrit literature – "must be the key of the whole position", whereas Williams was only familiar with the later, "less authentic, and less sacred" writings. The editorial ended by saying that Oxford "will not choose the less learned candidate; at all events, it will not accept from him that this is the true principle of a sound Christian election." Pusey, the influential "high church" Anglican theologian associated with the Oxford Movement, wrote a letter of support to Müller, reproduced in The Times. In his view, Boden's intentions would be best advanced by electing Müller. Missionaries could not win converts without knowing the details of the religion of those with whom they were dealing, he wrote, and Müller's publications were "the greatest gifts which have yet been bestowed" on those in such work. He added that Oxford would gain by electing him to a position where Müller could spend all his time on work "of such primary and lasting importance for the conversion of India." Beckerlegge finds Pusey's support noteworthy, since Pusey would not have agreed with Müller's particular "broad" approach to Christianity, and was thus providing a judgment on the academic abilities of the candidate best placed to advance missionary work in India. One anonymous writer of a letter to the press in support of Müller, shortly before the election, expressed it thus: "A man's personal character must stand very high, and his theological opinions can afford but little ground for animadversion on either hand, when he unites as his unhesitating supporters Dr. Pusey and Dr. Macbride" – a reference to John Macbride, described in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "a profoundly religious layman of the 'old' evangelical school". However, Dowling describes Müller as "impercipient of the subtle twists of theological argument, the fine shadings and compunctions of Victorian religious feeling" – a weakness that was held against him. ## Election The election was held on 7 December 1860 in the Sheldonian Theatre. Three special trains were laid on between Didcot and Oxford that afternoon to meet passengers travelling from the west of England, and one additional train was provided between Oxford and London via Didcot in the evening. A London-bound train from the north of England called additionally at Bletchley to allow onward connections to Oxford for passengers from places such as Liverpool, Manchester and Birkenhead. Evangelical clergymen turned out in force to vote. Over about five and a half hours of voting, 833 members of Congregation declared for Williams, 610 for Müller. Historians have advanced various views as to why, even though Müller was generally regarded as the superior scholar, he lost to Williams. Beckerlegge suggests several possible factors: unlike Williams, Müller was known as a writer and translator rather than a teacher of Sanskrit, he did not have links to the East India Company or the Indian Civil Service that he could call upon for supporters, and he had not been educated at Oxford. In his obituary of Müller, Arthur Macdonell (Boden professor 1899–1926) said that the election "came to turn on the political and religious opinions of the candidates rather than on their merits as Sanskrit scholars", adding that "party feeling ran high and large numbers came up to vote." Similarly, Dowling has written that "in the less cosmopolitan precincts outside Oxford ... the argument that Müller was 'not English' told heavily against him" since "the argument was (and was meant to be, of course) unanswerable." She adds that Tories opposed him for his liberal political views, traditionalist factions within Oxford rejected "Germanizing" reform, and "the Anglican clergy ... detected unbelief lurking in his umlaut". The American historian Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay takes the view that the three motives for people voting against Müller cannot be disentangled. Those who supported Indian missionary work, Dowling writes, saw it as the key to continued British rule, and there was no need to take a chance by electing Müller, who had "a reputation for unsound religious opinions", since Williams was a scholar "of distinction known for his conservatism and piety." Müller attributed his defeat to his German background and suspicions that his Christianity was insufficiently orthodox, factors that had been used to influence in particular those voters who were no longer resident members of the university. He had lost, he wrote, because of "calumnious falsehood and vulgar electioneering tactics." Williams wrote in his unpublished autobiography that he had been "favoured by circumstances" and that, unlike Müller, he had been regarded as politically and religiously conservative. ## Subsequent events Williams served as Boden professor until his death in 1899, although he retired from teaching (while retaining the title) in 1887 because of his health. He took as the title for his inaugural lecture "The Study of Sanskrit in Relation to Missionary Work", in keeping with his views as to the role of the chair. Thomas notes that as the East India Company had switched to using English rather than Sanskrit or Persian for its work, "a natural source of students had already dried up not long after the Boden Chair was inaugurated [in 1832]". Williams helped establish the Indian Institute at Oxford, proposing the idea in 1875 and helping to raise funds for the project on his visits to India, and persuaded the university to add a degree course in oriental studies. His publications included translations of plays and grammatical works. He received a knighthood in 1886, and was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1887, when he changed his surname to become Sir Monier Monier-Williams. Robinson Ellis was required to attend Williams's lectures despite his low opinions of the new professor's abilities. Williams said that Ellis's "whole demeanour was that of a person who would have welcomed an earthquake or any convulsion of nature which would have opened a way for him to sink out of my sight". Overall, Williams won over most of those who had opposed his election, with the exception of Müller. For Müller, losing the election was "a decisive turning point in his scholarly and intellectual life", according to Chaudhuri. It meant that Müller was never to teach Sanskrit at Oxford, although he remained there until his death in 1900; nor did he ever visit India. Greatly disappointed by not winning the chair, Müller "regularly avoided or snubbed Monier Williams and his family on the streets of Oxford", according to Williams. He was appointed to a chair of comparative philology in 1868, the first Oxford professorship to be established by the university itself without money from royal or private donations. He wrote a letter of resignation in 1875 when the university proposed to award an honorary doctorate to Williams, giving as his reason that he wanted to spend more time studying Sanskrit. Friends attempted to talk him out of it, and the university then appointed a deputy professor to discharge his duties, an honour he greatly appreciated. The Indian historian Rajesh Kochhar, noting the East India Company's support for Müller, commented that "Oxford professors may have had their own reasons for their assessment of him, but the Company and the natives both found him very relevant." Despite his electoral defeat, he enjoyed a high reputation at Oxford and beyond: he "occupied a central role in the intellectual life of the nation", according to Beckerlegge, and was "viewed by the world as a model of academic success" (as Dowling puts it). Dowling considers that "[w]ithin his own lifetime, Müller was discredited as a linguistic scientist" and has "little relevance" to later models of the study of language. In Beckerlegge's opinion, Müller's views about the nature of Christian missionary work showed the difficulty at that time for Christian academics "actively working to promote a more tolerant and even-handed study of other religious traditions". Of the other candidates, Cowell was elected as the first Sanskrit professor at the University of Cambridge in 1867, supported by Müller and others. Griffith was principal of his college from 1861 until 1878 (succeeding Ballantyne); he carried out further work in India after his retirement, and died there. Ballantyne resigned as principal because of health problems and returned to England, where he served as librarian to the India Office (a position that Wilson had held in addition to the professorship) until his death in 1864. The academic Jeremy Dibble (in his biography of the composer John Stainer, a friend of Müller) has written that the election "amply foreshadowed the ensuing battle between contemporary sacred and secular forces in the university, the anachronism of Oxford's systems of academic election and the burning need for reform". The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge Act 1877 continued a process of change imposed by Parliament that had begun in the middle of the 19th century, and empowered a group of commissioners to lay down new statutes for the university and its colleges. The commissioners' powers included the ability to rewrite trusts and directions attached to gifts that were 50 years old or more. The statutes governing the Boden chair were revised by the commissioners in 1882; Joseph Boden's original proselytising purpose was no longer mentioned, nor was the professor to be chosen by Convocation. The commissioners' new statutes for Balliol College in 1881 included a provision that the holder of the Boden professorship was to be appointed as a fellow of the college, creating a link between the chair and Balliol that is still in place. As with other professorships, the University Council now makes arrangements for convening a board of electors, upon which Balliol has two representatives, in the event of a vacancy. , the Sanskrit professor is Christopher Minkowski, appointed in 2005. His predecessor Richard Gombrich has said that he had to "fight a great battle" in 2004 to ensure that another professor was appointed after he retired, and credited his victory to the university's realisation that it was the last chair in Sanskrit left in the United Kingdom.
1,442,561	Verbascum thapsus	1,172,663,498	Species of plant	[ "Demulcents", "Flora naturalised in Australia", "Flora of Europe", "Flora of North Africa", "Flora of Spain", "Flora of temperate Asia", "Introduced plants of South America", "Medicinal plants", "Plants described in 1753", "Plants used in traditional Native American medicine", "Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus", "Verbascum" ]	Verbascum thapsus, the great mullein, greater mullein or common mullein is a species of mullein native to Europe, northern Africa, and Asia, and introduced in the Americas and Australia. It is a hairy biennial plant that can grow to 2 m tall or more. Its small, yellow flowers are densely grouped on a tall stem, which grows from a large rosette of leaves. It grows in a wide variety of habitats, but prefers well-lit, disturbed soils, where it can appear soon after the ground receives light, from long-lived seeds that persist in the soil seed bank. It is a common weedy plant that spreads by prolifically producing seeds, and has become invasive in temperate world regions. It is a minor problem for most agricultural crops, since it is not a competitive species, being intolerant of shade from other plants and unable to survive tilling. It also hosts many insects, some of which can be harmful to other plants. Although individuals are easy to remove by hand, populations are difficult to eliminate permanently. Although commonly used in traditional medicine, no approved drugs are made from this plant. It has been used to make dyes and torches. ## Description V. thapsus is a dicotyledonous plant that produces a rosette of leaves in its first year of growth. The leaves are large, up to 50 cm long. The second-year plants normally produce a single unbranched stem, usually 1–2 m tall. In the eastern part of its range in China, it is, however, only reported to grow up to 1.5 m tall. The tall, pole-like stems end in a dense spike of flowers that can occupy up to half the stem length. All parts of the plants are covered with star-shaped trichomes. This cover is particularly thick on the leaves, giving them a silvery appearance. The species' chromosome number is 2n = 36. On flowering plants, the leaves are alternately arranged up the stem. They are thick and decurrent, with much variation in leaf shape between the upper and lower leaves on the stem, ranging from oblong to oblanceolate, and reaching sizes up to 50 cm long and 14 cm across (19 inches long and 5 inches wide). They become smaller higher up the stem, and less strongly decurrent down the stem. The flowering stem is solid and 2–2.5 cm (nearly an inch) across, and occasionally branched just below the inflorescence, usually following damage. After flowering and seed release, the stem and fruits usually persist in winter, drying into dark brown, stiff structures of densely packed, ovoid-shaped, and dry seed capsules. The dried stems may persist into the following spring or even the next summer. The plant produces a shallow taproot. Flowers are pentamerous with (usually) five stamen, a five-lobed calyx tube, and a five-petalled corolla, the latter bright yellow and an 1.5–3 cm (0.59–1.18 in) wide. The flowers are almost sessile, with very short pedicels (2 mm, 0.08 in). The five stamens are of two types, with the three upper stamens being shorter, their filaments covered by yellow or whitish hairs, and having smaller anthers, while the lower two stamens have glabrous filaments and larger anthers. The plant produces small, ovoid (6 mm, 0.24 in) capsules that split open by way of two valves, each capsule containing large numbers of minute, brown seeds less than 1 mm (0.04 in) in size, marked with longitudinal ridges. A white-flowered form, V. thapsus f. candicans, is known to occur. Flowering lasts up to three months from early to late summer (June to August in northern Europe), with flowering starting at the bottom of the spike and progressing irregularly upward; each flower opens for part of a day and only a few open at the same time around the stem. ## Taxonomy For the purpose of botanical nomenclature, Verbascum thapsus was first described by Carl Linnaeus in his 1753 Species Plantarum. The specific epithet thapsus had been first used by Theophrastus (as Θάψος, Thapsos) for an unspecified herb from the Ancient Greek settlement of Thapsos, near modern Syracuse, Sicily, though it is often assimilated to the ancient Tunisian city of Thapsus. At the time, no type specimen was specified, as the practice only arose later, in the 19th century. When a lectotype (type selected amongst original material) was designated, it was assigned to specimen 242.1 of Linnaeus' herbarium, the only V. thapsus specimen. The species had previously been designated as type species for Verbascum. European plants exhibit considerable phenotypical variation, which has led to the plant acquiring many synonyms over the years. Introduced American populations show much less variation. The taxonomy of Verbascum has not undergone any significant revision since Svanve Mürbeck's monographs in the 1930s, with the exception of the work of Arthur Huber-Morath, who used informal grouping in organizing the genus for the florae of Iran and Turkey to account for many intermediate species. Since Huber-Morath's groups are not taxonomical, Mürbeck's treatment is the most current one available, as no study has yet sought to apply genetic or molecular data extensively to the genus. In Mürbeck's classification, V. thapsus is placed in sect. Bothrospermae subsect. Fasciculata alongside species such as Verbascum nigrum (black or dark mullein), Verbascum lychnitis (white mullein), and Verbascum sinuatum (wavy-leaved mullein).. As Verbascum thapsus is the type species of the genus the application of article 22 of the ICNafp gives sect. Verbascum subsect. Verbascum as the correct nomenclature for this placement. ### Subspecies and hybrids The three usually recognized subspecies are: - V. t. thapsus; type, widespread. - V. t. crassifolium (Lam.) Murb.; Mediterranean region and to 2000 metres in southwestern Austria. (syn. subsp. montanum (Scrad.) Bonnier & Layens) - V. t. giganteum (Willk.) Nyman; Spain, endemic. In all subspecies but the type, the lower stamens are also hairy. In V. t. crassifolium, the hairiness is less dense and often absent from the upper part of the anthers, while lower leaves are hardly decurrent and have longer petioles. In V. t. giganteum, the hairs are densely white tomentose, and lower leaves are strongly decurrent. V. t. crassifolium also differs from the type in having slightly larger flowers, which measure 15–30 mm wide, whereas in the type, they are 12–20 mm in diameter. Both V. t. giganteum and V. t. crassifolium were originally described as species. Due to its morphological variation, V. thapsus has had a great many subspecies described. A recent revision led its author to maintain V. giganteum but sink V. crassifolium into synonymy. The plant is also parent to several hybrids (see table). Of these, the most common is V. × semialbum Chaub. (× V. nigrum). All occur in Eurasia, and three, V. × kerneri Fritsch, V. × pterocaulon Franch. and V. × thapsi L. (syn. V. × spurium W.D.J.Koch), have also been reported in North America. ### Common names V. thapsus is known by a variety of names. European reference books call it "great mullein". In North America, "common mullein" is used while western United States residents commonly refer to mullein as "cowboy toilet paper". In the 19th century, it had well over 40 different common names in English alone. Some of the more whimsical ones included "hig candlewick", "Indian rag weed", "bullicks lungwort", "Adams-rod", "hare's-beard", and "ice-leaf". Vernacular names include innumerable references to the plant's hairiness: "woolly mullein", "velvet mullein", or "blanket mullein", "beggar's blanket", "Moses' blanket", "poor man's blanket", "Our Lady's blanket", or "old man's blanket", and "feltwort", and so on ("flannel" is another common generic name). "Mullein" itself derives from the French word for "soft". Some names refer to the plant's size and shape: "shepherd's club(s)" or "staff", "Aaron's rod" (a name it shares with a number of other plants with tall, yellow inflorescences), and a plethora of other "X's staff" and "X's rod". The name "velvet dock" or "mullein dock" is also recorded, where "dock" is a British name applied to any broad-leaved plant. ## Distribution and habitat V. thapsus has a wide native range including Europe, northern Africa, and Asia, from the Azores and Canary Islands east to western China, north to the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Siberia, and south to the Himalayas. In northern Europe, it grows from sea level up to 1,850 m altitude, while in China it grows at 1,400–3,200 m altitude. It has been introduced throughout the temperate world, and is established as a weed in Australia, New Zealand, tropical Asia, La Réunion, North America, Hawaii, Chile, Hispaniola, and Argentina. It has also been reported in Japan. In the United States, it was imported very early in the 18th century and cultivated for its medicinal and piscicide properties. By 1818, it had begun spreading so much that Amos Eaton thought it was a native plant. In 1839, it was already reported in Michigan and in 1876, in California. It is now found commonly in all the states. In Canada, it is most common in the Maritime Provinces and southern Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia, with scattered populations in between. Great mullein most frequently grows as a colonist of bare and disturbed soil, usually on sandy or chalky ones. It grows best in dry, sandy, or gravelly soils, although it can grow in a variety of habitats, including banksides, meadows, roadsides, forest clearings, and pastures. This ability to grow in a wide range of habitats has been linked to strong phenotype variation rather than adaptation capacities. ## Ecology Great mullein is a biennial and generally requires winter dormancy before it can flower. This dormancy is linked to starch degradation activated by low temperatures in the root, and gibberellin application bypasses this requirement. Seeds germinate almost solely in bare soil, at temperatures between 10 and 40 °C. While they can germinate in total darkness if proper conditions are present (tests give a 35% germination rate under ideal conditions), in the wild, they in practice only do so when exposed to light, or very close to the soil surface, which explains the plant's habitat preferences. While it can also grow in areas where some vegetation already exists, growth of the rosettes on bare soil is four to seven times more rapid. Seeds germinate in spring and summer. Those that germinate in autumn produce plants that overwinter if they are large enough, while rosettes less than 15 cm (6 in) across die in winter. After flowering, the entire plant usually dies at the end of its second year, but some individuals, especially in the northern parts of the range, require a longer growth period and flower in their third year. Under better growing conditions, some individuals flower in the first year. Triennial individuals have been found to produce fewer seeds than biennial and annual ones. While year of flowering and size are linked to the environment, most other characteristics appear to be genetic. A given flower is open only for a single day, opening before dawn and closing in the afternoon. Flowers are self-fecundating and protogynous (with female parts maturing first), and will self-pollinate if they have not been pollinated by insects during the day. While many insects visit the flowers, only some bees actually accomplish pollination. The flowering period of V. thapsus lasts from June to August in most of its range, extending to September or October in warmer climates. Visitors include halictid bees and hoverflies. The hair on lower stamens may serve to provide footholds for visitors. The seeds maintain their germinative powers for decades, up to 100 years, according to some studies. Because of this, and because the plant is an extremely prolific seed bearer (each plant produces hundreds of capsules, each containing up to 700 seeds, with a total up to 180,000 or 240,000 seeds), it remains in the soil seed bank for extended periods of time, and can sprout from apparently bare ground, or shortly after forest fires long after previous plants have died. Its population pattern typically consists of an ephemeral adult population followed by a long period of dormancy as seeds. Great mullein rarely establishes on new grounds without human intervention because its seeds do not disperse very far. Seed dispersion requires the stem to be moved by wind or animal movement; 75% of the seeds fall within 1 m of the parent plant, and 93% fall within 5 m. Megachilid bees of the genus Anthidium use the hair (amongst that of various woolly plants) in making their nests. The seeds are generally too small for birds to feed on, although the American goldfinch has been reported to consume them. Other bird species have been reported to consume the leaves (Hawaiian goose) or flowers (palila), or to use the plant as a source when foraging for insects (white-headed woodpecker). Additionally, deer and elk eat the leaves. ## Fossil record Seeds of V. thapsus have been recorded from part of the Cromer Forest Bed series and at West Wittering in Sussex from some parts of the Ipswichian interglacial layers. ## Agricultural impacts and control Because it cannot compete with established plants, great mullein is no longer considered a serious agricultural weed and is easily crowded out in cultivation, except in areas where vegetation is sparse to begin with, such as Californian semidesertic areas of the eastern Sierra Nevada. In such ecological contexts, it crowds out native herbs and grasses; its tendency to appear after forest fires also disturbs the normal ecological succession. Although not an agricultural threat, its presence can be very difficult to eradicate and is especially problematic in overgrazed pastures. The species is legally listed as a noxious weed in the US state of Colorado (class C) and Hawaii, and the Australian state of Victoria (regionally prohibited in the West Gippsland region, and regionally controlled in several others). Despite not being an agricultural weed in itself, it hosts a number of insects and diseases, including both pests and beneficial insects. It is also a potential reservoir of the cucumber mosaic virus, Erysiphum cichoraceum (the cucurbit powdery mildew) and Texas root rot. A study found V. thapsus hosts insects from 29 different families. Most of the pests found were western flower thrips (Frankliniella occidentalis), Lygus species such as the tarnished plant bug (L. lineolaris), and various spider mites from the family Tetranychidae. These make the plant a potential reservoir for overwintering pests. Other insects commonly found on great mullein feed exclusively on Verbascum species in general or V. thapsus in particular. They include mullein thrips (Haplothrips verbasci), Gymnaetron tetrum (whose larva consume the seeds), and the mullein moth (Cucullia verbasci). Useful insects are also hosted by great mullein, including predatory mites of the genera Galendromus, Typhlodromus, and Amblyseius, the minute pirate bug Orius tristicolor, and the mullein plant bug (Campylomma verbasci). The plant's ability to host both pests and beneficials makes it potentially useful to maintain stable populations of insects used for biological control in other cultures, like Campylomma verbasci and Dicyphus hesperus (Miridae), a predator of whiteflies. A number of pest Lepidoptera species, including the stalk borer (Papaipema nebris) and gray hairstreak (Strymon melinus), also use V. thapsus as a host plant. Control of the plant, when desired, is best managed via mechanical means, such as hand pulling and hoeing, preferably followed by sowing of native plants. Animals rarely graze it because of its irritating hairs, and liquid herbicides require surfactants to be effective, as the hair causes water to roll off the plant, much like the lotus effect. Burning is ineffective, as it only creates new bare areas for seedlings to occupy. G. tetrum and Cucullia verbasci usually have little effect on V. thapsus populations as a whole. Goats and chickens have also been proposed to control mullein. Effective (when used with a surfactant) contact herbicides include glyphosate, triclopyr and sulfurometuron-methyl. Ground herbicides, like tebuthiuron, are also effective, but recreate bare ground and require repeated application to prevent regrowth. ## Uses ### Phytochemicals Phytochemicals in V. thapsus flowers and leaves include saponins, polysaccharides, mucilage, flavonoids, tannins, iridoid and lignin glycosides, and essential oils. The plant's leaves, in addition to the seeds, have been reported to contain rotenone, although quantities are unknown. ### Traditional medicine Although long used in herbal medicine, no drugs are manufactured from its components. Dioscorides first recommended the plant 2000 years ago, considering it useful as a folk medicine for pulmonary diseases. Leaves were smoked to attempt to treat lung ailments, a tradition that in America was rapidly transmitted to Native American peoples. The Zuni people, however, use the plant in poultices of powdered root applied to sores, rashes, and skin infections. An infusion of the root is also used to treat athlete's foot. All preparations meant to be drunk have to be finely filtered to eliminate the irritating hairs. Oil from the flowers was used against catarrhs, colics, earaches, frostbite, eczema, and other external conditions. Topical application of various V. thapsus-based preparations was recommended for the treatment of warts, boils, carbuncles, hemorrhoids, and chilblains, amongst others. Glycyrrhizin compounds with bactericide effects in vitro were isolated from flowers. The German Commission E describes uses of the plant for respiratory infections. It was also part of the National Formulary in the United States and United Kingdom. The plant has been used in an attempt to treat colds, croup, sunburn, and other skin irritations. ### Other uses Roman soldiers are said to have dipped the plant stalks in grease for use as torches. Other cultures use the leaves as wicks. Native Americans and American colonists lined their shoes with leaves from the plant to keep out the cold. Mullein may be cultivated as an ornamental plant. As for many plants, (Pliny the Elder described it in his Naturalis Historia), great mullein was linked to witches, although the relationship remained generally ambiguous, and the plant was also widely held to ward off curses and evil spirits. The seeds contain several compounds (saponins, glycosides, coumarin, rotenone) that are toxic to fish, and have been widely used as piscicide for fishing. Due to its weedy capacities, the plant, unlike other species of the genus (such as V. phoeniceum), is not often cultivated.
6,334,902	Pithole, Pennsylvania	1,167,496,505	null	[ "1865 establishments in Pennsylvania", "1877 disestablishments in Pennsylvania", "Former municipalities in Pennsylvania", "Geography of Venango County, Pennsylvania", "Ghost towns in Pennsylvania", "History museums in Pennsylvania", "History of the petroleum industry in the United States", "Industrial buildings and structures on the National Register of Historic Places in Pennsylvania", "Museums in Venango County, Pennsylvania", "National Register of Historic Places in Venango County, Pennsylvania", "Populated places established in 1865", "Populated places on the National Register of Historic Places in Pennsylvania" ]	Pithole, or Pithole City, is a ghost town in Cornplanter Township, Venango County, Pennsylvania, United States, about 6 miles (9.7 km) from Oil Creek State Park and the Drake Well Museum, the site of the first commercial oil well in the United States. Pithole's sudden growth and equally rapid decline, as well as its status as a "proving ground" of sorts for the burgeoning petroleum industry, made it one of the most famous of oil boomtowns. Oil strikes at nearby wells in January 1865 prompted a large influx of people to the area that would become Pithole, most of whom were land speculators. The town was laid out in May 1865, and by December was incorporated with an approximate population of 20,000. At its peak, Pithole had at least 54 hotels, 3 churches, the third largest post office in Pennsylvania, a newspaper, a theater, a railroad, the world's first pipeline and a red-light district "the likes of Dodge City's." By 1866, economic growth and oil production in Pithole had slowed. Oil strikes around other nearby communities and numerous fires drove residents away from Pithole and, by 1877, the borough was unincorporated. The site was cleared of overgrowth and was donated to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in 1961. A visitor center, containing exhibits pertaining to the history of Pithole, was built in 1972. Pithole was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. ## Etymology The city of Pithole derived its name from its proximity to Pithole Creek, which flows through Venango County to the Allegheny River. The origin of the name "Pithole" itself, however, is a mystery. One origination theory is that early pioneers stumbled across strange fissures from which sulfurous fumes wafted. Such "pit-holes" are found in the area where Pithole Creek empties into the Allegheny River, with some measuring 14 inches (36 cm) wide and 8 feet (2 m) long. Another possible explanation involves the discovery of ancient pits dug by early settlers, some 8 feet (2 m) wide and 12 feet (4 m) deep, that were cribbed with oil-soaked timbers. These "pit-holes", found along Oil Creek and in Cornplanter Township, supposedly predate the Senecas who inhabited the area from the mid-17th to the late 18th century. ## Geology Most of the oil produced in northwestern Pennsylvania was formed in sandstone reservoir rocks at the boundary between the Mississippian and Devonian rock layers. Over time, the oil migrated toward the surface, became trapped beneath an impervious layer of caprock, and formed a reservoir. The presence of upwards-curving folds in the caprock called anticlines, or sometimes an inversion of an anticline called a syncline, greatly varied the depth of the reservoirs, from around 4,000 feet (1,200 m) to just beneath the surface. The majority of the oil wells in the vicinity of Pithole and the Oil Creek valley tapped into a sandstone formation known as the Venango Third sand. The Venango Third contained large volumes of oil under high pressure at only 450 to 550 feet (140 to 170 m) below ground level. Other oil-producing formations in the area were "the Venango First and Second [sands], the latter often prevailing after the Third sand was lost." At Pithole, the "first sandstone was reached at 115 feet [35 m], the second at 345 feet [105 m], the third at 480 feet [146 m], the fourth at 600 feet [183 m], and the oil itself at 615 feet [187 m]" by the Frazier Well, according to a report by the Oil City Register. Inaccurate numbering of the layers by the drillers, however, put the Fourth sand above the real Third at 670 feet (200 m). ## Geography and climate Pithole is located in northwestern Pennsylvania, 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Erie and 103 miles (166 km) north-northeast of Pittsburgh. The nearest cities to Pithole are Titusville, approximately 8 miles (13 km) to the northwest, and Oil City, 9 miles (14 km) to the southwest. Pithole is located on Pithole Road (State Route 1006), almost 4 miles (6.4 km) southwest of Pennsylvania Route 36 and about 2 miles (3.2 km) east Pennsylvania Route 227. Pithole was laid out with four primary east–west streets: First, Second, Third and Fourth. Duncan, Mason, Prather, Brown and Holmden Streets traversed Pithole from north to south. Each street was 60 feet (18 m) wide, except for Duncan at 80 feet (24 m). All five north–south streets terminated at First Street; Mason started at Third; Prather and Brown started at Fourth. Duncan and Holmden Streets both began at a Y-intersection with the road from Titusville. All four east–west streets began at Duncan and ended at Holmden Street except for First, which extended to the Frazier Well. July is the hottest month in Pithole, when the average high temperature is 81 °F (27 °C) and the average low is 57 °F (14 °C). January is the coldest month with an average high of 32 °F (0 °C) and an average low of 13 °F (−11 °C). The average 44 inches (1,118 mm) of precipitation a year wreaked havoc on Pithole's many unpaved streets, especially the heavily traveled First and Holmden. Portions of First Street were planked or corduroyed in response to the resulting quagmire of mud that would often trap wagons and draft animals. ## History The area around Pithole, and modern-day Venango County, was formerly inhabited by Eries, who were eventually wiped out by the Iroquois in 1653. On October 23, 1784, the Iroquois, which included the Seneca, ceded the land to Pennsylvania in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Venango County was formed from portions of Allegheny and Lycoming counties on March 12, 1800. Cornplanter Township was settled in 1795 and was incorporated on November 28, 1833. In 1859, Edwin Drake successfully drilled the first oil well along the banks of Oil Creek, outside of Titusville in Crawford County. Within a half year, over 500 wells were built along Oil Creek, in the 16-mile (26 km) corridor from Titusville to the creek's mouth at the Allegheny River in Oil City. Other wells were drilled down the Allegheny towards Franklin and upriver to Tionesta in Forest County. Pithole Creek did not attract the same attention from speculators and investors, who preferred to risk their money on the tried-and-true method of drilling on flatter terrain near large rivers like the Allegheny and Oil Creek, rather than gamble on rougher terrain. In January 1864, Isaiah Frazier leased two tracts of land, totaling 35 acres (14 ha), from Thomas Holmden, a farmer along Pithole Creek. Frazier, James Faulkner Jr., Frederick W. Jones and J. Nelson Tappan formed the United States Petroleum Company in April 1864 and started drilling what was dubbed the United States Well, or Frazier Well, in June. On January 7, 1865, the Frazier Well struck oil. ### Boom Two weeks after the Frazier strike, the Twin Wells, just to the south of the Frazier Well, also struck oil. In May 1865, A. P. Duncan and George C. Prather purchased the Holmden Farm, including the portions still leased to United States Petroleum, for \$25,000 and a bonus of \$75,000. The wooded bluff overlooking the Frazier and Twin Wells was cleared and a town was laid out. The town was divided into 500 lots, which were put up for sale on May 24. By July, the population was estimated to have been at least 2,000. The population of Pithole rose to 15,000 people in September and 20,000 by Christmas. Pithole was incorporated as a borough on November 30, 1865. As many residents were temporary, Pithole had a total of 54 hotels ranging from simple rooming houses to luxury hotels like the Chase and Danforth Houses, or the Bonta House located in Prather City on the bluff on the opposite side of Pithole Creek. The Astor House, Pithole's first hotel, was built in one day. Construction of the hotel was especially poor; a lack of insulation and innumerable gaps in the walls made conditions in the hotel miserable during the winter. At one point, the Pithole Post Office, located on the first-floor of the Chase House, was the third-busiest in the state of Pennsylvania, behind Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Three different churches—Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian—were constructed by their respective congregations. Pithole's local newspaper, the Pithole Daily Record was started on September 5, 1865. The largest building in Pithole—the three-story, 1,100-seat Murphy's Theater—opened on September 17. Among all the glamour, "every other building [in Pithole] was a bar". Prostitution was rampant in Pithole, with most of the brothels built along First Street. Although the borough council passed ordinances banning the sex trade and carried out raids in an attempt to enforce them, they had little impact. As oil production increased through the success of wells like the Frazier, Twin, Pool, Grant, and the two Homestead Wells, transportation of the oil to the outside world was still reliant on teamsters. The teamsters were notorious for mistreatment of their horses, most of which lost their hair due to a buildup of oil and only had a lifespan of a few months in Pithole. The high mortality rate caused a horse shortage, with more having to be brought in by rail from Ohio and New York. Teamsters often refused to work on days when the roads were impassable or gouged the oil producers. Various investors, fed up with the teamsters, pooled resources and built a plank toll road from Pithole to Titusville. Samuel Van Sykle, an oil buyer also frustrated with the teamsters, designed the world's first pipeline, which opened on October 9, 1865. The 2-inch-diameter (51 mm), 5.5-mile-long (8.9 km) pipeline connected Pithole to the Oil Creek Railroad and was initially able to transport 81 barrels (13 m<sup>3</sup>) per hour operating with three steam engines, equivalent to 300 teams working a 10-hour shift. A fourth engine brought the pipeline's maximum capacity to 2,500 barrels (397 m<sup>3</sup>) a day. The Oil City and Pithole Branch Railroad (OC&P) was opened on December 18. It was renamed the Pithole Valley Railway in 1871, and was to be abandoned in 1874. It ran from Oleopolis, and had passenger stops at Bennett, Woods Mill and Prather. A second railroad was partly built but never finished -this was the Reno, Oil Creek and Pithole Railroad, which in 1865 was building from Reno west of Oil City to Pithole via Rouseville and Plumer. The intention was to boost Reno and bypass Oil City. It only laid track between Rouseville and Plumer, went bankrupt in 1866 and was scrapped. Plans for other railroads never led to construction. Along with the pipeline, another innovation developed in Pithole was the railroad tank car, which was essentially two wooden tanks, each with a capacity of 80 barrels (13 m<sup>3</sup>), mounted onto a flatcar. ### Bust In March 1866, a chain of banks owned by Charles Vernon Culver, a financier and member of United States House of Representatives for Pennsylvania's 20th congressional district, collapsed. This triggered a financial panic throughout the oil region, bursting the oil bubble. Speculators and potential investors stopped coming to Pithole and life in Pithole settled down. In the early morning of February 24, a house caught fire and the flames were spread to other buildings by the wind. In two hours, most of Holmden Street, and parts of Brown and Second Streets, were reduced to smoldering ashes. The worst of multiple fires occurred on August 2, burning down several city blocks and destroying 27 wells. When many oil strikes occurred elsewhere in Venango County in 1867, people left Pithole, often taking their houses and places of business with them or abandoning their property. By December 1866, the population had dropped to 2,000. The newspaper was relocated to Petroleum Center in July 1868, becoming the Petroleum Center Daily Record. Both the Chase House and Murphy's Theater were sold in August 1868 and moved to Pleasantville. Prather and Duncan sold their interests in Pithole before the downturn; Prather split an estimated \$3 million with his two brothers and moved to Meadville, while Duncan returned to Scotland with his fortune. The 1870 United States Census recorded the population of Pithole as only 237. The borough charter of Pithole was officially annulled in August 1877. The remains of the city were sold, in 1879, back to Venango County for \$4.37. The Catholic church was dismantled and moved to Tionesta in 1886; the Methodist church was kept in "usable condition" through private donations before being taken down in the 1930s. A stone altar was erected and consecrated by the Methodist Episcopal Church on August 27, 1959, the centennial of the Drake Well strike. ## Visitor center The site was purchased in 1957 by James B. Stevenson, the publisher of the Titusville Herald, who later served as the chairman of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission from 1962 to 1971. Stevenson cleared the brush from the site, and donated it to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in 1961. Today, only a few foundations and mowed paths mark the buildings and former streets of Pithole. The site of Pithole was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on March 20, 1973. A walking tour of Pithole's 84.3 acres (34.1 ha) of streets can be completed in 42 minutes. The visitor center was constructed in 1972. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission operates the visitor center as part of the nearby Drake Well Museum, adjacent to Oil Creek State Park, outside of Titusville. The visitor center contains several exhibits, including a scale model of the city at its peak, an oil-transport wagon that is stuck in mud, and a small, informational theater. The visitor center is usually open, annually, from the Memorial Day weekend, at end of May, through Labor Day in September. The season is kicked off with the annual Wildcatter Day celebration featuring music, tours, demonstrations and other activities. ## See also - List of ghost towns in Pennsylvania - National Register of Historic Places listings in Venango County, Pennsylvania - Oil Region - Pennsylvanian oil rush
14,514,637	British logistics in the Falklands War	1,170,166,037	1982 combat service support operations	[ "Military logistics of the Falklands War", "Military logistics of the United Kingdom" ]	The 1982 British military campaign to recapture the Falkland Islands depended on complex logistical arrangements. The logistical difficulties of operating 7,000 nautical miles (8,100 mi; 13,000 km) from home were formidable. The Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands came at a time when the Royal Navy was experiencing a reduction in its amphibious capability, but it still possessed the aircraft carriers HMS Hermes and Invincible, the landing platform dock (LPD) ships HMS Fearless and Intrepid, and six landing ship logistics (LSL) ships. To provide the necessary logistic support, the Royal Navy's ships were augmented by ships taken up from trade (STUFT). The British Army and Royal Navy developed a base at Ascension Island, a British territory in the mid-Atlantic 3,700 nautical miles (4,300 mi; 6,900 km) from the UK and 3,300 nautical miles (3,800 mi; 6,100 km) from the Falkland Islands. Although it had an airfield with an excellent runway, there was only a small hardstand area for parking aircraft and no parallel taxiways. There was an anchorage, but no port facilities—just a lone jetty. Ascension was used as a convenient place for the amphibious ships to re-stow their equipment, and as a base for Hercules transport aircraft, which were modified by the addition of auxiliary fuel tanks and aerial refuelling probes. With the support of Victor tankers, these modifications allowed the transports to deliver priority supplies to the South Atlantic. The 3rd Commando Brigade landed at Ajax Bay, Port San Carlos and San Carlos on East Falkland, but struggled to build up its supplies as the Argentine air forces made repeated attacks on ships in Falkland Sound. SS Atlantic Conveyor was struck by two Exocet AM39 missiles, and sank with three Chinook and six Wessex helicopters still on board, along with their tools and spare parts, and other vital stores including tent accommodation. The loss of the helicopters on Atlantic Conveyor was a serious blow; it forced the 3rd Commando Brigade to make a loaded march across East Falkland. The Brigade Maintenance Area (BMA) was struck by an Argentine air attack on 27 May that destroyed hundreds of rounds of mortar and artillery ammunition. Forward Brigade Maintenance Areas (FBMAs) were established at Teal Inlet for the 3rd Commando Brigade and Fitzroy for the 5th Infantry Brigade. Some 500 rounds per gun were delivered to gun positions by helicopters to enable the artillery to support the attacks on the mountains ringing Port Stanley. The successful conclusion of these battles resulted in the surrender of the Argentine forces in the Falklands on 14 June. ## Background Tensions between Britain and Argentina over the disputed Falkland Islands (Malvinas) rose swiftly after Argentine scrap metal merchants and Argentina Marines raised the Argentine flag over South Georgia Island on 19 March 1982, and on 2 April, Argentine forces occupied the Falkland Islands. The British government had already taken some action on 29 March, ordering the submarines HMS Spartan and HMS Splendid to sail for the South Atlantic. Spartan left Gibraltar on 1 April, and Splendid sailed from Faslane the same day. A third submarine, HMS Conqueror, followed on 4 April. The Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) stores ship was despatched from the Western Mediterranean to replenish the only British warship in the South Atlantic, the patrol vessel HMS Endurance, which was down to its last three weeks' supplies. The tanker , which had left Curaçao bound for the United Kingdom with a full load of fuel, received orders on 27 March to divert to Gibraltar, embark stores there, and join Endurance and Fort Austin in the South Atlantic. When intelligence was received in London on 31 March that the Falklands would be invaded on 2 April, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the Secretary of State for Defence, John Nott, instructed the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, to ready a force to recapture the islands. The Commander-in-Chief Fleet, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, who was based at Northwood Headquarters, was placed in command of Task Force 317, with overall responsibility for this operation, codenamed Operation Corporate. Air Marshal Sir John Curtiss was appointed air component commander, and Major General Jeremy Moore, land component commander. Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, Flag Officer First Flotilla, commanded the aircraft carrier battle group (TG 317.8); Commodore Michael Clapp, the Commodore, Amphibious Warfare, commanded the amphibious force (TG 317.0); and Brigadier Julian Thompson, the landing force (TG 317.1). Thompson's force was built around his 3rd Commando Brigade, which had three battalions of the Royal Marines (40 Commando, 42 Commando and 45 Commando), and supporting units including its own logistic support unit, the Commando Logistic Regiment. About 80 per cent of the Commando Logistic Regiment's men were Royal Marines; the rest came from the British Army and Royal Navy. ## Shipping ### Amphibious On 2 April, orders went out to make the Royal Navy's two aircraft carriers, HMS Hermes and Invincible, ready to sail. Both had been involved in exercises in February and March, and were at HMNB Portsmouth for six weeks' maintenance. Many of Hermes's major systems had been dismantled for the maintenance work. Invincible was in a better state of readiness, but her crew were on leave. The Royal Navy's two landing platform dock (LPD) ships, HMS Fearless and HMS Intrepid, were also at Portsmouth, where the former was acting as an officer training ship and the latter was being mothballed, having been earmarked to be paid off under the terms of the 1981 Defence White Paper though that decision had been reversed only weeks prior to the outbreak of hostilities in the South Atlantic. She was hastily recommissioned, and her crew reassembled from their new postings. Each LPD carried four Landing Craft Utility (LCU) in its dock, and four of the smaller Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel (LCVP) on davits. The rest of the Royal Navy's amphibious capability consisted of six Round Table-class landing ship logistics (LSL) ships. Four were immediately available: and were at HMNB Devonport, while and were at the Marchwood Military Port. The other two were further away: was in Belize, and could meet up with the fleet on its way south; but was in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and would not be immediately available. It was therefore decided to use the stores ship , which was also in reserve at Portsmouth, as an LPD in the initial stages, after which she would revert to her normal role. Stromness departed on 7 April with 358 Royal Marines and 7,500 rations on board. As vital as they were, these ships were insufficient for the logistics needs of a task force operating 8,000 miles (13,000 km) from home. Civilian ships could be obtained by charter or by requisition; but there was no time to allow ships to complete the deliveries of their cargo or meet their existing passenger booking obligations. The British government therefore resorted to requisitioning, a practice last exercised during the Suez Crisis in 1956. An Order in Council was issued on 4 April allowing any British ship to be requisitioned, along with anything on board. Civilian ships acquired became known as ships taken up from trade (STUFT). Half were requisitioned; the rest were chartered. Some companies, such as P&O, insisted on requisitioning, as it allowed them to break existing contracts. Government policy was that only British-flagged vessels could be requisitioned, and only British nationals could serve as crewmen. British crewmen were retained, and a 150 per cent bonus was paid to those who entered the South Atlantic, considerably more than the extra £1 per day paid to members of the armed services. Among the RFA crews were some 400 Hong Kong Chinese, who were British Overseas Territories citizens. Some protested that their contracts said nothing about service in a war zone, but the Ministry of Defence refuted this. A declaration of active service brought everyone under the Naval Discipline Act 1957. A senior naval officer was assigned to each ship, with authority to direct the ship's actions and movements, even if, in the opinion of the master, it might put the ship at risk. Many modern ships are designed for maximum economy in performing a specific task, which limits their flexibility. The ferries that plied the English Channel, for example, did not have the capacity to store enough fresh water for a voyage to the South Atlantic. STUFT had to have a combination of range, endurance and sea-keeping qualities. The need for range meant that ships could not take on sea water as ballast, making them less stable in the rough seas anticipated in the South Atlantic. Only one vessel was taken up for every four inspected. Over the next few months, 54 ships were requisitioned from 33 owners. During the Falklands War they carried 100,000 long tons (100,000 t) of freight, 95 aircraft, 9,000 personnel, and 400,000 long tons (410,000 t) of fuel. On 3 April it was decided to add the 3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment (3 Para) to Thompson's 3rd Commando Brigade. This ended plans for the amphibious force to carry the entire landing force. Even if troops were accommodated on the aircraft carriers, they could not carry what was now a 4,350-man force. Calculations indicated that capacity was short by 1,700 men, 150 long tons (150 t) of stores and 60 vehicles. For a troop transport, an ocean liner was the best alternative, but there were few of these left. P&O's 44,807-gross-register-ton (126,880 m<sup>3</sup>) SS Canberra was chosen. She was on a cruise in the Mediterranean with a full complement of passengers and crew, but due to return to Southampton on 6 April. Some 400 of her crew were Asian nationals, and therefore had to be disembarked, but her master, Captain D. J. Scott-Masson, was a Royal Naval Reserve officer. The Chiefs of Staff Committee subsequently recommended further reinforcing the 3rd Commando Brigade with another battalion, the 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment (2 Para). This was approved by the War Cabinet on 15 April. To carry it, the 12,988-gross-register-ton (36,780 m<sup>3</sup>) ferry was requisitioned on 17 April. She was far from ideal, as her ramp could not be lowered to the height of the mexeflote landing rafts carried by the LSLs, but the choices of available ships were limited. For transporting vehicles, a roll-on/roll-off vessel was preferred, as unloading facilities were unavailable in the Falkland Islands. The 5,463-gross-register-ton (15,470 m<sup>3</sup>) P&O ferry MS Elk was therefore requisitioned. It took on 100 vehicles, 2,000 tons of ammunition, and several hundred tons of stores. It was followed by the 4,190-gross-register-ton (11,900 m<sup>3</sup>) , which was taken up on 19 April. Cunard's 14,946-gross-register-ton (42,320 m<sup>3</sup>) container ship, SS Atlantic Conveyor was requisitioned on 14 April and converted into an aircraft transport. Soon after his appointment as land component commander on 9 April, Moore began to press for British Army's 5th Infantry Brigade to be sent to the South Atlantic as well. Fieldhouse formally requested this on 27 April. The brigade had a strength of 3,961 men, and for 35 days' operations it required 1,067 long tons (1,084 t) of ammunition, 1,129 long tons (1,147 t) of stores, 205 vehicles and 19 helicopters. If the ships carrying the 3rd Commando Brigade were to be reused, even if the troops were flown to Ascension Island and embarked from there, they could not reach the Falkland Islands before the middle of June. It was therefore decided that the brigade would have to be carried in other ships. The War Cabinet only approved the despatch of the 5th Infantry Brigade on 2 May. The Cunard Line's 67,140-gross-register-ton (190,100 m<sup>3</sup>) SS Queen Elizabeth 2 was taken up just 19 hours before she was due to depart for the Mediterranean with cruise passengers. To carry the 5th Infantry Brigade's vehicles and stores, two more roll-on/roll-off vessels were requisitioned, the 6,455-gross-register-ton (18,280 m<sup>3</sup>) and . Atlantic Conveyor's sister ship, SS Atlantic Causeway, was requisitioned for the same conversion to an aircraft transport on 4 May. They were joined by the helicopter support ship . Atlantic Causeway was loaded with vehicles and stores, requiring another vessel to carry the aircraft. It had also been decided to send another six RAF Harriers to augment the six already sent on Atlantic Conveyor. MV Contender Bezant was requisitioned for conversion to an aircraft transport on 10 May, followed by Astronomer on 29 May. ### Logistical Fuel was a critical requirement of the task force, and for political reasons could not be obtained from South America or South Africa. Countries in South America, even if sympathetic, felt unable to offer overt support in a conflict involving a neighbouring state, while South Africa was an international pariah at the time due to its system of apartheid, and collaboration with its regime risked alienating other countries at a time when Britain needed all the support it could muster for its international diplomatic efforts. The nearest source of supply was Freetown in Sierra Leone, 4,100 miles (6,600 km) from the Falkland Islands. To carry the diesel fuel required by the gas turbines of the warships and the fuel oil required by Hermes and some of the older RFA and STUFT, the fourteen RFA tankers were supplemented by fifteen requisitioned tankers. `and Appleleaf accompanied Woodward's force of ships that sailed from Gibraltar, while and were detailed to accompany the force departing from the UK. was returning from Gibraltar to the UK; she was ordered to take on aviation fuel and petrol at Portsmouth. was in the Indian Ocean, and was ordered to proceed to the South Atlantic via the Cape of Good Hope. had been sold to Chile and was off the coast of Peru on its way there, but its government allowed it to be temporarily repossessed on 3 April. The first two tankers to be chartered were British Petroleum's British Esk at Hamburg and British Tay at Swansea on 5 April, followed by the British Tamar on 7 April, and British Dart on 9 April.` Although the Royal Navy ships in the task force were fitted with reverse osmosis systems for producing potable water, many civilian ships were not, and some ships needed more water than usual owing to their carrying additional passengers. The 31,400-gross-register-ton (89,000 m<sup>3</sup>) SS Fort Toronto was chartered from Canadian Pacific for service as a water tanker. The supply of water while under way was simpler than fuel, as the hoses are lighter and the quantities involved are not as great. The 6,061-gross-register-ton (17,160 m<sup>3</sup>) North Sea oil rig support ship SS Stena Seaspread was taken up to act as a repair ship. The Royal Maritime Auxiliary Service had one ocean-going tugboat, , but it was evident that more would be required, and three were requisitioned from the United Towing company: SS Salvageman, Irishman and Yorkshireman. The Royal Navy had no hospital ships. HMY Britannia had been built to allow its conversion into a hospital ship, but she required special fuel oil, and had only a 200-bed capacity. Instead, the 16,907-gross-register-ton (47,880 m<sup>3</sup>) P&O liner SS Uganda, which was in the Mediterranean on an educational cruise with a thousand schoolchildren on board, was requisitioned, and modified to become a hospital ship. A team of 135 medical personnel was assigned, which included members of Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service (QARNNS). This was the first time that QARNNS personnel had been deployed afloat since the Korean War. They brought a packaged 250-bed portable hospital and 90 tons of medical supplies with them. Beds were provided for 20 intensive-care patients and 94 medium-dependency patients. Up to 940 low-dependency patients could be accommodated in dormitories. Three Hecla-class survey vessels, HMS Hecla, Herald and Hydra, became ambulance ships. Hospital ships were exempt from attack under the Geneva Conventions, but they also require that patients not be returned directly to the battlefield after treatment. Due to the distances involved, this meant that treatment on Uganda would involve a prolonged absence, even those with relatively minor injuries that were anticipated such as trench foot. Additional medical facilities were therefore established elsewhere in the task force. Surgical teams were also embarked on Hermes, Fearless and Canberra. In addition to the British Army medical staff embarked, there were 425 Royal Navy medical staff with the task force, including 103 doctors. Some 40 Royal Naval Reserve doctors were called up for service in the UK to replace those headed for the South Atlantic. The departure of so many trained personnel led to the suspension of nursing training at the Royal Naval Hospital, Haslar, and Royal Naval Hospital, Stonehouse. The Army Blood Supply Depot issued 800 units to the task force, and more units were obtained from a blood donation drive on Canberra. ## Dockyards It was initially hoped that ships could be loaded and converted at commercial shipyards, but these were soon overwhelmed by the requirements for skilled labour and specialised facilities, and the burden fell on the Royal Navy Dockyards at Portsmouth, Devonport, Chatham, Portland, Rosyth and Gibraltar. These had been subject to cutbacks; redundancy notices had been issued at Portsmouth on 2 April, and Chatham and Gibraltar had been slated for closure. Along with Marchwood, the home of the Army's 17 Port Regiment and the home base of the six LSLs, they were not bound by legal limits on the handling of explosives. Marchwood had only a single jetty, capable of accepting two ships, and could not accept deep draft vessels. Most major ship conversions were carried out at Devonport. Portsmouth carried out seven major conversions, including Norland, and fourteen minor ones, of which ten were tankers. These were the simplest conversions, as all they involved was installing communications equipment and replenishment at sea (RAS) systems to allow the tankers to supply fuel over the stern using a long, buoyant hose. Under normal circumstances they could pump 450 long tons (460 t) per hour, whereas an RFA tanker could refuel warships running alongside, with transfer rates of 600 long tons (610 t) per hour. Other ships required major alterations. The conversion of Atlantic Conveyor at Devonport required the removal of 500 tie-down points for containers from her deck, adding a landing pad for helicopters and Hawker Siddeley Harriers, installing UHF radio equipment and satellite communications, providing accommodation for 122 men, installing a liquid oxygen tank, cutting additional hatches, and modifying the stern doors. Similar conversions were undertaken on Atlantic Causeway, Contender Bezant and Astronomer. The experience with Atlantic Conveyor allowed these to be converted far more quickly. The conversion of Uganda to a hospital ship was carried out at Gibraltar in 65 hours. Minesweepers were converted at Rosyth. Some 17 ships were fitted with helicopter landing pads; on Canberra and Queen Elizabeth 2, the area around the swimming pool was used, as it had been designed to hold the weight of 70 to 100 long tons (71 to 102 t) of water. On and the cable ship Iris there was insufficient room for the flight deck and it had to be cantilevered over the stern. All ships fitted to operate helicopters also had to have communications, lighting and glide path indicators. The Royal Marines normally kept war reserves both afloat and ashore, but the floating reserve was on Sir Geraint, and had just been unloaded for a routine transfer to another LSL. These were soon reloaded. A request to the Army for assistance for the Commando Logistic Regiment in moving stores from the depots was met by 150 trucks on the first day; 1,500 trucks would ultimately be used. The depots despatched one million operational rations and twelve million ordinary meals. They also supplied 10,000 long tons (10,000 t) of ammunition, 1,260 long tons (1,280 t) of fuel, and 3,880 long tons (3,940 t) of stores. Eventually, 38,000 long tons (39,000 t) would be moved through to the ports. Good weather at Devonport and Portsmouth permitted loading to be carried out in the open without the danger of perishable stores being damaged by rain. Ships were not combat loaded—loaded in such a way that the weapons, ammunition, equipment and stores that the embarked troops would require on landing were immediately accessible. Most units sent critical equipment to the ports first, and this then became the first equipment loaded, and the last that could be unloaded. Baltic Ferry had munitions stored deep in her holds that could only be retrieved by removing all the other cargo. Most of the 3rd Commando Brigade's ammunition, about 2,000 long tons (2,000 t) of it, was loaded on Elk, making that vessel a particularly vulnerable target. Wheeled vehicles were not expected to be able to traverse the islands, so most were left behind. The 3rd Commando Brigade did take 54 of the Commando Logistic Regiment's 82 4-ton prime movers, ten of its fifteen fuel trucks, and nine of its forklifts. To make up for the wheeled vehicles, the 3rd Commando Brigade took 75 Bv202 tracked vehicles. These were fetched from Scotland by British Rail, the only use of rail during the initial deployment, because British Rail required seven days notice to reposition its rolling stock. Some 44 special trains were hired in the second week. All vehicles were loaded fully fuelled with two full 20-litre (4.4 imp gal) jerry cans, a practice normally prohibited as a fire hazard. As it turned out, four-wheel drive vehicles were able to operate on the islands. The Commando Logistic Regiment was missing 383 Commando Petroleum Troop, as this was made up of reservists, who were not called up. Leaving personnel behind reduced the strength of the Commando Logistic Regiment from its normal peacetime strength of over 600 to just 346. The only supplement it received was three Surgical Support Teams. The 3rd Commando Brigade's air defences were bolstered by the addition of T Battery (Shah Sujah's Troop) Royal Artillery, armed with twelve Rapier missile launchers. The logistical implications of deploying and maintaining the battery in the field were not fully appreciated. ## Ascension The task force headed for Ascension Island, a British territory in the mid-Atlantic 3,700 nautical miles (6,900 km; 4,300 mi) from the UK and 3,300 nautical miles (6,100 km; 3,800 mi) from the Falkland Islands. Parts of the island were leased by the US under a 1956 treaty which expired on 20 July 1975, but continued on an annual basis until either government announced its intention to terminate. Neither had done so by 1982. A 1962 exchange of notes obliged the US to provide "logistic, administrative or operating facilities at the airfield" for use by UK military aircraft. Ascension had about a thousand inhabitants, all contractors or employees, or the family members of contractors or employees, of British or American companies that included Cable & Wireless, the BBC, Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). There were about 200 schoolchildren on the island, who were obliged to leave at age 18. Although considered a United States Air Force (USAF) base, the US military garrison consisted of just one man, the base commander, Lieutenant Colonel William D. Bryden. Wideawake Airfield was built on the island by the US during the Second World War. The runway was extended to 10,000 feet (3,000 m) in 1966 by the USAF to meet the demands of the Eastern Test Range, and the airfield operated on behalf of the US government by Pan Am. Although it had an excellent runway, there was only a small hardstand area for parking aircraft, and no parallel taxiways. In the year prior to April 1982, it handled an average of 24.4 aircraft arrivals per month. Ascension had an anchorage, but no port facilities—just a lone jetty. The island was resupplied on a regular basis by a charter flight, which brought fresh produce, and a freighter, . When the Falklands War broke out, St Helena was due and the charter flight had just departed. The island was therefore fortuitously well-stocked. There were two shops on the island, run by NAAFI under contract. As such they looked like NAAFI stores, but charged much higher prices. At first these were open to service personnel, but as stocks quickly became low they were placed off limits to them. The Expeditionary Forces Institute (EFI) then established a third shop, exclusively for service personnel. After some delay, space was made available for a weekly supply run for the civilians. Their morale plummeted when it was announced that the Ministry of Defence had chartered St Helena, their only means of shipping baggage, receiving sea mail, and returning to St Helena, which had no airport. MV Stena Inspector and HMS Dumbarton Castle had to be diverted from operational tasks to perform these duties. A dozen RAF Lockheed C-130 Hercules transports flew to Ascension via Gibraltar and Dakar on 3 April, bringing stores and RAF and Royal Navy personnel to establish a base on Ascension. Royal Navy Captain Robert McQueen was appointed to command the British Forces Support Unit (BFSU) on Ascension, and arrived on 8 April. The BFSU ballooned to over 800 personnel in the first three weeks. It began operating Westland Sea King and Wessex helicopters. Aviation fuel storage facilities on Ascension were controlled by the United States. On 13 April, the US agreed that the British forces could use 950,000 US gallons (3,600,000 L) of the 12.5 million US gallons (47,000,000 L) stored on the island. Some 250,000 US gallons (950,000 L) of this allocation was consumed on 19 April, and just 12,000 US gallons (45,000 L) remained on 25 April when a supply tanker with 2.4 million US gallons (9,100,000 L) commenced replenishment. At this point, the US released its reserve stocks for British use. Fuel was discharged from tankers through a floating pipeline to an American fuel farm. It then needed to be transported 3.5 miles (5.6 km) to Wideawake Airfield. Tanker trucks found the island's steep and rough road heavy going. The compacted volcanic rock used to surface the roads was abrasive, and tyres soon wore out. New sets had to be flown in. Sappers of 1 Troop, 51 Field Squadron, Royal Engineers, built a pipeline to connect the fuel farm with the storage tanks at the airfield. Meanwhile, 12 Petroleum Operations Section, Royal Army Ordnance Corps, had taken over management of the fuel farm. Fuel storage at Wideawake Airfield was increased by 180,000 US gallons (680,000 L) by the addition of 30,000-US-gallon (110,000 L) fuel bladders. The RAF presence sharply increased after it was decided to use Ascension as a base for operations. Two Hawker Siddeley Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft arrived on 5 April. These were followed by seventeen Handley Page Victor aerial refuelling tankers and three Avro Vulcan bombers, which conducted raids on the Falkland Islands as part of Operation Black Buck. The first five Victor tankers deployed to Ascension on 18 April, followed by four more the next day. Six more deployed by the end of the month, bringing the Victor tanker force to fourteen, since one had returned to their base at RAF Marham on 26 April. Each was refuelled by another Victor before leaving UK airspace. The station commander at Marham, Group Captain J. S. B. Price, became the senior RAF officer at Ascension. Wing Commander D. W. Maurice-Jones assumed command of the Victor detachment until 22 April, when he was relieved by Wing Commander A. W. Bowman, the commander of No. 57 Squadron RAF. The number of personnel on the island increased to about one thousand, of whom around 120 were Navy, 60 were British Army, and 800 were RAF. This exceeded the capacity of the island's water supply, and McQueen instituted draconian measures to limit the number of personnel on Ascension Island, in some cases sending people back on the planes they arrived on. In early May, the USAF flew in fourteen planeloads of portable accommodation in the form of 31 twelve-man living units. Each was self-contained, with its own air-conditioning, bunks, showers and toilets. They were erected in five days by British and American personnel. The Army's 30 Signal Regiment established direct telephone circuits to the UK, and its 2 Postal Regiment provided mail and courier services. By June, some 20,000 mailbags had passed through Ascension. A detachment of 9 Ordnance Battalion established laundry facilities in a disused laundry. Service cooks from all three services prepared a thousand meals per day through three field kitchens. Intelligence sources warned of a possible Argentine attack on Ascension, perhaps using special forces and a long-range civilian airliner like a Boeing 707. Concerns about the vulnerability of the base led to three RAF Harriers being assigned for air defence on 10 May. These were replaced by McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom IIs on 24 May. Hermes reached Ascension on 16 April, and Fearless, Stromness and the five LSLs the following day. Canberra and Elk arrived on 20 April, having refuelled at Freetown. By this time, cargo planes were arriving at Wideawake Airfield at a rate of eight per day, and 1,500 long tons (1,500 t) of supplies had arrived, a third of which were earmarked for the 3rd Commando Brigade. Stores were difficult to identify, as many were poorly labelled, making it difficult to distinguish real ammunition from training ammunition. When cargo was not properly logged on arrival, it became difficult to know whether or not an item had been delivered. There was no security at the airfield, so goods were subject to pilferage. D Squadron, 22 Special Air Service Regiment, helped themselves to special ammunition and weapons belonging to the 3rd Commando Brigade, which they thought were just lying around. The amphibious force took the opportunity to re-stow its equipment. This took eleven days. Having not yet refuelled, Fearless rode too high in the water, and was unable to launch its LCUs, so the burden of the effort initially had to be carried by helicopters. Two Wessexes, three Sea Kings and a Boeing CH-47 Chinook supported the effort. Shortages of lifting gear and cargo nets hampered the effort, as did the haphazard original stowage of stores. In some cases, cargo had shifted during the voyage to Ascension. Some 138 Wessex, 40 Chinook and 40 Sea King sorties were flown on a single day. The LSLs Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale were stocked with two days' supply of ammunition, fuel and rations. Four more days' supply was stowed on Stromness, and sixteen on Elk. Units were issued with supplies and equipment they would require for an amphibious assault. Meanwhile, Intrepid, Atlantic Conveyor, Norland and Europic Ferry departed the UK on 25 and 26 April, and Sir Bedivere, which reached Marchwood on 25 April, sailed for Ascension on 27 April. The five LSLs, carrying most of the Commando Logistic Regiment, weighed anchor and set out for the Falkland Islands on 1 May, along with Pearleaf and escorted by the frigate HMS Antelope. Norland arrived at Ascension on the morning of 7 May, and departed for the Falklands that evening. Canberra, Tidepool and Elk had left the previous day, and the last ship, the LPD Intrepid, departed Ascension on 8 May. To allow ships to be resupplied by air when operating in the South Atlantic, modifications were made to the Hercules aircraft, which normally had a range of about 2,000 miles (3,200 km). At RAF Lyneham, Hercules transports were fitted with pairs of 825-imperial-gallon (3,750 L) auxiliary fuel tanks, thereby extending their range by three or four hours. Adding four tanks increased the range further still, but reduced the cargo carrying capacity by 75 per cent. These modified Hercules aircraft became known as LR2 and LR4 variants, depending on how many auxiliary tanks had been installed. They were also modified to allow for aerial refuelling by the addition of refuelling probes taken from Vulcan bombers. In the search for refuelling probes, they were taken from Vulcans at the Royal Air Force Museum London, Imperial War Museum Duxford, Castle Air Museum in California, and the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum in Nebraska. The Hercules transports were the first propeller-driven aircraft to be refuelled by Victor tankers. The difference in the speeds required skilful flying. A Victor would approach a Hercules from above and aft at 23,000 feet (7,000 m). The Hercules would then descend at 500 feet (150 m) per minute. At full throttle, this allowed the Hercules to reach 230 to 240 knots (430 to 440 km/h), the minimum speed of the Victor. Refuelling took about 15 minutes, by which time they would have descended to 8,000 feet (2,400 m), but occasionally it took longer and they descended as low as 2,000 feet (610 m). Part of 47 Air Despatch Squadron, Royal Corps of Transport, went to Ascension on Fearless. They prepared their first packages for airdropping on 19 April, of high priority supplies for HMS Alacrity and Invincible. The first LR2 Hercules arrived at Wideawake Airfield on 12 May, and four days later a 24-hour, 6,300-nautical-mile (11,700 km) flight delivered 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of supplies to Antelope. A flight to the Falkland Islands would take 28 hours, so two crews were needed, and required five Victor tankers for aerial refuelling. McQueen tried to enforce a policy that airdrop loads be rigged in the UK to save space at Ascension, but was overruled by Fieldhouse. By 1 June, 47 Air Despatch Squadron had prepared 47 loads totalling 163 long tons (166 t), with high priority items delivered within 40 hours of the initial request. Airdrop missions mounted from Ascension were given girls' names, in ascending alphabetical order. After "Zara" was flown on 9 June, the sequence started again with "Alison" the following day. While most airdrops were at sea, some were made to units in the Falkland Islands. Those at sea were made with the stores in waterproof containers which were retrieved by the ships' boats. Occasionally personnel were also dropped. In the "Ursula" mission on 1 June, Lieutenant Colonel David Chaundler, a replacement commander for 2 Para, parachuted into the sea and was plucked from the water by a boat from the frigate HMS Penelope. ## Over the beach ### Landing The plan for an amphibious landing in the Falkland Islands, codenamed Operation Sutton, called for units to land from the ships in which they had sailed, which meant that 40 Commando, 42 Commando and 3 Para would land from Canberra; but Fieldhouse became concerned about risking 2,000 men on one ship. On 18 May, Clapp received orders for different battalions to be carried on separate ships. Unusually calm seas on 19 May allowed this cross-decking to be carried out by LCUs and LCVPs from Fearless and Intrepid, with 40 Commando transferred to the former, and 3 Para to the latter. Both LPDs were seriously overloaded, and, unlike Canberra, did not have enough life rafts for everyone. After sunset an 846 Naval Air Squadron Sea King from Hermes transferring troops of D Squadron, 22 Special Air Service Regiment, to Intrepid crashed into the ocean. Intrepid's LCVPs rescued eight men, but 22 others were lost. Another change was that the Commando Logistic Regiment wanted the LSLs beached so they could be quickly unloaded. Clapp demurred. If done improperly, this could damage the ship. For this reason, peacetime financial restraints had prevented the LSL captains from practising this manoeuvre. Clapp ruled that the LSLs would discharge onto mexeflotes and landing craft through the stern doors. The LSLs had been loaded with the most urgently required stores in the bow, where they could be accessed first, but now the order needed to be changed. The double-handling required meant that unloading would be slower than planned. The logistics plan called for the support elements of the combat units, known as the B Echelons, to remain afloat, along with the entire Commando Logistic Regiment. After the beachhead was secured, the B Echelons would join their units. Lieutenant Colonel Ivar Hellberg, the commander of the Commando Logistic Regiment, and Major Gerry Wells-Cole, the 3rd Commando Brigade's Deputy Assistant Adjutant and Quartermaster General (DAA & QMG), would select a Brigade Maintenance Area (BMA) site near Ajax Bay to be run by the Commando Logistic Regiment. Engineers would establish a refuelling point for Harriers and helicopters, and establish water points. Hellberg and Wells-Cole planned to use a "pull" system whereby unit quartermasters would request supplies that they needed. There would be no equipment repair facilities ashore; the Commando Logistic Regiment's Workshop Squadron would remain afloat, with detachments going ashore temporarily to retrieve or repair equipment as necessary. Medical support was supplied by No. 1 Medical Troop on Sir Galahad, the Parachute Clearing Troop of the 16th (Parachute) Field Ambulance on Norland, and No. 3 Medical Troop, No. 2 Surgical Support Team and the Commando Logistic Regiment's Medical Squadron on Canberra. After the beachhead was secure, No. 1 Medical Troop and the Parachute Clearing Troop would establish a field dressing station in the BMA. Casualties could be flown to Uganda, and then taken to Montevideo by HMS Hecate, Hydra and Hecla, from whence they would be flown back to the UK via Ascension. The dead would be buried in the BMA or at sea. The amphibious force entered Falkland Sound shortly after midnight local time on 21 May, delayed by mists and navigational difficulties. One of Fearless's ballast pumps broke down, slowing the start of dock operations. Four LCUs from Intrepid collected 2 Para from Norland, while 40 Commando boarded four LCVPs and four LCUs; the LCVPs were needed because two of its LCUs were carrying a FV101 Scorpion and a FV107 Scimitar. 2 Para was slow boarding the LCUs, as this had not been practised, and one man suffered a crushed pelvis when he fell between the ship and an LCU. The various mishaps caused H-hour to be postponed by an hour. Guided by Major Ewen Southby-Tailyour, they landed at San Carlos Water, (Blue Beach) at 03:30. They then secured the high ground of the Sussex Mountains, establishing a reverse slope defence. Meanwhile, the landing craft returned to take 45 Commando from Intrepid and Stromness to Ajax Bay (Red Beach), and 3 Para from Intrepid to Port San Carlos (Green Beach). 42 Commando remained on Canberra as a reserve. Delays in landing the first wave meant that the second was about two hours late, with 3 Para landing at 07:30. ### Build-up Daylight allowed helicopter operations to begin. On 21 May, helicopters carried 288 loads, moving 520 personnel and 220 long tons (220 t) of stores from 11 ships to 21 sites. STUFT were unloaded at a rate of 20 long tons (20 t) per hour, and the LSLs could be unloaded at 90 long tons (91 t) per hour, the lesson being that STUFT were a poor substitute for purpose-built amphibious vessels. Priority was given to moving the six L118 light guns of 79 Commando Battery, 29th Commando Regiment Royal Artillery, ashore. Moving a battery with 500 rounds per gun required 85 Sea King sorties. The next priority was to position the Rapiers of T battery, but owing to the delays in the landing, the Rapier sites were not secured until around midday. Generally located on hilltops where there were no roads or tracks, the Rapiers had to be sited by helicopter. If they had to be moved, whether yards or miles, another helicopter sortie was called for. No one knew for certain what the effect of seven weeks' sea voyage would be on the equipment, but the need for air defence was obvious, as the Argentine air forces made repeated attacks on ships in Falkland Sound. Two Gazelle helicopters were lost. Of the seven escorts, five, HMS Antrim, Ardent, Argonaut, Brilliant and Broadsword, were hit; only HMS Plymouth and Yarmouth were unscathed. Of those hit, only Broadsword was fully capable of continuing the fight, while Ardent was ablaze and sinking. Clapp decided that the sound was too dangerous for STUFT, and ordered that Canberra, Norland and Europic Ferry leave Falkland Sound by midnight. The LSLs remained, but on 23 May Argentine bombs found Sir Bedivere, Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot. None of those that struck the LSLs exploded. Damage to Sir Bedivere was minor, but Sir Galahad was set on fire and beached, and was put out of action for a week. Fires started on Sir Lancelot, which put it out of action until 7 June—although in the meantime she acted as an accommodation ship and helicopter refuelling station. Clapp decided that the remaining stores had to be landed as quickly as possible. Inevitably, some stores that were neither requested nor required were landed. This disrupted the logistics plan. 42 Commando came ashore at Green Beach by LCU, but the B Echelons remained on Canberra, and the assault troops had left rucksacks, parkas, sleeping and cooking gear, and spare clothing behind. Canberra and Norland also took 90,000 rations with them. The BMA was far from ideal. There was a landing ramp where forklifts could unload landing craft, but unusable rocky ground limited the area available to about a third of what was really required to properly disperse the stores, and the only cover was a disused refrigeration plant on the shore of Ajax Bay, which had been taken over by the hospital. Commander Rick Jolly brought No. 2 Surgical Support Team and the Headquarters of the Commando Logistic Regiment's Medical Squadron ashore from Canberra. No. 1 Medical Troop disembarked from Sir Galahad, and the Parachute Clearing Troop had already come ashore from Norland. With these units he set up a field hospital in the refrigeration plant. They decided not to paint a Red Cross on the building, as it was close to the ordnance stores. A sign painted over the entrance proclaimed it to be "The Red and Green Life Machine", alluding to the colour of the paratroopers' and commandos' berets. A "Water Heater, Field Kitchen, Portable" was the sole source of hot water for the surgical team at Ajax Bay. It was loaned from an American unit for a crate of beer; the British kit they were supposed to use never made it ashore. Of 1,205 men treated, including 310 who required major surgery, 3 died. Atlantic Conveyor was struck by an Exocet anti-ship missile on the afternoon of 25 May and set ablaze. Although she remained afloat for several days, nothing could be salvaged. She was the most serious loss of the campaign. Twelve of those on board died, but 150 were rescued. Of the aircraft she had brought to the South Atlantic, the Harriers of No. 1 Squadron RAF had already been transferred to Hermes, a Wessex of 848 Naval Air Squadron had already flown ashore, and a Chinook of No. 18 Squadron RAF was in the air at the time. The rest, three Chinook and six Wessex helicopters, were lost. The lone surviving Chinook landed on Hermes. It spent the night there, arrived at San Carlos the next day, and was made available for missions on 29 May. The Chinook arrived with two aircrews, and a maintenance detachment, but they had no tools, spare parts or documentation, all of which were lost with Atlantic Conveyor. Somehow, it went on to fly 109 hours without servicing, carrying 1,500 troops, 95 casualties, 650 Argentine prisoners of war (POWs) and 540 long tons (550 t) of cargo. At one point it carried 81 paratroops in a single load, and then returned to fetch another 75, and it survived being accidentally flown into the sea one night during a snowstorm. In addition to the helicopters, Atlantic Conveyor took with her four tent camps, complete with field kitchens and sanitary facilities, which would have accommodated 4,500 personnel. Another serious loss was a portable fuelling system and six 10-long-ton (10 t) fuel tanks. Material for building an airstrip at Port San Carlos also went down, but 59 Independent Commando Squadron Royal Engineers managed to build it anyway, using matting earmarked for repairing Port Stanley Airport. All ships were unloaded by 27 May, leaving only the two damaged LSLs at San Carlos. ## Over the mountains ### 3rd Commando Brigade North east of the Total Exclusion Zone (TEZ) that the British government had declared around the Falkland Islands, the Royal Navy designated a Tug, Repair and Logistics Area (TRALA) where ships could receive and transfer supplies, and conduct repairs of battle damage under the protection of the carrier battle group. Hercules airdrops were made to ships there. Ships were now held in the TRALA, from whence it took about 20 hours to reach San Carlos. Their captains preferred to navigate Falkland Sound by night, allowing them to be unloaded by day, which suited the Commando Logistic Regiment. Working around the clock was inadvisable, for there were no relief crews for the landing craft or helicopters. Only four Sea Kings had night vision equipment, allowing them to operate at night. These were reserved for night operations; to allow the crews to rest, and necessary aircraft maintenance to be performed, they were not employed during the day. One Sea King was permanently assigned to support of the Rapier battery. This left six Sea King, five Wessex and the Chinook helicopter available for logistical and tactical missions. Requested supplies took at least two days to fetch from the TRALA. Hellberg visited Clapp on Fearless each night and presented a list of required ships. Clapp would then signal Woodward and ask for them; but for operational reasons a requested ship might not arrive, or a substitute might be sent containing none of the required stores. The Ordnance Squadron of the Commando Logistic Regiment had compiled lists of what was on board each ship, but lacked the manpower to maintain teams on all the supply ships. Goods became damaged from improper storage or handling, or were pilfered, and the contents of the ships slowly became less certain. carried stores for both the Royal Navy and the 3rd Commando Brigade, and with no-one to assess conflicting priorities, she remained with the fleet. `The provision of fuel posed a special challenge. The Rapier batteries required fuel to keep their generators running, and their isolated sites required the full-time service of a Sea King to keep them going. The Bv202s consumed fuel at a high rate because the operators kept them running constantly to keep warm and keep the radio batteries charged. The problem was not one of availability—there was ample fuel available on ships—but of distribution. The 3rd Commando Brigade's 10,000-litre (2,200 imp gal) collapsible pillow tank was holed by cannon shells from an Argentine fighter as it was being brought ashore on a mexeflote. The tanker trucks could be used to bring the fuel ashore on mexeflotes or landing craft, but it still needed to be decanted into jerry cans. There was no special equipment for this, so hand pumps had to be used. Daily consumption was 698 jerry cans, of which 160 were for the Rapiers, 378 for the Bv202s, 106 for Land Rovers and 54 for cooking. The 3rd Commando Brigade brought 1,880 jerry cans with it, of which 1,000 were empty, 600 were full, and 280 filled and carried on vehicles. The procedure was for an empty jerry can to be handed over for a full one, but it was impractical to deny a unit fuel for not producing a jerry can. The 5th Infantry Brigade arrived with another 1,000 empty jerry cans, having been prohibited from loading full ones on its ships.` Stromness brought the Emergency Fuel Handling Equipment (EFHE) on 23 May. This had been loaded on multiple ships, and not all the components could be located; but the 59 Independent Commando Squadron was still able to rig it. A Dracone Barge was moored offshore, and piping attached that allowed aviation fuel to be pumped into collapsible tanks ashore. This allowed helicopters to refuel ashore, eliminating the need to land on the LPDs, which had two helipads, or the LSLs, which had one each, for refuelling, for which they competed with the 15 light helicopters of 3 Commando Brigade Air Squadron. On 24 May, 11 Field Squadron commenced work on an airstrip to allow Harriers to refuel as well. The plant and equipment earmarked for this was lost on Atlantic Conveyor, but Stromness had 10-by-2-foot (3.05 by 0.61 m) aluminium panels for airfield surfacing, which were landed at Green Beach by helicopter and landing craft, and taken to the site with civilian vehicles. The airstrip was completed, with a ski jump for Harriers, assembled by hand, on 2 June. The absence of 383 Commando Petroleum Troop, though, meant that there was no one to operate the fuel points until the 5th Infantry Brigade arrived. Its attached 91 Ordnance Company had a petroleum platoon, the only regular army one based in the UK. These specialists took over the EFHE at Port San Carlos as soon as they arrived on 3 June, allowing Harriers to be refuelled there from 5 June. It was damaged by a Harrier that crash landed on 8 June, but was repaired. Over 150 operational sorties were flown from the airstrip between 5 and 14 June. Argentine air attacks were initially directed at the ships, but on 27 May four Douglas A-4 Skyhawks attacked the BMA, dropping twelve bombs, only four of which exploded. Six men were killed and thirty wounded. The field hospital was struck by two 400-kilogram (880 lb) bombs, neither of which exploded. They would remain in place, sandbagged and defuzed, for the rest of the campaign. Bombs that struck the ordnance area set off stockpiles of 105 mm artillery shells, MILAN missiles and 81 mm mortar bombs. The Commando Logistic Regiment had no fire fighting equipment, so the fire was left to burn itself out, and explosions continued through the night. All of 45 Commando's MILAN missiles were lost, along with two hundred 81 mm mortar bombs and three hundred 105 mm artillery rounds. The Battle of Goose Green on 28 and 29 May confirmed what logisticians had suspected and feared; the expenditure of ammunition was not only five times greater than that expected in a limited war, it exceeded that forecast for an all-out war against the Warsaw Pact. Another 30 days' supply had been ordered on 17 April, and was on its way south, but by the evening of 28 May, the BMA held just eighty-three 105 mm artillery rounds, thirty MILAN missiles, two days' supply of ten-man ration packs and three days' of medical stores, and no one-man ration packs, cooking fuel or spare clothing. The ration situation was exacerbated when 2 Para captured nearly a thousand Argentine prisoners at Goose Green, all of whom had to be fed. Since the tents were lost on Atlantic Conveyor, they had to be kept in the disused refrigeration plant during the night. The Argentine wounded put more pressure on the medical supplies, and the Argentine dead had to be disposed of, although the task force had no graves unit. The Commando Logistic Regiment buried them in a mass grave near Darwin. After the war, Thompson reflected that: > The majority of senior officers and their staffs were handicapped by a dearth of understanding of the logistic realities of fighting a conventional war. Brush fire wars and Northern Ireland had provided few logistic problems, and most peacetime exercises, with their emphasis on tactical movement, teach false logistic lessons. Commanders on these exercises are seldom faced with the choice between moving men, and moving bullets, beans and fuel. In war, if helicopters are in short supply, and for some reason other means of movement are not available, or cannot be used, the men will walk carrying some of the beans and bullets, and helicopters will be almost exclusively employed carrying the rest. At first light on 27 May, 45 Commando embarked in LCUs that took it from Ajax Bay to Port San Carlos. It then conducted a loaded march (which the commandos called a "yomp" and the paras called a "tab") to Douglas. Every man carried about 120 pounds (54 kg); some carried far more. Douglas was reached at 13:00 on 28 May. 3 Para set out from Port San Carlos at 11:00 on 27 May, and reached the Arroy Pedro River, 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) from Teal Inlet, at 11:00 on 28 May. The paras waited until night-fall before advancing on Teal Inlet, which was secured by 23:00. They were joined on the morning of 29 May by the Scorpion and Scimitar light tanks of No. 4 Troop, Blues and Royals, whose departure from Port San Carlos had been delayed by a temporary fuel shortage which had occurred when Sir Lancelot jettisoned all its motor transport fuel on discovering an unexploded bomb on board. Once fuel was secured, they were able to make the journey to Teal Inlet, arriving on the morning of 29 May. 3 Para and 45 Commando were then ordered to advance to Estancia. Helicopters resupplied 3 Para, and brought its mortars and support weapons. Estancia House was taken on 31 May, with 3 Para utilising local farm tractors to move its stores and heavy equipment. An attempt to fly 42 Commando and three 105 mm guns to Mount Kent on 29/30 May ran into a blizzard and was forced to return to Port San Carlos. A second attempt the following night succeeded. With the high ground overlooking Teal Inlet in British hands, a Forward Brigade Maintenance Area (FBMA) was established there, with a Distribution Point (DP) at Estancia. Supplies were delivered to the FBMA by LSL, and then moved to the DP by Bv202, requisitioned local farm tractor or helicopter. A Forward Arming and Refuelling Point (FARP) at Teal Inlet saved the helicopters from having to make a 90-to-100-mile (140 to 160 km) round trip for replenishment. ### 5th Infantry Brigade Brigadier Tony Wilson's 5th Infantry Brigade reached Cumberland Bay off South Georgia Island on Queen Elizabeth 2 on 27 May. The politicians were nervous about the political repercussions if the ship were lost, so it was decided to unload it here, and move the brigade to the Falkland Islands in other ships. The Queen Elizabeth 2 was met by a veritable fleet of ships that proceeded to unload her passengers and cargo. The trawler cum minesweepers HMS Cordella, Farnella, Junella, Northella and Pict ferried the infantry and the 16th (Parachute) Field Ambulance across to Canberra and Norland, which departed for San Carlos at 21:00 on 28 May. Cargo was unloaded onto Stromness, Resource, Saxonia, Lycaon, Leeds Castle, British Esk, and British Tay. A false warning of an attack by Argentine forces caused Queen Elizabeth 2 to weigh anchor and set sail for the UK on 29 May. So difficult was it to unload the ship that around 70 per cent of the brigade's 81 mm mortar and 105 mm artillery rounds remained on board. Stromness headed for San Carlos with most of the logistics units. Inclement weather made what would normally be a two-day voyage into a four-day one. Moore established his headquarters on Fearless on 29 May, and assumed control of land battle the following day. Atlantic Causeway, with twenty Wessex and eight Sea King helicopters, arrived at San Carlos on 1 June, and Canberra and Norland followed the next day. The logistics units that arrived with the 5th Infantry Brigade included 81 Ordnance Company, which supplied most services, and 91 Ordnance Company, a third line unit that included a laundry section, bath unit, and field bakery, and most importantly, the petroleum platoon. 10 Field Workshop provided maintenance support, but most of its equipment was on Baltic Ferry and Nordic Ferry, which departed without unloading due to another air raid alert. The unit, therefore, spent much of its time guarding POWs. 407 Transport Troop brought 20 Snow Tracs, predecessors of the Bv202s, but only six were landed in the first few days. There was also 160 Provost Company, Royal Military Police and 6 Field Cash Office, Royal Army Pay Corps. These logistic units constituted an augmentation of the Commando Logistic Regiment, rather than the logistic support required by a brigade engaged in combat operations. As a result, the 5th Infantry Brigade's arrival in the Falklands meant that the Commando Logistic Regiment became responsible for supporting two large brigades with a total strength of around 9,000 personnel. This placed stress on the regiment, as it was structured to support only the 3rd Commando Brigade's 3,000 personnel, and it had deployed to the Falklands with less than its usual allocations of manpower and transport. The 230-gross-register-ton (650 m<sup>3</sup>) coastal vessel MV Monsunen was used by the Argentinians until forced aground near Goose Green by Yarmouth on 23 May. It was salvaged by a prize crew from Fearless, and used to supplement the 5th Infantry Brigade's transport. While the 3rd Commando Brigade advanced on Port Stanley on a northerly axis, the 5th Infantry Brigade advanced on a southerly one. The plan was to establish a second FBMA at Fitzroy, with a DP at Bluff Cove. It was nowhere near as good as Teal Inlet. The route from Port San Carlos went all the way around Lafonia, a distance that landing craft and mexeflotes could not cover on their own. While the LPDs were fast enough to get there and back in darkness, the LSLs could not. Moreover, unlike at Teal Inlet, the Argentinians held the high ground overlooking it. As a result, Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram were caught unloading in daylight on 8 June and attacked by Argentine aircraft, and both were set ablaze. The fires on Sir Tristram soon burned themselves out, and some of the cargo was saved; ultimately, the ship was salvaged. But Sir Galahad was a total loss. The disaster cost 49 men their lives; another 115 were wounded. Among the dead were four Chinese crewmen. The field hospital was flooded with casualties, and arrangements were made for landing craft to send two dozen each to Fearless, Intrepid and Atlantic Causeway; others were flown to Uganda. That same day, one of the LCUs from Fearless was caught in open water in daylight, and attacked and sunk by Argentine aircraft, killing six men. On board were six Land Rovers carrying the 5th Brigade's communications equipment. For the final battles around Port Stanley, the gun positions were stocked with 500 rounds per gun, plus another 500 in reserve. Each combat unit would have two days' supply, plus two more days at the FBMAs at Fitzroy or Teal Inlet. The remaining LSLs made runs to Fitzroy and Teal Inlet on alternating days, moving over 1,000 long tons (1,000 t) to each. The arrival of four more Wessex helicopters on Engadine brought the number of helicopters available to forty; these were used to move ammunition to the gun positions. FARPs at each FBMA saved the helicopters from having to return to San Carlos. The field hospital was broken up on 10 June, with teams deploying to Fitzroy and Teal Inlet. The final four-day battle around Port Stanley involved some of the hardest fighting of the campaign. One battery almost ran out of ammunition, requiring an emergency helicopter resupply mission in a snowstorm at night. The lone bridge over the Murrell River collapsed when an armoured recovery vehicle loaded with ammunition attempted to cross it, cutting the 3rd Commando Brigade's overland supply line for their Bv202s, but the engineers built an air-portable bridge at Fitzroy which the Chinook delivered. On 14 June, the Argentine commander, Brigadier General Mario Menéndez surrendered Argentine forces in the Falkland Islands to Moore. ## Aftermath Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Kennedy arrived at San Carlos soon after the Argentine surrender as Commander Royal Engineers (CRE) Works, Falkland Islands. His task was to rehabilitate Port Stanley. It took the sappers of 9 Parachute Squadron and 61 Field Squadron four days to restore the water supply to Port Stanley. By this time, the reservoirs were down to two days' supply. In the meantime it was supplied by Fort Toronto through a dracone moored offshore. A military water supply point at Moody Brook was constructed and operated by 3 Field Squadron. The town's consumption was about 12,000 imperial gallons (55,000 L) per day. The electric grid had also been damaged by shellfire, and took a week longer to repair. Its capacity was still limited, so it was supplemented by two 250 KW Army generators. A separate military power station was subsequently established. Fuel was supplied using a dracone. The major task was restoration of the port and airfield. In the interim, the Hercules transports continued to fly from Ascension, dropping high priority items. The postal unit moved from Ajax Bay into the Post Office at Port Stanley. At first, mail bags were airdropped but some fell into Argentine minefields. A method was then devised to allow the Hercules to deliver bags without having to land by trailing a grappling hook attached to the bags which snagged a wire strung between two poles. Built in the 1970s, the airfield had a 4,100-by-150-foot (1,250 by 46 m) runway. It was unusable because it had been cratered by the RAF. Its rehabilitation was undertaken by 11 Field Squadron and 59 Independent Commando Squadron. The Argentinians had already repaired three craters. The others were filled in and topped with Argentine aluminium matting. A huge crater caused by a 1,000-pound (450 kg) bomb required over 1,000 square metres (11,000 sq ft) of matting. "Scabs", or scrapes in the runway surface, of which there were several hundred, were repaired with Bostik 276, a magnesium phosphate cement and aggregate mixture. There were 47 Hercules and several hundred Harrier landings before the airfield was closed for repairs on 15 August. The runway was too short for use by the RAF's Phantoms, so 50 Field Squadron (which had been detailed for the task in May) began extending it to 6,100 feet (1,900 m). Some 9,000 long tons (9,100 t) of airfield construction stores, plant and equipment were landed for this purpose. 25,000 long tons (25,000 t) of quartz granite rock fill was used, which was obtained by 3 and 60 Field Squadrons from a local quarry. Aluminium matting was laid along the whole length of the runway. The first Hercules landed on the new runway on 28 August. Subsequently, RAF Mount Pleasant was built as a permanent airbase, and opened by Prince Andrew on 12 May 1985. Sites for the breakdown and storage of bulk supplies were limited, and the warehouses were initially used for the Argentine prisoners. While Port Stanley provided anchorages for deep draft vessels, its berths were only 6 to 10 metres (20 to 33 ft) deep, suitable only for shallow draft vessels. The Royal Engineers built two slipways for mexeflotes and LCUs. As late as April 1983, the Ministry of Defence had 25 ships on charter to supply the Falkland Islands. About 1,000 personnel were being ferried to and from the islands each month, requiring the services of Uganda and Cunard Countess. To provide a regular service, a ferry, the was taken up and commissioned as a troopship, HMS Keren, although it was decommissioned becoming MV Keren a few weeks later. The port was replaced by a £23 million floating wharf and warehouse complex that opened on 26 April 1984. This consisted of six 800-foot (240 m) North Sea oil rig support barges that were linked together. Atop them were warehouses, refrigerated storages, and accommodation and mess facilities for 200 people. It could berth vessels up to 1,000 feet (300 m) long, and was connected to the shore by a 623-foot (190 m) two-lane causeway. An access road was constructed by 37 Engineer Regiment. With the end of hostilities in the Falklands (although Operation Keyhole, the reoccupation of Thule Island in the South Sandwich Islands, remained, and was concluded on 20 June), the British forces became responsible for feeding the civilian population and 11,848 Argentine prisoners. Due to the British blockade of the island, they had only three days' rations. The prisoners were initially issued with Argentine rations, but the British withheld the officer rations as they contained alcohol. Prisoners rioted on 16 June, setting fire to their clothing store. Those taken at Goose Green had already been repatriated to Argentina via Montevideo in neutral Uruguay on Norland. Some 5,000 Argentine prisoners were embarked on Canberra and 1,000 on Norland on 17 June. By 20 June 10,250 prisoners had been repatriated. Only 593 remained, including Menéndez. These were held for intelligence gathering, and to encourage Argentina to end hostilities. One British prisoner, Flight Lieutenant Jeffrey Glover, was held in Argentina; he was released on 16 July. The last Argentine prisoners were repatriated by 14 July. The Bakery Section of 91 Ordnance Company baked its first loaf in the Falkland Islands on 30 June. It baked up to 6,000 loaves per day before settling down to just 4,000 by August. Although rations could soon be supplemented with fresh fruit and vegetables, it was not until August that the troops could be fed fresh rations. A wing of the small King Edward VII Memorial Hospital at Port Stanley was occupied by 16 Field Ambulance. Its first task was sorting through captured Argentine medical supplies. The military hospital wing opened on 29 June. Uganda dropped anchor at Port William to supply backup care, and donated fifty hospital beds and bedding to King Edward VII Memorial Hospital. Having sailed from the UK on the TEV Rangatira on 19 June, 2 Field Hospital reached the Falkland Islands on 11 July. Its staff included fourteen officers and other ranks of Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps. Its tent accommodation had been lost on Atlantic Conveyor, so it moved into the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital. About 3,000 long tons (3,000 t) of British ammunition was recovered from 47 battlefield sites by 81 Ordnance Company, along with over 4.5 million rounds of Argentine ammunition. Some 1,000 long tons (1,000 t) was found to be serviceable, and was shipped to the UK. Most Argentine equipment was dumped at sea, but some items, including Chinook and Agusta 109 helicopters, were taken back to the UK. The first units to return from the Falkland Islands were 2 and 3 Para, which left on Norland and Europic Ferry in June. The 3rd Commando Brigade followed, departing on Canberra on 26 June, with the Commando Logistic Regiment embarking on Sir Percivale two days later. This left the 5th Infantry Brigade, whose logistic support was consolidated into the Falkland Islands Logistic Battalion on 28 June. Major General David Thorne became Commander, British Forces Falkland Islands in July. He brought the 1st Battalion Queen's Own Highlanders (Seaforth and Camerons) and a company of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment with him, enabling the relief of the 5th Infantry Brigade's combat units to commence. The last of these, the 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards, departed the Falkland Islands in July. Thorne gave a high priority to providing proper accommodation for his men before the next winter. Portable buildings were erected with running water, electric power and sewerage. Additional accommodation was provided by the "coastels", floating multi-storeyed accommodation vessels for 900 people with their own kitchens, fresh water, laundry and recreational facilities. Safe Dominia and Safe Esperia were chartered from the Swedish Consafe. The latter's facilities included a gymnasium, four squash courts, two swimming pools and a canteen, which was operated by NAAFI. They were joined by the British-built Pursuivant, which left for the Falkland Islands in July 1983. Thorne was succeeded by Major General Peter de la Billière in 1984. A Grave Registration unit of the Royal Pioneer Corps arrived on the SS Strathewe, along with coffins and embalming materials. It had the task of disinterring the bodies of those killed. For the first time in British history, families were given the option of having their loved ones' remains returned to the UK, and 64 chose to exercise this option. The remaining 14 bodies (including that of Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones, who was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross (VC) for his part in the Battle of Goose Green) were re-interred in the Blue Beach Military Cemetery at San Carlos. An Argentine Military Cemetery was established near Goose Green in 1983, which was rebuilt between 2002 and 2004. The Argentine government did not wish to "repatriate" its dead, as it considered that they were already in Argentina. Many were not identified, and were buried with the inscription "Argentine soldier known unto God." ## Lessons In the logistics section of its report to Parliament on the lessons of the war, the Ministry of Defence highlighted the prodigious expenditure of ammunition and missiles; the high level of logistic support required for operations outside western Europe; the importance of civil resources in the defence effort; and the utility of aerial refuelling. The value of the Royal Navy's amphibious forces was reassessed. A replacement for the lost Sir Galahad was ordered, and two roll-on roll-off ferries, and , were chartered while the new was built and Sir Tristram was repaired. However, the government still dithered over the replacement of the Fearless-class LPDs; and replacements, the Albion class, were not ordered until 1996. The oil rig support ship MV Stena Inspector was purchased in 1983, and became , while Astronomer and Contender Bezant were retained as RFA Reliant and Argus respectively. The value of STUFT was recognised, and over the next few years STUFT would see active service in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The Falkland War was also studied in other countries, notably in China, where it was the subject of organised teaching and research at the PLA Naval Command College in Nanjing. The Americans were impressed by the speed with which the British were able to mobilise their forces and get them moving to the theatre of operations in response to a crisis that had erupted with very little warning. A programme was already under way to improve American sealift capability, and between 1982 and 1986, the United States Congress appropriated and spent US\$7 billion on the purchase or lease of new logistics ships. They would be tested in the 1991 Gulf War. Thompson felt that the overriding importance of logistics as the driving factor of operations was overlooked. He was particularly disappointed that the 5th Infantry Brigade had not used the time it had before embarkation to remedy more of its logistical shortcomings. Logistics lessons drawn from the conflict were not new, but had not been learned either. These included the failure to integrate operational and tactical planning; improper tactical loading of ships; outdated planning data for consumables, particularly fuel and ammunition; lack of heavy-lift helicopters and poor discipline in the employment of helicopters; shortages of land transport; the employment of new and highly complex equipment on the battlefield; faulty casualty evacuation plans; and the need for post-conflict planning. British and American commentators observed that much of this could be traced to logistically unrealistic peacetime training and exercises, and called for more exercises where there were "no permanent quarters to house the troops, no Federal Express to deliver critical supply parts, no power production and no in-place hookups for communications or intelligence information."
21,785,395	Chorioactis	1,113,527,681	Genus of fungi that contains the single species Chorioactis geaster	[ "Fungi of Asia", "Fungi of the United States", "Fungi without expected TNC conservation status", "Monotypic Ascomycota genera", "Pezizales", "Taxa described in 1893" ]	Chorioactis is a genus of fungi that contains the single species Chorioactis geaster. The mushroom is commonly known as the devil's cigar or the Texas star in the United States, while in Japan it is called . This extremely rare mushroom is notable for its unusual appearance and disjunct distribution; it is found only in select locales in Texas and Japan. The fruit body, which grows on the stumps or dead roots of cedar elms (in Texas) or dead oaks (in Japan), somewhat resembles a dark brown or black cigar before it splits open radially into a starlike arrangement of four to seven leathery rays. The interior surface of the fruit body bears the spore-bearing tissue known as the hymenium, and is colored white to brown, depending on its age. The fruit body opening can be accompanied by a distinct hissing sound and the release of a smoky cloud of spores. Fruit bodies were first collected in Austin, Texas, and the species was named Urnula geaster in 1893; later it was found in Kyushu in 1937, but the mushroom was not reported again in Japan until 1973. Although the new genus Chorioactis was proposed to accommodate the unique species a few years after its original discovery, it was not accepted as a valid genus until 1968. Its classification has also been a source of confusion. Historically, Chorioactis was placed in the fungus family Sarcosomataceae, despite inconsistencies in the microscopic structure of the ascus, the saclike structure in which spores are formed. Phylogenetic analyses of the past decade have clarified the fungus's classification: Chorioactis, along with three other genera, make up the family Chorioactidaceae, a grouping of related fungi formally acknowledged in 2008. In 2009, Japanese researchers reported discovering a form of the fungus missing the sexual stage of its lifecycle; this asexual state was named Kumanasamuha geaster. ## History The fungus was first collected in 1893 by botanist Lucien Marcus Underwood, who sent the specimens to mycologist Charles Horton Peck for identification. Peck described the species as Urnula geaster in that year's Annual Report of the New York State Botanist, although he expressed doubt about its generic placement in Urnula. In 1902, student mycologist Elsie Kupfer questioned the proposed classification of various species in the genera Urnula and Geopyxis, as suggested in an 1896 publication on the Discomycetes by German mycologist Heinrich Rehm. She considered Rehm's transfer of the species to the genus Geopyxis illogical: > "Even externally the fungus does not closely answer Rehm's own description of the genus Geopyxis under which he places it; the texture of the apothecium is described as fleshy, the stem, as short and sometimes thin; while in this plant, the leathery character of the cup and the length and thickness of the stem are its noticeable features." Working with Underwood's guidance, Kupfer compared the microscopic structure of the hymenium (the fertile, spore-bearing tissue) of the Texan species with a number of similar ones—Geopyxis carbonaria, Urnula craterium, and Urnula terrestris (now known as Podophacidium xanthomelum). She concluded that the Texan species was so dissimilar as to warrant its own genus, which she named Chorioactis. Although this taxonomical change was opposed in later studies of the fungus by Frederick De Forest Heald and Frederick Adolf Wolf (1910) and Fred Jay Seaver (1928, 1942), Chorioactis was established as a valid genus in 1968 by Finn-Egil Eckblad in his comprehensive monograph about the Discomycetes. ## Classification and naming Historically, Chorioactis was considered to be in the family Sarcosomataceae. A 1983 monograph on the family included Chorioactis in the tribe Sarcosomateae (along with the genera Desmazierella, Sarcosoma, Korfiella, Plectania, and Urnula), a grouping of fungi characterized by having spores lacking small, wart-like projections (verruculae) capable of absorbing blue dye. A 1994 study of the structural features of the asci and the ascospores concluded that Chorioactis was more closely aligned with the Sarcoscyphaceae, although it conceded that the layering of the cells comprising the walls of the ascus differed considerably from the other members of the family. It was not until 1999 that the results of phylogenetic analysis firmly challenged the traditional classification, showing C. geaster to be part of a distinct lineage, or clade, that includes species in the genera Desmazierella, Neournula, and Wolfina, taxa that were distributed among both families. This analysis was later corroborated when it was shown that the grouping of these four genera (by then called the "Chorioactis clade") represented a sister clade to the Sarcosomataceae, and a new family, the Chorioactidaceae, was erected to contain them. Although C. geaster shares some characteristics with the other Chorioactidaceae genera, including dark-colored superficial "hairs" on the outer surface of the fruit bodies, it is distinguished from them by its tan to orange (rather than black) hymenia. The specific epithet geaster alludes to members of genus Geastrum, which also open to form star-shaped fruit bodies commonly called 'earthstars'. In the United States, Chorioactis geaster is commonly known as the Texas star, or the devil's cigar. Regarding the origin of the latter name American mycologist Fred Jay Seaver commented: "Whether the name Devil's Cigar refers to the form of the young specimens which resemble a bloated cigar in form, as well as in color, or to the fact that the fungus appears to 'smoke' at maturity, we cannot say ... At any rate, the name is very appropriate." In 1997, Texas State Senator Chris Harris filed a bill to make C. geaster the official state fungus of Texas. The bill passed the Senate but did not succeed in the House. The Texas Legislature finally designated the Texas star as the official "State Mushroom of Texas" in 2021. In Japan the mushroom is called kirinomitake (キリノミタケ), because the immature, unopened fruit body bears a superficial resemblance to the seed pods of kiri, the empress tree (Paulownia tomentosa). ## Description Young specimens of C. geaster have a hollow, club-shaped, dark-brown fruit body, connected to a stem. The stem, which is usually buried in the ground, is shorter than the hollow fruit body or equals it in length, although the stem length is somewhat variable depending on the depth of the underground root to which it is attached. The flesh of the stem and the wall of the fruit body are white, while the inner surface is yellowish-white, turning light brown with age. The fruit body varies in width from 1.2 to 3.5 cm (0.5 to 1.4 in) in the thickest portion, and has a length of 4 to 12 cm (1.6 to 4.7 in); the stem is 0.75 to 1.5 cm (0.3 to 0.6 in) wide by 1 to 5 cm (0.4 to 2.0 in) long. Both stem and fruit body are covered by a dense layer of soft, brown, velvety "hairs", or tomentum. In maturity, the fruit body splits open into four to seven rays that curve downward, similar to mushrooms of the genus Geastrum. The spores are borne on the inner surface of the rays, which, depending on the maturity of the specimen, may range in color from whitish to saffron to salmon to butterscotch to chestnut. The leathery rays are up to 0.35 cm (0.1 in) thick. The fruit body remains closed until shortly before spore discharge; dehiscence (fruit body opening) is caused by the pressure exerted by swollen paraphyses—sterile (i.e., nonreproductive) cells that are interspersed between the ascospores. Dehiscence is accompanied by the release of clouds of spores, resembling smoke. The spore puffing upon rupture is thought to be caused by the sudden change in relative humidity between the interior chamber of the fruit body and the outside environment. Dehiscence is accompanied by a hissing sound, an auditory phenomenon known to occur in about 15 other fungal species. ### Microscopic characteristics Spores are oblong to spindle-shaped, and are flattened on one side; they have dimensions of 54–68 μm by 10–13 μm. The spores each contain three to five oil drops. Although the spores have been described as smooth in older literature, when viewed with transmission electron microscopy, they are seen to have minute spots or punctures. The spores develop simultaneously (synchronously) within the ascus, a developmental feature shared with the Sarcoscyphaceae genera Cookeina and Microstoma. Like other members of the Pezizales order, the asci of C. geaster have an operculum—a "lid"—that opens when the spores are discharged. However, the operculum of C. geaster develops a two-layered ring zone upon dehiscence, making it structurally distinct from members of both the Sarcosomataceae and the Sarcoscyphaceae families. Similar to other Discomycetes, the fruit body consists of three distinct layers of tissue: the hymenium, the hypothecium, and the excipulum. The spore-bearing hymenium, the outermost layer of cells, contains asci interspersed with sterile cells called paraphyses. In C. geaster, the club-shaped asci are 700–800 μm long and 14–17.25 μm thick; they are abruptly constricted at the base to a narrow pedicel. The paraphyses are initially filamentous or thread-like (filiform) but swell with age to resemble a string of beads (moniliform). The swelling of the paraphyses is believed to cause the expansion of the hymenium and subsequent splitting of the fruit body into rays; this development places the asci into an optimal position for spore release and dispersal. Supporting the cells of the hymenium is a thin layer of tightly interwoven hyphae called the hypothecium, and underneath this is a thick layer of loosely interwoven hyphae known as the excipulum. This tissue layer, analogous to parenchyma found in plants, gives the tissue a fibrous texture. The excipulum layer averages 34 μm in diameter, while the hypothecium is 10–14 μm. When viewed with electron microscopy, the dark brown "hairs" on the surface of the fruit body can be seen to be adorned with conical warts or spines. ### Anamorph form Many fungi have an asexual stage in their lifecycle, in which they propagate via asexual spores called conidia. In some cases, the sexual stage—or teleomorph stage—is later identified, and a teleomorph-anamorph relationship is established between the species. In 2004, researchers reported a connection between C. geaster and the appearance of blackish-brown tufted structures on rotting wood. By comparing the internal transcribed spacer region of the nuclear ribosomal DNA from the two organisms, they established a phylogenetic connection between Chorioactis and the fungus they called Conoplea aff. elegantula. However, they were unable to induce the new organism to grow on artificial media, and did not definitively establish a teleomorph-anamorph connection between the fungi. In 2009, Japanese researchers found a similar fungus growing on rotting logs that were normally associated with the growth of C. geaster; they were able to grow the organism in axenic cultures from single-spore isolates of C. geaster. Until the one fungus, one name rule was enacted in 2011, the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature permitted the recognition of two (or more) names for one and the same organism, one based on the teleomorph, the other(s) restricted to the anamorph(s). So Nagao et al. named the anamorph Kumanasamuha geaster due to its morphological similarity with species in the genus Kumanasamuha. ## Distribution, ecology, and habitat Chorioactis geaster has a disjunct distribution, and has only been collected from Texas, Oklahoma, and Japan. The first reported collection in Japan was in Kyushu in 1937, and then it was not collected again in that location until 36 years later. In 2006, it was observed in a humid forest near Kawakami, Nara Prefecture. The fungus's natural habitat in Japan is disappearing because of the practice of deforestation and replanting with Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica). This rare mushroom has been put on the list of threatened species in Japan. In Texas, the fungus has been reported in Collin, Hays, Travis, Dallas, Denton, Guadalupe, Tarrant, Hunt, and Bell Counties. Travis, Hays, and Guadalupe Counties are in central Texas, while the remainder are clustered together in the northeastern part of the state. Its habitat may be threatened in Texas by industrialization. The fungus was reported from Choctaw County, Oklahoma, in 2017, the first record in North America outside of Texas. Although the species is considered rare due to its globally restricted distribution, it may be locally abundant. Although it is not known definitively, Chorioactis is believed to be saprobic, deriving nutrients from decomposing organic matter. In Texas, fruit bodies are found growing singly or in groups from roots, stumps, and dead roots of cedar elm trees (Ulmus crassifolia) or Symplocos myrtacea; in Japan, the usual host is dead oak trees. Fruit bodies can be clustered together close to the base of the stump, or from the roots away from the stump; the stem of the fruit body tends to originate from a point 5 to 10 cm (2 to 4 in) below the ground. In Texas, fruit bodies usually appear between October and April, as this period is associated with somewhat cooler weather, and the temperature and moisture conditions during this time seem to be more favorable for growth. Scientists do not know why the fungus mysteriously lives only in Texas and Japan, locations of approximately the same latitude, but separated by 11,000 km (6,800 mi). Fred Jay Seaver commented "this is only another illustration of the unusual and unpredictable distribution of many species of the fungi. It would be difficult indeed to account for it, and we merely accept the facts as they are." In 2004, a research study compared the DNA sequences of both populations and used a combination of molecular phylogenetics and molecular clock calculations to estimate the extent of genetic divergence. It concluded that the two populations have been separated for at least 19 million years, ruling out the possibility of human introduction of the species from one location to the other. Although no consistent differences in morphology are seen between the two populations, several differences exist in their life histories. The preferred host of Texan populations is typically roots and stumps of Ulmus crassifolia, while the Japanese populations tend to grow on the fallen trunks of Symplocos myrtacea and Quercus gilva. Texan species grow in areas subjected to periodic flooding, unlike their Japanese counterparts. Finally, only Japanese specimens can be grown in culture—the spores of Texan material have not been successfully germinated on artificial media.
6,260	Claude Debussy	1,173,612,451	French classical composer (1862–1918)	[ "1862 births", "1918 deaths", "19th-century French composers", "19th-century French male classical pianists", "19th-century classical composers", "20th-century French composers", "20th-century French male classical pianists", "20th-century classical composers", "Ballets Russes composers", "Burials at Passy Cemetery", "Claude Debussy", "Composers for piano", "Conservatoire de Paris alumni", "Deaths from cancer in France", "Deaths from colorectal cancer", "French ballet composers", "French male classical composers", "French opera composers", "Impressionist composers", "Knights of the Legion of Honour", "Male opera composers", "People from Saint-Germain-en-Laye", "Prix de Rome for composition", "Pupils of Antoine François Marmontel", "Pupils of Ernest Guiraud" ]	(Achille) Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born to a family of modest means and little cultural involvement, Debussy showed enough musical talent to be admitted at the age of ten to France's leading music college, the Conservatoire de Paris. He originally studied the piano, but found his vocation in innovative composition, despite the disapproval of the Conservatoire's conservative professors. He took many years to develop his mature style, and was nearly 40 when he achieved international fame in 1902 with the only opera he completed, Pelléas et Mélisande. Debussy's orchestral works include Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894), Nocturnes (1897–1899) and Images (1905–1912). His music was to a considerable extent a reaction against Wagner and the German musical tradition. He regarded the classical symphony as obsolete and sought an alternative in his "symphonic sketches", La mer (1903–1905). His piano works include sets of 24 Préludes and 12 Études. Throughout his career he wrote mélodies based on a wide variety of poetry, including his own. He was greatly influenced by the Symbolist poetic movement of the later 19th century. A small number of works, including the early La Damoiselle élue and the late Le Martyre de saint Sébastien have important parts for chorus. In his final years, he focused on chamber music, completing three of six planned sonatas for different combinations of instruments. With early influences including Russian and Far Eastern music and works by Chopin, Debussy developed his own style of harmony and orchestral colouring, derided – and unsuccessfully resisted – by much of the musical establishment of the day. His works have strongly influenced a wide range of composers including Béla Bartók, Olivier Messiaen, George Benjamin, and the jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans. Debussy died from cancer at his home in Paris at the age of 55 after a composing career of a little more than 30 years. ## Life and career ### Early life Debussy was born on 22 August 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Seine-et-Oise, on the north-west fringes of Paris. He was the eldest of the five children of Manuel-Achille Debussy and his wife, Victorine, née Manoury. Debussy senior ran a china shop and his wife was a seamstress. The shop was unsuccessful, and closed in 1864; the family moved to Paris, first living with Victorine's mother, in Clichy, and, from 1868, in their own apartment in the Rue Saint-Honoré. Manuel worked in a printing factory. In 1870, to escape the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, Debussy's pregnant mother took him and his sister Adèle to their paternal aunt's home in Cannes, where they remained until the following year. During his stay in Cannes, the seven-year-old Debussy had his first piano lessons; his aunt paid for him to study with an Italian musician, Jean Cerutti. Manuel Debussy remained in Paris and joined the forces of the Commune; after its defeat by French government troops in 1871 he was sentenced to four years' imprisonment, of which he only served one year. His fellow Communard prisoners included his friend Charles de Sivry, a musician. Sivry's mother, Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville, gave piano lessons, and at his instigation the young Debussy became one of her pupils. Debussy's talents soon became evident, and in 1872, aged ten, he was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris, where he remained a student for the next eleven years. He first joined the piano class of Antoine François Marmontel, and studied solfège with Albert Lavignac and, later, composition with Ernest Guiraud, harmony with Émile Durand, and organ with César Franck. The course included music history and theory studies with Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, but it is not certain that Debussy, who was apt to skip classes, actually attended these. At the Conservatoire, Debussy initially made good progress. Marmontel said of him "A charming child, a truly artistic temperament; much can be expected of him". Another teacher was less impressed: Émile Durand wrote in a report "Debussy would be an excellent pupil if he were less sketchy and less cavalier." A year later he described Debussy as "desperately careless". In July 1874 Debussy received the award of deuxième accessit for his performance as soloist in the first movement of Chopin's Second Piano Concerto at the Conservatoire's annual competition. He was a fine pianist and an outstanding sight reader, who could have had a professional career had he wished, but he was only intermittently diligent in his studies. He advanced to premier accessit in 1875 and second prize in 1877, but failed at the competitions in 1878 and 1879. These failures made him ineligible to continue in the Conservatoire's piano classes, but he remained a student for harmony, solfège and, later, composition. With Marmontel's help Debussy secured a summer vacation job in 1879 as resident pianist at the Château de Chenonceau, where he rapidly acquired a taste for luxury that was to remain with him all his life. His first compositions date from this period, two settings of poems by Alfred de Musset: "Ballade à la lune" and "Madrid, princesse des Espagnes". The following year he secured a job as pianist in the household of Nadezhda von Meck, the patroness of Tchaikovsky. He travelled with her family for the summers of 1880 to 1882, staying at various places in France, Switzerland and Italy, as well as at her home in Moscow. He composed his Piano Trio in G major for von Meck's ensemble, and made a transcription for piano duet of three dances from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. ### Prix de Rome At the end of 1880 Debussy, while continuing his studies at the Conservatoire, was engaged as accompanist for Marie Moreau-Sainti's singing class; he took this role for four years. Among the members of the class was Marie Vasnier; Debussy was greatly taken with her, and she inspired him to compose: he wrote 27 songs dedicated to her during their seven-year relationship. She was the wife of Henri Vasnier, a prominent civil servant, and much younger than her husband. She soon became Debussy's lover as well as his muse. Whether Vasnier was content to tolerate his wife's affair with the young student or was simply unaware of it is not clear, but he and Debussy remained on excellent terms, and he continued to encourage the composer in his career. At the Conservatoire, Debussy incurred the disapproval of the faculty, particularly his composition teacher, Guiraud, for his failure to follow the orthodox rules of composition then prevailing. Nevertheless, in 1884 Debussy won France's most prestigious musical award, the Prix de Rome, with his cantata L'enfant prodigue. The Prix carried with it a residence at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, to further the winner's studies. Debussy was there from January 1885 to March 1887, with three or possibly four absences of several weeks when he returned to France, chiefly to see Marie Vasnier. Initially Debussy found the artistic atmosphere of the Villa Medici stifling, the company boorish, the food bad, and the accommodation "abominable". Neither did he delight in Italian opera, as he found the operas of Donizetti and Verdi not to his taste. He was much more impressed by the music of the 16th-century composers Palestrina and Lassus, which he heard at Santa Maria dell'Anima: "The only church music I will accept". He was often depressed and unable to compose, but he was inspired by Franz Liszt, who visited the students and played for them. In June 1885, Debussy wrote of his desire to follow his own way, saying, "I am sure the Institute would not approve, for, naturally it regards the path which it ordains as the only right one. But there is no help for it! I am too enamoured of my freedom, too fond of my own ideas!" Debussy finally composed four pieces that were submitted to the Academy: the symphonic ode Zuleima (based on a text by Heinrich Heine); the orchestral piece Printemps; the cantata La Damoiselle élue (1887–1888), the first piece in which the stylistic features of his later music began to emerge; and the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, which was heavily based on Franck's music and was eventually withdrawn by Debussy. The Academy chided him for writing music that was "bizarre, incomprehensible and unperformable". Although Debussy's works showed the influence of Jules Massenet, the latter concluded, "He is an enigma". During his years in Rome Debussy composed – not for the Academy – most of his Verlaine cycle, Ariettes oubliées, which made little impact at the time but was successfully republished in 1903 after the composer had become well known. ### Return to Paris, 1887 A week after his return to Paris in 1887, Debussy heard the first act of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at the Concerts Lamoureux, and judged it "decidedly the finest thing I know". In 1888 and 1889 he went to the annual festivals of Wagner's operas at Bayreuth. He responded positively to Wagner's sensuousness, mastery of form, and striking harmonies, and was briefly influenced by them, but, unlike some other French composers of his generation, he concluded that there was no future in attempting to adopt and develop Wagner's style. He commented in 1903 that Wagner was "a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn". In 1889, at the Paris Exposition Universelle, Debussy first heard Javanese gamelan music. The gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, and ensemble textures appealed to him, and echoes of them are heard in "Pagodes" in his piano suite Estampes. He also attended two concerts of Rimsky-Korsakov's music, conducted by the composer. This too made an impression on him, and its harmonic freedom and non-Teutonic tone colours influenced his own developing musical style. Marie Vasnier ended her liaison with Debussy soon after his final return from Rome, although they remained on good enough terms for him to dedicate to her one more song, "Mandoline", in 1890. Later in 1890 Debussy met Erik Satie, who proved a kindred spirit in his experimental approach to composition. Both were bohemians, enjoying the same café society and struggling to survive financially. In the same year Debussy began a relationship with Gabrielle (Gaby) Dupont, a tailor's daughter from Lisieux; in July 1893 they began living together. Debussy continued to compose songs, piano pieces and other works, some of which were publicly performed, but his music made only a modest impact, although his fellow composers recognised his potential by electing him to the committee of the Société Nationale de Musique in 1893. His String Quartet was premiered by the Ysaÿe string quartet at the Société Nationale in the same year. In May 1893 Debussy attended a theatrical event that was of key importance to his later career – the premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande, which he immediately determined to turn into an opera. He travelled to Maeterlinck's home in Ghent in November to secure his consent to an operatic adaptation. ### 1894–1902: Pelléas et Mélisande In February 1894 Debussy completed the first draft of Act I of his operatic version of Pelléas et Mélisande, and for most of the year worked to complete the work. While still living with Dupont, he had an affair with the singer Thérèse Roger, and in 1894 he announced their engagement. His behaviour was widely condemned; anonymous letters circulated denouncing his treatment of both women, as well as his financial irresponsibility and debts. The engagement was broken off, and several of Debussy's friends and supporters disowned him, including Ernest Chausson, hitherto one of his strongest supporters. In terms of musical recognition, Debussy made a step forward in December 1894, when the symphonic poem Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, based on Stéphane Mallarmé's poem, was premiered at a concert of the Société Nationale. The following year he completed the first draft of Pelléas and began efforts to get it staged. In May 1898 he made his first contacts with André Messager and Albert Carré, respectively the musical director and general manager of the Opéra-Comique, Paris, about presenting the opera. Debussy abandoned Dupont for her friend Marie-Rosalie Texier, known as "Lilly", whom he married in October 1899, after threatening suicide if she refused him. She was affectionate, practical, straightforward, and well liked by Debussy's friends and associates, but he became increasingly irritated by her intellectual limitations and lack of musical sensitivity. The marriage lasted barely five years. From around 1900 Debussy's music became a focus and inspiration for an informal group of innovative young artists, poets, critics, and musicians who began meeting in Paris. They called themselves Les Apaches – roughly "The Hooligans" – to represent their status as "artistic outcasts" The membership was fluid, but at various times included Maurice Ravel, Ricardo Viñes, Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla. In the same year the first two of Debussy's three orchestral Nocturnes were first performed. Although they did not make any great impact with the public they were well reviewed by musicians including Paul Dukas, Alfred Bruneau and Pierre de Bréville. The complete set was given the following year. Like many other composers of the time, Debussy supplemented his income by teaching and writing. For most of 1901 he had a sideline as music critic of La Revue Blanche, adopting the pen name "Monsieur Croche". He expressed trenchant views on composers ("I hate sentimentality – his name is Camille Saint-Saëns"), institutions (on the Paris Opéra: "A stranger would take it for a railway station, and, once inside, would mistake it for a Turkish bath"), conductors ("Nikisch is a unique virtuoso, so much so that his virtuosity seems to make him forget the claims of good taste"), musical politics ("The English actually think that a musician can manage an opera house successfully!"), and audiences ("their almost drugged expression of boredom, indifference and even stupidity"). He later collected his criticisms with a view to their publication as a book; it was published after his death as Monsieur Croche, Antidilettante. In January 1902 rehearsals began at the Opéra-Comique for the opening of Pelléas et Mélisande. For three months, Debussy attended rehearsals practically every day. In February there was conflict between Maeterlinck on the one hand and Debussy, Messager and Carré on the other about the casting of Mélisande. Maeterlinck wanted his mistress, Georgette Leblanc, to sing the role, and was incensed when she was passed over in favour of the Scottish soprano Mary Garden. The opera opened on 30 April 1902, and although the first-night audience was divided between admirers and sceptics, the work quickly became a success. It made Debussy a well-known name in France and abroad; The Times commented that the opera had "provoked more discussion than any work of modern times, excepting, of course, those of Richard Strauss". The Apaches, led by Ravel (who attended every one of the 14 performances in the first run), were loud in their support; the conservative faculty of the Conservatoire tried in vain to stop its students from seeing the opera. The vocal score was published in early May, and the full orchestral score in 1904. ### 1903–1918 In 1903 there was public recognition of Debussy's stature when he was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, but his social standing suffered a great blow when another turn in his private life caused a scandal the following year. One of his pupils was Raoul Bardac, son of Emma and her husband, Parisian banker Sigismond Bardac. Raoul introduced his teacher to his mother, to whom Debussy quickly became greatly attracted. She was sophisticate, a brilliant conversationalist, an accomplished singer, and relaxed about marital fidelity, having been the mistress and muse of Gabriel Fauré a few years earlier. After despatching Lilly to her parental home at Bichain in Villeneuve-la-Guyard on 15 July 1904, Debussy took Emma away, staying incognito in Jersey and then at Pourville in Normandy. He wrote to his wife on 11 August from Dieppe, telling her that their marriage was over, but still making no mention of Bardac. When he returned to Paris he set up home on his own, taking a flat in a different arrondissement. On 14 October, five days before their fifth wedding anniversary, Lilly Debussy attempted suicide, shooting herself in the chest with a revolver; she survived, although the bullet remained lodged in her vertebrae for the rest of her life. The ensuing scandal caused Bardac's family to disown her, and Debussy lost many good friends including Dukas and Messager. His relations with Ravel, never close, were exacerbated when the latter joined other former friends of Debussy in contributing to a fund to support the deserted Lilly. The Bardacs divorced in May 1905. Finding the hostility in Paris intolerable, Debussy and Emma (now pregnant) went to England. They stayed at the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne in July and August, where Debussy corrected the proofs of his symphonic sketches La mer, celebrating his divorce on 2 August. After a brief visit to London, the couple returned to Paris in September, buying a house in a courtyard development off the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now Avenue Foch), Debussy's home for the rest of his life. In October 1905 La mer, Debussy's most substantial orchestral work, was premiered in Paris by the Orchestre Lamoureux under the direction of Camille Chevillard; the reception was mixed. Some praised the work, but Pierre Lalo, critic of Le Temps, hitherto an admirer of Debussy, wrote, "I do not hear, I do not see, I do not smell the sea". In the same month the composer's only child was born at their home. Claude-Emma, affectionately known as "Chouchou", was a musical inspiration to the composer (she was the dedicatee of his Children's Corner suite). She outlived her father by scarcely a year, succumbing to the diphtheria epidemic of 1919. Mary Garden said, "I honestly don't know if Debussy ever loved anybody really. He loved his music – and perhaps himself. I think he was wrapped up in his genius", but biographers are agreed that whatever his relations with lovers and friends, Debussy was devoted to his daughter. Debussy and Emma Bardac eventually married in 1908, their troubled union enduring for the rest of his life. The following year began well, when at Fauré's invitation, Debussy became a member of the governing council of the Conservatoire. His success in London was consolidated in April 1909, when he conducted Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and the Nocturnes at the Queen's Hall; in May he was present at the first London production of Pelléas et Mélisande, at Covent Garden. In the same year, Debussy was diagnosed with colorectal cancer, from which he was to die nine years later. Debussy's works began to feature increasingly in concert programmes at home and overseas. In 1910 Gustav Mahler conducted the Nocturnes and Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune in New York in successive months. In the same year, visiting Budapest, Debussy commented that his works were better known there than in Paris. In 1912 Sergei Diaghilev commissioned a new ballet score, Jeux. That, and the three Images, premiered the following year, were the composer's last orchestral works. Jeux was unfortunate in its timing: two weeks after the premiere, in March 1913, Diaghilev presented the first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, a sensational event that monopolised discussion in musical circles, and effectively sidelined Jeux along with Fauré's Pénélope, which had opened a week before. In 1915 Debussy underwent one of the earliest colostomy operations. It achieved only a temporary respite, and occasioned him considerable frustration ("There are mornings when the effort of dressing seems like one of the twelve labours of Hercules"). He also had a fierce enemy at this period in the form of Camille Saint-Saëns, who in a letter to Fauré condemned Debussy's En blanc et noir: "It's incredible, and the door of the Institut [de France] must at all costs be barred against a man capable of such atrocities". Saint-Saëns had been a member of the Institut since 1881: Debussy never became one. His health continued to decline; he gave his final concert on 14 September 1917 and became bedridden in early 1918. Debussy died on 25 March 1918 at his home. The First World War was still raging and Paris was under German aerial and artillery bombardment. The military situation did not permit the honour of a public funeral with ceremonious graveside orations. The funeral procession made its way through deserted streets to a temporary grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery as the German guns bombarded the city. Debussy's body was reinterred the following year in the small Passy Cemetery sequestered behind the Trocadéro, fulfilling his wish to rest "among the trees and the birds"; his wife and daughter are buried with him. ## Works In a survey of Debussy's oeuvre shortly after the composer's death, the critic Ernest Newman wrote, "It would be hardly too much to say that Debussy spent a third of his life in the discovery of himself, a third in the free and happy realisation of himself, and the final third in the partial, painful loss of himself". Later commentators have rated some of the late works more highly than Newman and other contemporaries did, but much of the music for which Debussy is best known is from the middle years of his career. The analyst David Cox wrote in 1974 that Debussy, admiring Wagner's attempts to combine all the creative arts, "created a new, instinctive, dreamlike world of music, lyrical and pantheistic, contemplative and objective – a kind of art, in fact, which seemed to reach out into all aspects of experience". In 1988 the composer and scholar Wilfrid Mellers wrote of Debussy: > Because of, rather than in spite of, his preoccupation with chords in themselves, he deprived music of the sense of harmonic progression, broke down three centuries' dominance of harmonic tonality, and showed how the melodic conceptions of tonality typical of primitive folk-music and of medieval music might be relevant to the twentieth century" Debussy did not give his works opus numbers, apart from his String Quartet, Op. 10 in G minor (also the only work where the composer's title included a key). His works were catalogued and indexed by the musicologist François Lesure in 1977 (revised in 2003) and their Lesure number ("L" followed by a number) is sometimes used as a suffix to their title in concert programmes and recordings. ### Early works, 1879–1892 Debussy's musical development was slow, and as a student he was adept enough to produce for his teachers at the Conservatoire works that would conform to their conservative precepts. His friend Georges Jean-Aubry commented that Debussy "admirably imitated Massenet's melodic turns of phrase" in the cantata L'enfant prodigue (1884) which won him the Prix de Rome. A more characteristically Debussian work from his early years is La Damoiselle élue, recasting the traditional form for oratorios and cantatas, using a chamber orchestra and a small body of choral tone and using new or long-neglected scales and harmonies. His early mélodies, inspired by Marie Vasnier, are more virtuosic in character than his later works in the genre, with extensive wordless vocalise; from the Ariettes oubliées (1885–1887) onwards he developed a more restrained style. He wrote his own poems for the Proses lyriques (1892–1893) but, in the view of the musical scholar Robert Orledge, "his literary talents were not on a par with his musical imagination". The musicologist Jacques-Gabriel Prod'homme wrote that, together with La Demoiselle élue, the Ariettes oubliées and the Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire (1889) show "the new, strange way which the young musician will hereafter follow". Newman concurred: "There is a good deal of Wagner, especially of Tristan, in the idiom. But the work as a whole is distinctive, and the first in which we get a hint of the Debussy we were to know later – the lover of vague outlines, of half-lights, of mysterious consonances and dissonances of colour, the apostle of languor, the exclusivist in thought and in style." During the next few years Debussy developed his personal style, without, at this stage, breaking sharply away from French musical traditions. Much of his music from this period is on a small scale, such as the Two Arabesques, Valse romantique, Suite bergamasque, and the first set of Fêtes galantes. Newman remarked that, like Chopin, the Debussy of this period appears as a liberator from Germanic styles of composition – offering instead "an exquisite, pellucid style" capable of conveying "not only gaiety and whimsicality but emotion of a deeper sort". In a 2004 study, Mark DeVoto comments that Debussy's early works are harmonically no more adventurous than existing music by Fauré; in a 2007 book about the piano works, Margery Halford observes that Two Arabesques (1888–1891) and "Rêverie" (1890) have "the fluidity and warmth of Debussy's later style" but are not harmonically innovative. Halford cites the popular "Clair de Lune" (1890), the third of the four movements of Suite Bergamasque, as a transitional work pointing towards the composer's mature style. ### Middle works, 1893–1905 Musicians from Debussy's time onwards have regarded Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894) as his first orchestral masterpiece. Newman considered it "completely original in idea, absolutely personal in style, and logical and coherent from first to last, without a superfluous bar or even a superfluous note"; Pierre Boulez observed, "Modern music was awakened by Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune". Most of the major works for which Debussy is best known were written between the mid-1890s and the mid-1900s. They include the String Quartet (1893), Pelléas et Mélisande (1893–1902), the Nocturnes for Orchestra (1899) and La mer (1903–1905). The suite Pour le piano (1894–1901) is, in Halford's view, one of the first examples of the mature Debussy as a composer for the piano: "a major landmark ... and an enlargement of the use of piano sonorities". In the String Quartet (1893), the gamelan sonorities Debussy had heard four years earlier are recalled in the pizzicatos and cross-rhythms of the scherzo. Debussy's biographer Edward Lockspeiser comments that this movement shows the composer's rejection of "the traditional dictum that string instruments should be predominantly lyrical". The work influenced Ravel, whose own String Quartet, written ten years later, has noticeably Debussian features. The academic and journalist Stephen Walsh calls Pelléas et Mélisande (begun 1893, staged 1902) "a key work for the 20th century". The composer Olivier Messiaen was fascinated by its "extraordinary harmonic qualities and ... transparent instrumental texture". The opera is composed in what Alan Blyth describes as a sustained and heightened recitative style, with "sensuous, intimate" vocal lines. It influenced composers as different as Stravinsky and Puccini. Orledge describes the Nocturnes as exceptionally varied in texture, "ranging from the Musorgskian start of 'Nuages', through the approaching brass band procession in 'Fêtes', to the wordless female chorus in 'Sirènes'". Orledge considers the last a pre-echo of the marine textures of La mer. Estampes for piano (1903) gives impressions of exotic locations, with further echoes of the gamelan in its pentatonic structures. Debussy believed that since Beethoven, the traditional symphonic form had become formulaic, repetitive and obsolete. The three-part, cyclic symphony by César Franck (1888) was more to his liking, and its influence can be found in La mer (1905); this uses a quasi-symphonic form, its three sections making up a giant sonata-form movement with, as Orledge observes, a cyclic theme, in the manner of Franck. The central "Jeux de vagues" section has the function of a symphonic development section leading into the final "Dialogue du vent et de la mer", "a powerful essay in orchestral colour and sonority" (Orledge) which reworks themes from the first movement. The reviews were sharply divided. Some critics thought the treatment less subtle and less mysterious than his previous works, and even a step backward; others praised its "power and charm", its "extraordinary verve and brilliant fantasy", and its strong colours and definite lines. ### Late works, 1906–1917 Of the later orchestral works, Images (1905–1912) is better known than Jeux (1913). The former follows the tripartite form established in the Nocturnes and La mer, but differs in employing traditional British and French folk tunes, and in making the central movement, "Ibéria", far longer than the outer ones, and subdividing it into three parts, all inspired by scenes from Spanish life. Although considering Images "the pinnacle of Debussy's achievement as a composer for orchestra", Trezise notes a contrary view that the accolade belongs to the ballet score Jeux. The latter failed as a ballet because of what Jann Pasler describes as a banal scenario, and the score was neglected for some years. Recent analysts have found it a link between traditional continuity and thematic growth within a score and the desire to create discontinuity in a way mirrored in later 20th century music. In this piece, Debussy abandoned the whole-tone scale he had often favoured previously in favour of the octatonic scale with what the Debussy scholar François Lesure describes as its tonal ambiguities. Among the late piano works are two books of Préludes (1909–10, 1911–13), short pieces that depict a wide range of subjects. Lesure comments that they range from the frolics of minstrels at Eastbourne in 1905 and the American acrobat "General Lavine" "to dead leaves and the sounds and scents of the evening air". En blanc et noir (In white and black, 1915), a three-movement work for two pianos, is a predominantly sombre piece, reflecting the war and national danger. The Études (1915) for piano have divided opinion. Writing soon after Debussy's death, Newman found them laboured – "a strange last chapter in a great artist's life"; Lesure, writing eighty years later, rates them among Debussy's greatest late works: "Behind a pedagogic exterior, these 12 pieces explore abstract intervals, or – in the last five – the sonorities and timbres peculiar to the piano." In 1914 Debussy started work on a planned set of six sonatas for various instruments. His fatal illness prevented him from completing the set, but those for cello and piano (1915), flute, viola and harp (1915), and violin and piano (1917 – his last completed work) are all concise, three-movement pieces, more diatonic in nature than some of his other late works. Le Martyre de saint Sébastien (1911), originally a five-act musical play to a text by Gabriele D'Annunzio that took nearly five hours in performance, was not a success, and the music is now more often heard in a concert (or studio) adaptation with narrator, or as an orchestral suite of "Fragments symphoniques". Debussy enlisted the help of André Caplet in orchestrating and arranging the score. Two late stage works, the ballets Khamma (1912) and La boîte à joujoux (1913), were left with the orchestration incomplete, and were completed by Charles Koechlin and Caplet, respectively. ## Style ### Debussy and Impressionism The application of the term "Impressionist" to Debussy and the music he influenced has been much debated, both during his lifetime and since. The analyst Richard Langham Smith writes that Impressionism was originally a term coined to describe a style of late 19th-century French painting, typically scenes suffused with reflected light in which the emphasis is on the overall impression rather than outline or clarity of detail, as in works by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and others. Langham Smith writes that the term became transferred to the compositions of Debussy and others which were "concerned with the representation of landscape or natural phenomena, particularly the water and light imagery dear to Impressionists, through subtle textures suffused with instrumental colour". Among painters, Debussy particularly admired Turner, but also drew inspiration from Whistler. With the latter in mind the composer wrote to the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe in 1894 describing the orchestral Nocturnes as "an experiment in the different combinations that can be obtained from one colour – what a study in grey would be in painting." Debussy strongly objected to the use of the word "Impressionism" for his (or anybody else's) music, but it has continually been attached to him since the assessors at the Conservatoire first applied it, opprobriously, to his early work Printemps. Langham Smith comments that Debussy wrote many piano pieces with titles evocative of nature – "Reflets dans l'eau" (1905), "Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir" (1910) and "Brouillards" (1913) – and suggests that the Impressionist painters' use of brush-strokes and dots is paralleled in the music of Debussy. Although Debussy said that anyone using the term (whether about painting or music) was an imbecile, some Debussy scholars have taken a less absolutist line. Lockspeiser calls La mer "the greatest example of an orchestral Impressionist work", and more recently in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy Nigel Simeone comments, "It does not seem unduly far-fetched to see a parallel in Monet's seascapes". In this context may be placed Debussy's pantheistic eulogy to Nature, in a 1911 interview with Henry Malherbe: > I have made mysterious Nature my religion ... When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvellous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpeted earth, ... and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration. In contrast to the "impressionistic" characterisation of Debussy's music, several writers have suggested that he structured at least some of his music on rigorous mathematical lines. In 1983 the pianist and scholar Roy Howat published a book contending that certain of Debussy's works are proportioned using mathematical models, even while using an apparent classical structure such as sonata form. Howat suggests that some of Debussy's pieces can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio, which is approximated by ratios of consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. Simon Trezise, in his 1994 book Debussy: La Mer, finds the intrinsic evidence "remarkable", with the caveat that no written or reported evidence suggests that Debussy deliberately sought such proportions. Lesure takes a similar view, endorsing Howat's conclusions while not taking a view on Debussy's conscious intentions. ### Musical idiom `Debussy wrote "We must agree that the beauty of a work of art will always remain a mystery [...] we can never be absolutely sure 'how it's made.' We must at all costs preserve this magic which is peculiar to music and to which music, by its nature, is of all the arts the most receptive."` Nevertheless, there are many indicators of the sources and elements of Debussy's idiom. Writing in 1958, the critic Rudolph Reti summarised six features of Debussy's music, which he asserted "established a new concept of tonality in European music": the frequent use of lengthy pedal points – "not merely bass pedals in the actual sense of the term, but sustained 'pedals' in any voice"; glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality; frequent use of parallel chords which are "in essence not harmonies at all, but rather 'chordal melodies', enriched unisons", described by some writers as non-functional harmonies; bitonality, or at least bitonal chords; use of the whole-tone and pentatonic scales; and unprepared modulations, "without any harmonic bridge". Reti concludes that Debussy's achievement was the synthesis of monophonic based "melodic tonality" with harmonies, albeit different from those of "harmonic tonality". In 1889, Debussy held conversations with his former teacher Guiraud, which included exploration of harmonic possibilities at the piano. The discussion, and Debussy's chordal keyboard improvisations, were noted by a younger pupil of Guiraud, Maurice Emmanuel. The chord sequences played by Debussy include some of the elements identified by Reti. They may also indicate the influence on Debussy of Satie's 1887 Trois Sarabandes. A further improvisation by Debussy during this conversation included a sequence of whole tone harmonies which may have been inspired by the music of Glinka or Rimsky-Korsakov which was becoming known in Paris at this time. During the conversation, Debussy told Guiraud, "There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law!" – although he also conceded, "I feel free because I have been through the mill, and I don't write in the fugal style because I know it." ## Influences ### Musical Among French predecessors, Chabrier was an important influence on Debussy (as he was on Ravel and Poulenc); Howat has written that Chabrier's piano music such as "Sous-bois" and "Mauresque" in the Pièces pittoresques explored new sound-worlds of which Debussy made effective use 30 years later. Lesure finds traces of Gounod and Massenet in some of Debussy's early songs, and remarks that it may have been from the Russians – Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky – that Debussy acquired his taste for "ancient and oriental modes and for vivid colorations, and a certain disdain for academic rules". Lesure also considers that Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov directly influenced Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. In the music of Palestrina, Debussy found what he called "a perfect whiteness", and he felt that although Palestrina's musical forms had a "strict manner", they were more to his taste than the rigid rules prevailing among 19th-century French composers and teachers. He drew inspiration from what he called Palestrina's "harmony created by melody", finding an arabesque-like quality in the melodic lines. Debussy opined that Chopin was "the greatest of them all, for through the piano he discovered everything"; he professed his "respectful gratitude" for Chopin's piano music. He was torn between dedicating his own Études to Chopin or to François Couperin, whom he also admired as a model of form, seeing himself as heir to their mastery of the genre. Howat cautions against the assumption that Debussy's Ballade (1891) and Nocturne (1892) are influenced by Chopin – in Howat's view they owe more to Debussy's early Russian models – but Chopin's influence is found in other early works such as the Two arabesques (1889–1891). In 1914 the publisher A. Durand & fils began publishing scholarly new editions of the works of major composers, and Debussy undertook the supervision of the editing of Chopin's music. Although Debussy was in no doubt of Wagner's stature, he was only briefly influenced by him in his compositions, after La damoiselle élue and the Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (both begun in 1887). According to Pierre Louÿs, Debussy "did not see 'what anyone can do beyond Tristan'," although he admitted that it was sometimes difficult to avoid "the ghost of old Klingsor, alias Richard Wagner, appearing at the turning of a bar". After Debussy's short Wagnerian phase, he started to become interested in non-Western music and its unfamiliar approaches to composition. The piano piece Golliwogg's Cakewalk, from the 1908 suite Children's Corner, contains a parody of music from the introduction to Tristan, in which, in the opinion of the musicologist Lawrence Kramer, Debussy escapes the shadow of the older composer and "smilingly relativizes Wagner into insignificance". A contemporary influence was Erik Satie, according to Nichols Debussy's "most faithful friend" amongst French musicians. Debussy's orchestration in 1896 of Satie's Gymnopédies (which had been written in 1887) "put their composer on the map" according to the musicologist Richard Taruskin, and the Sarabande from Debussy's Pour le piano (1901) "shows that [Debussy] knew Satie's Trois Sarabandes at a time when only a personal friend of the composer could have known them." (They were not published until 1911). Debussy's interest in the popular music of his time is evidenced not only by the Golliwogg's Cakewalk and other piano pieces featuring rag-time, such as The Little Nigar (Debussy's spelling) (1909), but by the slow waltz La plus que lente (The more than slow), based on the style of the gipsy violinist at a Paris hotel (to whom he gave the manuscript of the piece). In addition to the composers who influenced his own compositions, Debussy held strong views about several others. He was for the most part enthusiastic about Richard Strauss and Stravinsky, respectful of Mozart and was in awe of Bach, whom he called the "good God of music" (le Bon Dieu de la musique). His relationship to Beethoven was complex; he was said to refer to him as le vieux sourd ('the old deaf one') and asked one young pupil not to play Beethoven's music for "it is like somebody dancing on my grave;" but he believed that Beethoven had profound things to say, yet did not know how to say them, "because he was imprisoned in a web of incessant restatement and of German aggressiveness." He was not in sympathy with Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, the latter being described as a "facile and elegant notary". With the advent of the First World War, Debussy became ardently patriotic in his musical opinions. Writing to Stravinsky, he asked "How could we not have foreseen that these men were plotting the destruction of our art, just as they had planned the destruction of our country?" In 1915 he complained that "since Rameau we have had no purely French tradition [...] We tolerated overblown orchestras, tortuous forms [...] we were about to give the seal of approval to even more suspect naturalizations when the sound of gunfire put a sudden stop to it all." Taruskin writes that some have seen this as a reference to the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, both born Jewish. In 1912 Debussy had remarked to his publisher of the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue by the (also Jewish) composer Paul Dukas, "You're right, [it] is a masterpiece – but it's not a masterpiece of French music." ### Literary Despite his lack of formal schooling, Debussy read widely and found inspiration in literature. Lesure writes, "The development of free verse in poetry and the disappearance of the subject or model in painting influenced him to think about issues of musical form." Debussy was influenced by the Symbolist poets. These writers, who included Verlaine, Mallarmé, Maeterlinck and Rimbaud, reacted against the realism, naturalism, objectivity and formal conservatism that prevailed in the 1870s. They favoured poetry using suggestion rather than direct statement; the literary scholar Chris Baldrick writes that they evoked "subjective moods through the use of private symbols, while avoiding the description of external reality or the expression of opinion". Debussy was much in sympathy with the Symbolists' desire to bring poetry closer to music, became friendly with several leading exponents, and set many Symbolist works throughout his career. Debussy's literary inspirations were mostly French, but he did not overlook foreign writers. As well as Maeterlinck for Pelléas et Mélisande, he drew on Shakespeare and Dickens for two of his Préludes for piano – La Danse de Puck (Book 1, 1910) and Hommage à S. Pickwick Esq. P.P.M.P.C. (Book 2, 1913). He set Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel in his early cantata, La Damoiselle élue (1888). He wrote incidental music for King Lear and planned an opera based on As You Like It, but abandoned that once he turned his attention to setting Maeterlinck's play. In 1890 he began work on an orchestral piece inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and later sketched the libretto for an opera, La chute de la maison Usher. Another project inspired by Poe – an operatic version of The Devil in the Belfry did not progress beyond sketches. French writers whose words he set include Paul Bourget, Alfred de Musset, Théodore de Banville, Leconte de Lisle, Théophile Gautier, Paul Verlaine, François Villon, and Mallarmé – the last of whom also provided Debussy with the inspiration for one of his most popular orchestral pieces, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. ## Influence on later composers Debussy is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. Roger Nichols writes that "if one omits Schoenberg [...] a list of 20th-century composers influenced by Debussy is practically a list of 20th-century composers tout court." Bartók first encountered Debussy's music in 1907 and later said that "Debussy's great service to music was to reawaken among all musicians an awareness of harmony and its possibilities". Not only Debussy's use of whole-tone scales, but also his style of word-setting in Pelléas et Mélisande, were the subject of study by Leoš Janáček while he was writing his 1921 opera Káťa Kabanová. Stravinsky was more ambivalent about Debussy's music (he thought Pelléas "a terrible bore ... in spite of many wonderful pages") but the two composers knew each other and Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) was written as a memorial for Debussy. In the aftermath of the First World War, the young French composers of Les Six reacted against what they saw as the poetic, mystical quality of Debussy's music in favour of something more hard-edged. Their sympathiser and self-appointed spokesman Jean Cocteau wrote in 1918: "Enough of nuages, waves, aquariums, ondines and nocturnal perfumes," pointedly alluding to the titles of pieces by Debussy. Later generations of French composers had a much more positive relationship with his music. Messiaen was given a score of Pelléas et Mélisande as a boy and said that it was "a revelation, love at first sight" and "probably the most decisive influence I have been subject to". Boulez also discovered Debussy's music at a young age and said that it gave him his first sense of what modernity in music could mean. Among contemporary composers George Benjamin has described Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune as "the definition of perfection"; he has conducted Pelléas et Mélisande and the critic Rupert Christiansen detects the influence of the work in Benjamin's opera Written on Skin (2012). Others have made orchestrations of some of the piano and vocal works, including John Adams's version of four of the Baudelaire songs (Le Livre de Baudelaire, 1994), Robin Holloway's of En blanc et noir (2002), and Colin Matthews's of both books of Préludes (2001–2006). The pianist Stephen Hough believes that Debussy's influence also extends to jazz and suggests that Reflets dans l'eau can be heard in the harmonies of Bill Evans. ## Recordings In 1904, Debussy played the piano accompaniment for Mary Garden in recordings for the Compagnie française du Gramophone of four of his songs: three mélodies from the Verlaine cycle Ariettes oubliées – "Il pleure dans mon coeur", "L'ombre des arbres" and "Green" – and "Mes longs cheveux", from Act III of Pelléas et Mélisande. He made a set of piano rolls for the Welte-Mignon company in 1913. They contain fourteen of his pieces: "D'un cahier d'esquisses", "La plus que lente", "La soirée dans Grenade", all six movements of Children's Corner, and five of the Preludes: "Danseuses de Delphes", "Le vent dans la plaine", "La cathédrale engloutie", "La danse de Puck" and "Minstrels". The 1904 and 1913 sets have been transferred to compact disc. Contemporaries of Debussy who made recordings of his music included the pianists Ricardo Viñes (in "Poissons d'or" from Images and "La soirée dans Grenade" from Estampes); Alfred Cortot (numerous solo pieces as well as the Violin Sonata with Jacques Thibaud and the Chansons de Bilitis with Maggie Teyte); and Marguerite Long ("Jardins sous la pluie" and "Arabesques"). Singers in Debussy's mélodies or excerpts from Pelléas et Mélisande included Jane Bathori, Claire Croiza, Charles Panzéra and Ninon Vallin; and among the conductors in the major orchestral works were Ernest Ansermet, Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, Pierre Monteux and Arturo Toscanini, and in the Petite Suite, Henri Büsser, who had prepared the orchestration for Debussy. Many of these early recordings have been reissued on CD. In more recent times Debussy's output has been extensively recorded. In 2018, to mark the centenary of the composer's death, Warner Classics, with contributions from other companies, issued a 33-CD set that is claimed to include all the music Debussy wrote. ## Notes, references and sources
66,314,455	Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln	1,168,326,321	Relationship between 19th century poet and politician	[ "Cultural depictions of Abraham Lincoln", "Political literature", "Reconstruction Era in popular culture", "Walt Whitman", "Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln" ]	The American poet Walt Whitman greatly admired Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, and was deeply affected by his assassination, writing several poems as elegies and giving a series of lectures on Lincoln. The two never met. Shortly after Lincoln was killed in April 1865, Whitman hastily wrote the first of his Lincoln poems, "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day". In the following months, he wrote two more: "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd". Both appeared in his collection Sequel to Drum-Taps later that year. The poems—particularly "My Captain!"—were well received and popular upon publication and, in the following years, Whitman styled himself as an interpreter of Lincoln. In 1871, his fourth poem on Lincoln, "This Dust Was Once the Man", was published, and the four were grouped together as the "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn" cluster in Passage to India. In 1881, the poems were republished in the "Memories of President Lincoln" cluster of Leaves of Grass. From 1879 to 1890, Whitman's lectures on Lincoln's assassination bolstered the poet's own reputation and that of his poems. Critical reception to Whitman's Lincoln poetry has varied since their publication. "My Captain!" was very popular, particularly before the mid-20th century, and is still considered one of his most popular works, despite slipping in popularity and critical assessment since the early 1900s. "Lilacs" is often listed as one of Whitman's finest works. ## Background ### Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln was raised on the frontier in the early 19th century, living in Kentucky and Indiana before settling in Illinois, serving in the state legislature, and marrying Mary Todd. He gained a reputation on the national stage with his 1858 debates against Stephen Douglas during a race for a seat in the United States Senate, which Douglas won. Two years later Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States. In that capacity, he led the United States through the American Civil War until his assassination on April 14, 1865. ### Walt Whitman Walt Whitman established his reputation as a poet following the release of his poetry collection Leaves of Grass (1855); the volume came to wider public attention following a positive review by American transcendentalist lecturer and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epic and had developed a free verse style inspired by the cadences of the King James Bible. Reviewing Leaves of Grass, some critics objected to Whitman's blunt depiction of sexuality and what they perceived as an undercurrent of homoeroticism. At the start of the American Civil War, Whitman moved from New York to Washington, D.C., where he had a series of government jobs—first with the Army Paymaster's Office and later with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He volunteered in the army hospitals as a nurse. Whitman's wartime experience greatly influenced his poetry, and he shifted to writing reflections on death and youth, the brutality of war and patriotism. He later wrote that the war offered "some pang of anguish—some tragedy, profounder than ever poet wrote." Whitman's brother, Union Army soldier George Washington Whitman, was taken prisoner in Virginia in September 1864, and held for five months in Libby Prison, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp near Richmond, Virginia. On February 24, 1865, George was granted a furlough to return home because of his poor health. Whitman traveled to his mother's home in New York to visit him. While visiting Brooklyn, Whitman signed a contract to have his collection of Civil War poems, Drum-Taps, published. In June 1865, the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered a copy of Leaves of Grass and fired Whitman from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, describing the collection as "obscene".'' ## Whitman and Lincoln In 1856, Whitman wrote a lengthy description of his ideal president: a "heroic" figure who was cunning and bold in temperament and knowledgeable about the world; a "Lincolnesque figure" according to Whitman biographer Justin Kaplan. He also opined on this hypothetical president's physical attributes: bearded and dressed in "a clean suit of working attire". Whitman explicitly mentions blacksmiths and boatmen as ideal precursor occupations. Two years later, Whitman first mentioned Lincoln by name in writing. That year, he supported Stephen Douglas over Lincoln for election to the United States Senate. Whitman first saw Lincoln as the president-elect traveled through New York City on February 19, 1861. Whitman noticed Lincoln's "striking appearance" and "unpretentious dignity", and trusted his "supernatural tact" and "idiomatic Western genius". Whitman's admiration of Lincoln steadily grew in the following years; in October 1863 Whitman wrote in his diary "I love the President personally." Although they never met, Whitman estimated in a letter he saw Lincoln about twenty to thirty times between 1861 and 1865, sometimes at close quarters. Lincoln passed Whitman several times and nodded to him, interactions that Whitman detailed in letters to his mother. Lincoln biographer William Barton writes there was little "evidence of recognition", and Lincoln likely nodded to many passersby as he traveled. Whitman and Lincoln were in the same room twice: at a reception in the White House following Lincoln's first inauguration in 1861, and when Whitman visited John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary, at the White House. In August 1863, Whitman wrote in The New York Times, "I see the president almost every day". Later that year, Whitman wrote a letter about Lincoln in which he described the president's face as a "Hoosier Michel Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful". In the letter he described Lincoln as captaining the "ship of state". Whitman considered himself and Lincoln to be "afloat in the same stream" and "rooted in the same ground". They shared similar views on slavery and the Union—both men opposed allowing slavery to expand across the US but considered preservation of the Union more important. Whitman was a consistent supporter of Lincoln's politics, and similarities have been noted in their literary styles and inspirations. Whitman later said that, "Lincoln gets almost nearer me than anybody else." It remains unclear how much Lincoln knew about Whitman, though he knew of him and his admiration for him. There is an account of Lincoln reading Leaves of Grass in his office, and another of the president saying "Well, he looks like a man!" upon seeing Whitman in Washington, D.C., but these accounts may be fictitious. Whitman was present at Lincoln's second inauguration in 1865 and left D.C. shortly after to visit his family. On April 15, 1865, shortly after the end of the American Civil War, Lincoln was assassinated. Whitman was residing in Brooklyn while on a break from his job at the Department of the Interior when he heard the news. He recalled that although breakfast was served, the family did not eat and "not a word was spoken all day". ## Whitman's poetry on Abraham Lincoln The first poem that Whitman wrote on Lincoln's assassination was "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day", dated April 19, 1865—the day of Lincoln's funeral in Washington. Near the publication of Drum-Taps, Whitman decided the collection would be incomplete without a poem on Lincoln's death and hastily added "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day". He halted further distribution of the work and stopped publication on May 1, primarily to develop his Lincoln poems. He followed that poem with "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd". "My Captain" first appeared in The Saturday Press on November 4, 1865, and was published with "Lilacs" in Sequel to Drum-Taps around the same time. Although Sequel to Drum-Taps had been published in early October, copies were not ready for distribution until December, and English professor Amanda Gailey described Whitman's decision to publish "My Captain" in The Saturday Press as a teaser for Sequel. In 1866, Whitman's friend William D. O'Connor published The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, a short, promotional work for Whitman. O'Connor presented Whitman as Lincoln's "foremost poetic interpreter", proclaiming "Lilacs" as "the grandest and the only grand funeral music poured around Lincoln's bier". Whitman did not compose "This Dust was Once the Man", his fourth on Lincoln, until 1871. The four poems were first grouped together in the "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn" cluster of Passage to India (1871). Ten years later, in a later edition of Leaves of Grass, the grouping was named "Memories of President Lincoln". The poems were not revised substantially following their publication. Whitman wrote two other poems on Lincoln's assassination that were not included in the cluster. Shortly before Whitman's death, he wrote a final poem with the president as its subject, titled "Abraham Lincoln, Born Feb. 12, 1809", in honor of Lincoln's birthday. It appeared in the New York Herald on February 12, 1888. The poem has only two lines and is not well known. ## Lectures In 1875, Whitman published Memoranda During the War. The book, a collection of diary entries, includes a telling of Lincoln's assassination from the perspective of someone who was present. The New York Sun published that section in 1876 to a positive reception. Whitman, by then in failing health, presented himself as neglected, unfairly criticized, and deserving of pity in the form of financial aid. Richard Watson Gilder and several of Whitman's other friends soon suggested he give a series of "Lincoln Lectures" aimed at raising both funds and Whitman's profile. Whitman adapted his New York Sun article for the lectures. Whitman gave a series of lectures on Lincoln from 1879 to 1890. They centered on the assassination but also covered the years leading up to and during the American Civil War. Whitman occasionally gave poetry readings, such as "O Captain! My Captain!". The lectures were generally popular and well received. In 1980, Whitman biographer Justin Kaplan wrote that Whitman's 1887 lecture in New York City and its after-party marked the closest he came to "social eminence on a large scale". In 1885, Whitman contributed an essay about his experiences with Lincoln to a volume being compiled by Allen Thorndike Rice. Novelist Bram Stoker gave at least one lecture on Lincoln and discussed the deceased president with Whitman in November 1886. The two met when Stoker wrote a lengthy letter to Whitman in 1872 and were friends thereafter. Robert J. Havlik in the Walt Whitman Quarterly wrote that their "mutual respect for Lincoln" was a foundation of their relationship. ## Reception The cluster of poems improved Whitman's reputation, and included one considered by critics to be his best ("Lilacs") and one of his most popular ("My Captain!"). Historian Roy Basler deemed "My Captain!" and "Lilacs" Whitman's two most famous poems. The scholar William Pannapacker called "My Captain" the most popular poem ever written on Lincoln. Drum-Taps and Sequel received mixed reviews from critics following their publication. Some poems were generally praised; particularly "My Captain!" and, to a lesser extent, "Lilacs". Henry James accused Whitman of exploiting the tragedy of Lincoln's death to serve himself. Conversely, after reading Sequel to Drum-Taps, author William Dean Howells became convinced that Whitman had cleaned his "old channels of their filth" and poured "a stream of blameless purity" through; he would become a prominent defender of Whitman. Whitman's Lincoln poetry was not immediately popular. His lectures helped to raise the perception of the poems around the nation, and by the late 1870s "My Captain" was often listed with James Russell Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" as some of the best poetry honoring Lincoln. As Whitman's profile grew, many people assumed he had been close to the president during his life. After 1881, Whitman became known increasingly for "My Captain!" and the persona he cultivated through events like the lectures. "My Captain!" became Whitman's most popular poem; it was his only poem to be anthologized before his death. Following Whitman's death in 1892, his obituary in the New York Herald noted that to most people "Whitman's poetry will always remain as a sealed book, but there are few who are not able to appreciate the beauty of 'O Captain! My Captain!'" In 1920, Léon Bazalgette, a French literary critic, wrote "Lilacs" and "My Captain!" had established Whitman as the poet "who sings the American nation" and that his Lincoln poems represented "the heart of America in tears". In 1943, Henry Seidel Canby wrote that Whitman's poems on Lincoln have become known as "the poems of Lincoln". Opinions of "My Captain!" and "Commemoration Ode" remained high until the 20th century. Following a critical reappraisal, critics wrote about the poems' conventionality and lack of originality. "Lilacs" superseded them as one of the most prominent poems of the Civil War era. In 1962, Whitman biographer James E. Miller described several poems in the cluster as "competently executed expressions of public sentiment on a high public occasion", but lacking the sentimentality and powerful symbolism of "Lilacs". The scholar of American literature Charles M. Oliver wrote in 2006 that Whitman's works on Lincoln represent him at his most eloquent. ## Analysis ### Whitman as interpreter of Lincoln Shortly after Lincoln's assassination, hundreds of poems were composed about his death. Historian Stephen B. Oates wrote that the American public had never mourned the death of a head of state so deeply. Whitman was ready and willing to write poetry on the topic, seizing the opportunity to present himself as an "interpreter of Lincoln" to increase the readership of Leaves of Grass while honoring a man he admired. In 2004, Pannapacker described the poetry as a "mixture of innovation and opportunism". Scholar Daniel Aaron writes that "Whitman placed himself and his work in the reflected limelight" of Lincoln's death. The work of poets like Whitman and Lowell helped to establish Lincoln as the "first American", epitomizing the newly reunited America. Whitman portrayed Lincoln by using metaphors such as the captain of the ship of state and made his assassination into a monumental event. Aaron wrote that Whitman treated Lincoln's death as a moment that could unite the American people. The historian Merrill D. Peterson wrote to a similar effect, noting that Whitman's poetry placed Lincoln's assassination firmly in the American consciousness. Kaplan considers responding to Lincoln's death to have been Whitman's "crowning challenge". However, he considers Whitman's poems such as "My Captain" and "Lilacs" to be less bold and emotionally direct than his earlier work. Pannapacker concludes that Whitman reached the "heights of fame" through his poetry on Lincoln. He worked to fashion Lincoln as the "redeemer of the promise of American democracy". The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum considers Lincoln to be the only individual subject of love in Whitman's poetry. The Chilean critic Armando Donoso [es] wrote that Lincoln's death allowed Whitman to find significance in his feelings surrounding the Civil War. Several critics consider Whitman's response to Lincoln's death to memorialize all those who had died in the Civil War. For Whitman, Lincoln's death was the culmination of all the tragedies the Civil War had brought, according to scholar Betsy Erlikka. Critics have noted Whitman's departure from his earlier poetry in his Lincoln poems; for instance, in 1932, Floyd Stovall felt that Whitman's "barbaric yawp" had been "silenced" and replaced by a more sentimental side; he noted an undercurrent of melancholy arising from the subject of death. Ed Folsom argues that, although Whitman may have struggled with his success coming from work uncharacteristic of his other poetry, he decided that acceptance was "preferable to exclusion and rejection". ### Cluster James E. Miller considers the cluster to make up a "sustained elegy". The first poem to be written, "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day," is generally considered to have been written hastily as Whitman's tribute to Lincoln's funeral. The English professor Peter J. Bellis wrote that "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day", as Whitman's first elegy to Lincoln, aimed to encapsulate the nation's grief and provide closure, like a funeral. "Hush'd" has inaccuracies and what scholar Ted Genoways describes as "stock form"; Whitman was unsatisfied by it. Gay Wilson Allen similarly argues that to Whitman the poem was not a fitting poem for the occasion, and neither was "My Captain!". Throughout the summer Whitman developed and refined his feelings and response to the assassination as he wrote "Lilacs". Bellis notes that the poems in Sequel to Drum-Taps'', mainly "Lilacs", focus on the future. Instead of describing Lincoln's burial as an endpoint, "Lilacs" follows his funeral train through "a process of renewal and return" and grapples with grief and death. The literary critic Helen Vendler also noted this progression, writing that the poems go from Lincoln's being a "dead commander" (in "Hush'd"), to "fallen cold and dead" (in "My Captain!") to "dust" (in "This Dust"). According to the academic F. O. Matthiessen, Whitman's tributes to Lincoln showed how he could make what he wrote about seem "mythical". All the elegies lack "historical specificity": Lincoln's name is not mentioned in any of the poems. Vendler argues this makes the cluster's title "misleading", because only "This Dust" actually comments on Lincoln. Critics have noted stylistic differences among poems in the cluster; historian Daniel Mark Epstein felt it "may seem hard to believe" that the same writer wrote both "Lilacs" and "O Captain! My Captain!". "Hush'd", "This Dust", and "My Captain!" are instances of Whitman's subordinating himself and writing as someone else, whereas "Lilacs" is Whitman speaking. Pannapacker considers the cluster part of a larger trend in Whitman's poetry to be more elegiac. The critic Joann P. Krieg argues that the cluster succeeds "by narrowing the scale of emotion to the grief of one individual whose pain reflects that of the nation". Vendler felt that of all poetry written on Lincoln in the mid- to late-19th century, Whitman's poems have proven to "last the best". ## General sources
53,878	Betelgeuse	1,173,437,761	Red supergiant star in the constellation of Orion	[ "Bayer objects", "Bright Star Catalogue objects", "Durchmusterung objects", "Flamsteed objects", "Henry Draper Catalogue objects", "Hipparcos objects", "M-type supergiants", "Orion (constellation)", "Runaway stars", "Semiregular variable stars", "TIC objects" ]	Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star of spectral type M1-2 and one of the largest visible to the naked eye. It is usually the tenth-brightest star in the night sky and, after Rigel, the second-brightest in the constellation of Orion. It is a distinctly reddish, semiregular variable star whose apparent magnitude, varying between +0.0 and +1.6, has the widest range displayed by any first-magnitude star. At near-infrared wavelengths, Betelgeuse is the brightest star in the night sky. Its Bayer designation is α Orionis, Latinised to Alpha Orionis and abbreviated Alpha Ori or α Ori. If it were at the center of our Solar System, its surface would lie beyond the asteroid belt and it would engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Calculations of Betelgeuse's mass range from slightly under ten to a little over twenty times that of the Sun. For various reasons, its distance has been quite difficult to measure; current best estimates are on the order of 500–600 light-years from the Sun – a comparatively wide uncertainty for a relatively nearby star. Its absolute magnitude is about −6. Less than 10 million years old, Betelgeuse has evolved rapidly because of its large mass and is expected to end its evolution with a supernova explosion, most likely within 100,000 years. When Betelgeuse explodes, it will shine as bright as the half-Moon— for more than three months. Life on Earth will be unharmed. Having been ejected from its birthplace in the Orion OB1 association – which includes the stars in Orion's Belt – this runaway star has been observed to be moving through the interstellar medium at a speed of 30 km/s, creating a bow shock over four light-years wide. In 1920, Betelgeuse became the first extrasolar star whose photosphere's angular size was measured. Subsequent studies have reported an angular diameter (i.e., apparent size) ranging from 0.042 to 0.056 arcseconds; that range of determinations is ascribed to non-sphericity, limb darkening, pulsations and varying appearance at different wavelengths. It is also surrounded by a complex, asymmetric envelope, roughly 250 times the size of the star, caused by mass loss from the star itself. The Earth-observed angular diameter of Betelgeuse is exceeded only by those of R Doradus and the Sun. Starting in October 2019, Betelgeuse began to dim noticeably, and by mid-February 2020 its brightness had dropped by a factor of approximately 3, from magnitude 0.5 to 1.7. It then returned to a more normal brightness range, reaching a peak of 0.0 visual and 0.1 V-band magnitude in April 2023. Infrared observations found no significant change in luminosity over the last 50 years, suggesting that the dimming was due to a change in extinction around the star rather than a more fundamental change. A study using the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that occluding dust was created by a surface mass ejection. This cast material millions of miles from the star that then cooled to form the dust that caused the star's dimming. ## Nomenclature The star's designation is α Orionis (Latinised to Alpha Orionis), given by Johann Bayer in 1603. The traditional name Betelgeuse was derived from the Arabic يد الجوزاء Yad al-Jauzā’ "the hand of al-Jauzā’ [i.e. Orion]". An error in the 13th-century reading of the Arabic Ya as Ba led to the European name. In English, there are four common pronunciations of this name, depending on whether the first e is pronounced short or long and whether the s is pronounced "s" or "z": - /ˈbɛtəldʒuːz/ - /ˈbiːtəldʒuːz/ - /ˈbɛtəldʒuːs/ - /ˈbiːtəldʒuːs/ The /ˈbiːtəldʒuːs/ pronunciation has been popularized for sounding like "beetle juice". In 2016, the International Astronomical Union organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN's first bulletin, issued July 2016, included a table of the first two batches of names approved by the WGSN, which included Betelgeuse for this star. It is now so entered in the IAU Catalog of Star Names. ## Observational history Betelgeuse and its red coloration have been noted since antiquity; the classical astronomer Ptolemy described its color as ὑπόκιρρος (hypókirrhos = more or less orange-tawny), a term later described by a translator of Ulugh Beg's Zij-i Sultani as rubedo, Latin for "ruddiness". In the 19th century, before modern systems of stellar classification, Angelo Secchi included Betelgeuse as one of the prototypes for his Class III (orange to red) stars. By contrast, three centuries before Ptolemy, Chinese astronomers observed Betelgeuse as yellow; if accurate, such an observation could suggest the star was in a yellow supergiant phase around this time, a credible possibility, given current research into these stars' complex circumstellar environment. ### Nascent discoveries Aboriginal groups in South Australia have shared oral tales of the variable brightness of Betelgeuse for at least 1,000 years. The variation in Betelgeuse's brightness was described in 1836 by Sir John Herschel in Outlines of Astronomy. From 1836 to 1840, he noticed significant changes in magnitude when Betelgeuse outshone Rigel in October 1837 and again in November 1839. A 10-year quiescent period followed; then in 1849, Herschel noted another short cycle of variability, which peaked in 1852. Later observers recorded unusually high maxima with an interval of years, but only small variations from 1957 to 1967. The records of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) show a maximum brightness of 0.2 in 1933 and 1942, and a minimum of 1.2, observed in 1927 and 1941. This variability in brightness may explain why Johann Bayer, with the publication of his Uranometria in 1603, designated the star alpha, as it probably rivaled the usually brighter Rigel (beta). From Arctic latitudes, Betelgeuse's red colour and higher location in the sky than Rigel meant the Inuit regarded it as brighter, and one local name was Ulluriajjuaq ("large star"). In 1920, Albert A. Michelson and Francis G. Pease mounted a six-meter interferometer on the front of the 2.5-meter telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, helped by John August Anderson. The trio measured the angular diameter of Betelgeuse at 0.047′′, a figure that resulted in a diameter of 3.84×10<sup>8</sup> km (2.58 AU) based on the parallax value of 0.018′′. But limb darkening and measurement errors resulted in uncertainty about the accuracy of these measurements. The 1950s and 1960s saw two developments that affected stellar convection theory in red supergiants: the Stratoscope projects and the 1958 publication of Structure and Evolution of the Stars, principally the work of Martin Schwarzschild and his colleague at Princeton University, Richard Härm. This book disseminated ideas on how to apply computer technologies to create stellar models, while the Stratoscope projects, by taking balloon-borne telescopes above the Earth's turbulence, produced some of the finest images of solar granules and sunspots ever seen, thus confirming the existence of convection in the solar atmosphere. ### Imaging breakthroughs In the 1970s, astronomers saw some major advances in astronomical imaging technology, beginning with Antoine Labeyrie's invention of speckle interferometry, a process that significantly reduced the blurring effect caused by astronomical seeing. It increased the optical resolution of ground-based telescopes, allowing for more precise measurements of Betelgeuse's photosphere. With improvements in infrared telescopy atop Mount Wilson, Mount Locke, and Mauna Kea in Hawaii, astrophysicists began peering into the complex circumstellar shells surrounding the supergiant, causing them to suspect the presence of huge gas bubbles resulting from convection. But it was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Betelgeuse became a regular target for aperture masking interferometry, that breakthroughs occurred in visible-light and infrared imaging. Pioneered by J.E. Baldwin and colleagues of the Cavendish Astrophysics Group, the new technique employed a small mask with several holes in the telescope pupil plane, converting the aperture into an ad hoc interferometric array. The technique contributed some of the most accurate measurements of Betelgeuse while revealing bright spots on the star's photosphere. These were the first optical and infrared images of a stellar disk other than the Sun, taken first from ground-based interferometers and later from higher-resolution observations of the COAST telescope. The "bright patches" or "hotspots" observed with these instruments appeared to corroborate a theory put forth by Schwarzschild decades earlier of massive convection cells dominating the stellar surface. In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope's Faint Object Camera captured an ultraviolet image with a resolution superior to that obtained by ground-based interferometers—the first conventional-telescope image (or "direct-image" in NASA terminology) of the disk of another star. Because ultraviolet light is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere, observations at these wavelengths are best performed by space telescopes. Like earlier pictures, this image contained a bright patch indicating a region in the southwestern quadrant 2,000 K hotter than the stellar surface. Subsequent ultraviolet spectra taken with the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph suggested that the hot spot was one of Betelgeuse's poles of rotation. This would give the rotational axis an inclination of about 20° to the direction of Earth, and a position angle from celestial North of about 55°. ### 2000s studies In a study published in December 2000, the star's diameter was measured with the Infrared Spatial Interferometer (ISI) at mid-infrared wavelengths producing a limb-darkened estimate of 55.2±0.5 mas – a figure entirely consistent with Michelson's findings eighty years earlier. At the time of its publication, the estimated parallax from the Hipparcos mission was 7.63±1.64 mas, yielding an estimated radius for Betelgeuse of 3.6 AU. However, an infrared interferometric study published in 2009 announced that the star had shrunk by 15% since 1993 at an increasing rate without a significant diminution in magnitude. Subsequent observations suggest that the apparent contraction may be due to shell activity in the star's extended atmosphere. In addition to the star's diameter, questions have arisen about the complex dynamics of Betelgeuse's extended atmosphere. The mass that makes up galaxies is recycled as stars are formed and destroyed, and red supergiants are major contributors, yet the process by which mass is lost remains a mystery. With advances in interferometric methodologies, astronomers may be close to resolving this conundrum. In July 2009, images released by the European Southern Observatory, taken by the ground-based Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), showed a vast plume of gas extending 30 AU from the star into the surrounding atmosphere. This mass ejection was equal to the distance between the Sun and Neptune and is one of multiple events occurring in Betelgeuse's surrounding atmosphere. Astronomers have identified at least six shells surrounding Betelgeuse. Solving the mystery of mass loss in the late stages of a star's evolution may reveal those factors that precipitate the explosive deaths of these stellar giants. ### 2019–2020 fading A pulsating semiregular variable star, Betelgeuse is subject to multiple cycles of increasing and decreasing brightness due to changes in its size and temperature. The astronomers who first noted the dimming of Betelgeuse, Villanova University astronomers Richard Wasatonic and Edward Guinan, and amateur Thomas Calderwood, theorize that a coincidence of a normal 5.9 year light-cycle minimum and a deeper-than-normal 425 day period are the driving factors. Other possible causes hypothesized by late 2019 were an eruption of gas or dust or fluctuations in the star's surface brightness. By August 2020 long-term and extensive studies of Betelgeuse, primarily using ultraviolet observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, had suggested that the unexpected dimming was probably caused by an immense amount of superhot material ejected into space. The material cooled and formed a dust cloud that blocked the starlight coming from about a quarter of Betelgeuse's surface. Hubble captured signs of dense, heated material moving through the star's atmosphere in September, October and November before several telescopes observed the more marked dimming in December and the first few months of 2020. By January 2020 Betelgeuse had dimmed by a factor of approximately 2.5 from magnitude 0.5 to 1.5 and was reported still fainter in February in The Astronomer's Telegram at a record minimum of +1.614, noting that the star is currently the "least luminous and coolest" in the 25 years of their studies and also calculating a decrease in radius. Astronomy magazine described it as a "bizarre dimming", and popular speculation inferred that this might indicate an imminent supernova. This dropped Betelgeuse from one of the top 10 brightest stars in the sky to outside the top 20, noticeably dimmer than its near neighbor Aldebaran. Mainstream media reports discussed speculation that Betelgeuse might be about to explode as a supernova, but astronomers note that the supernova is expected to occur within approximately the next 100,000 years and is thus unlikely to be imminent. By 17 February 2020 Betelgeuse's brightness had remained constant for about 10 days, and the star showed signs of rebrightening. On 22 February 2020 Betelgeuse may have stopped dimming altogether, all but ending the dimming episode. On 24 February 2020 no significant change in the infrared over the last 50 years was detected; this seemed unrelated to the recent visual fading and suggested that an impending core collapse may be unlikely. Also on 24 February 2020, further studies suggested that occluding "large-grain circumstellar dust" may be the most likely explanation for the dimming of the star. A study that uses observations at submillimetre wavelengths rules out significant contributions from dust absorption. Instead, large starspots appear to be the cause for the dimming. Followup studies, reported on 31 March 2020 in The Astronomer's Telegram, found a rapid rise in the brightness of Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse is almost unobservable from the ground between May and August because it is too close to the Sun. Before entering its 2020 conjunction with the Sun, Betelgeuse had reached a brightness of +0.4 . Observations with the STEREO-A spacecraft made in June and July 2020 showed that the star had dimmed by 0.5 since the last ground-based observation in April. This is surprising, because a maximum was expected for August/September 2020, and the next minimum should occur around April 2021. However Betelgeuse's brightness is known to vary irregularly, making predictions difficult. The fading could indicate that another dimming event might occur much earlier than expected. On 30 August 2020, astronomers reported the detection of a second dust cloud emitted from Betelgeuse, and associated with recent substantial dimming (a secondary minimum on 3 August) in luminosity of the star. In June 2021 the dust was explained as possibly caused by a cool patch on its photosphere and in August a second independent group confirmed these results. The dust is thought to have resulted from the cooling of gas ejected from the star. An August 2022 study using the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed previous research and suggested the dust could have been created by a surface mass ejection. It conjectured as well that the dimming could have come from a short-term minimum coinciding with a long-term minimum producing a grand minimum, a 416 day cycle and 2010 day cycle respectively, a mechanism first suggested by astronomer L. Goldberg. In April 2023, astronomers reported the star reached a peak of 0.0 visual and 0.1 V-band magnitude. ## Observation As a result of its distinctive orange-red color and position within Orion, Betelgeuse is easy to find with the naked eye. It is one of three stars that make up the Winter Triangle asterism, and it marks the center of the Winter Hexagon. At the beginning of January of each year, it can be seen rising in the east just after sunset. Between mid-September to mid-March (best in mid-December), it is visible to virtually every inhabited region of the globe, except in Antarctica at latitudes south of 82°. In May (moderate northern latitudes) or June (southern latitudes), the red supergiant can be seen briefly on the western horizon after sunset, reappearing again a few months later on the eastern horizon before sunrise. In the intermediate period (June–July, centered around mid June), it is invisible to the naked eye (visible only with a telescope in daylight), except around midday low in the north in Antarctic regions between 70° and 80° south latitude (during midday twilight in polar night, when the Sun is below the horizon). Betelgeuse is a variable star whose visual magnitude ranges between 0.0 and +1.6 . There are periods during which it surpasses Rigel to become the sixth brightest star, and occasionally it will become even brighter than Capella. At its faintest, Betelgeuse can fall behind Deneb and Beta Crucis, themselves both slightly variable, to be the twentieth-brightest star. Betelgeuse has a B–V color index of 1.85 – a figure which points to its pronounced "redness". The photosphere has an extended atmosphere, which displays strong lines of emission rather than absorption, a phenomenon that occurs when a star is surrounded by a thick gaseous envelope (rather than ionized). This extended gaseous atmosphere has been observed moving toward and away from Betelgeuse, depending on fluctuations in the photosphere. Betelgeuse is the brightest near-infrared source in the sky with a J band magnitude of −2.99; only about 13% of the star's radiant energy is emitted as visible light. If human eyes were sensitive to radiation at all wavelengths, Betelgeuse would appear as the brightest star in the night sky. Catalogues list up to nine faint visual companions to Betelgeuse. They are at distances of about one to four arc-minutes and all are fainter than 10th magnitude. ### Star system Betelgeuse is generally considered to be a single isolated star and a runaway star, not currently associated with any cluster or star-forming region, although its birthplace is unclear. Two spectroscopic companions to Betelgeuse have been proposed. Analysis of polarization data from 1968 through 1983 indicated a close companion with a periodic orbit of about 2.1 years, and by using speckle interferometry, the team concluded that the closer of the two companions was located at 0.06′′±0.01′′ (≈9 AU) from the main star with a position angle of 273°, an orbit that would potentially place it within the star's chromosphere. The more distant companion was at 0.51′′±0.01′′ (≈77 AU) with a position angle of 278°. Further studies have found no evidence for these companions or have actively refuted their existence, but the possibility of a close companion contributing to the overall flux has never been fully ruled out. High-resolution interferometry of Betelgeuse and its vicinity, far beyond the technology of the 1980s and 1990s, has not detected any companions. ### Distance measurements Parallax is the apparent change of the position of an object, measured in seconds of arc, caused by the change of position of the observer of that object. As the Earth orbits the Sun, every star is seen to shift by a fraction of an arc second, which measure, combined with the baseline provided by the Earth's orbit gives the distance to that star. Since the first successful parallax measurement by Friedrich Bessel in 1838, astronomers have been puzzled by Betelgeuse's apparent distance. Knowledge of the star's distance improves the accuracy of other stellar parameters, such as luminosity that, when combined with an angular diameter, can be used to calculate the physical radius and effective temperature; luminosity and isotopic abundances can also be used to estimate the stellar age and mass. In 1920, when the first interferometric studies were performed on the star's diameter, the assumed parallax was 0.0180′′. This equated to a distance of 56 pc or roughly 180 ly, producing not only an inaccurate radius for the star but every other stellar characteristic. Since then, there has been ongoing work to measure the distance of Betelgeuse, with proposed distances as high as 400 pc or about 1,300 ly. Before the publication of the Hipparcos Catalogue (1997), there were two slightly conflicting parallax measurements for Betelgeuse. The first, in 1991, gave a parallax of 9.8±4.7 mas, yielding a distance of roughly 102 pc or 330 ly. The second was the Hipparcos Input Catalogue (1993) with a trigonometric parallax of 5±4 mas, a distance of 200 pc or 650 ly. Given this uncertainty, researchers were adopting a wide range of distance estimates, leading to significant variances in the calculation of the star's attributes. The results from the Hipparcos mission were released in 1997. The measured parallax of Betelgeuse was 7.63±1.64 mas, which equated to a distance of roughly 131 pc or 427 ly, and had a smaller reported error than previous measurements. However, later evaluation of the Hipparcos parallax measurements for variable stars like Betelgeuse found that the uncertainty of these measurements had been underestimated. In 2007, an improved figure of 6.55±0.83 was calculated, hence a much tighter error factor yielding a distance of roughly 152±20 pc or 500±65 ly. In 2008, using the Very Large Array (VLA), produced a radio solution of 5.07±1.10 mas, equaling a distance of 197±45 pc or 643±146 ly. As the researcher, Harper, points out: "The revised Hipparcos parallax leads to a larger distance (152±20 pc) than the original; however, the astrometric solution still requires a significant cosmic noise of 2.4 mas. Given these results it is clear that the Hipparcos data still contain systematic errors of unknown origin." Although the radio data also have systematic errors, the Harper solution combines the datasets in the hope of mitigating such errors. An updated result from further observations with ALMA and e-Merlin gives a parallax of 4.51±0.8 mas and a distance of 222+34 −48 pc or 724+111 −156 ly. In 2020, new observational data from the space-based Solar Mass Ejection Imager aboard the Coriolis satellite and three different modeling techniques produced a refined parallax of 5.95+0.58 −0.85 mas, a radius of 764+116 −62 , and a distance of 168.1+27.5 −14.4 pc or 548+90 −49 ly, which, if accurate, would mean Betelgeuse is nearly 25% smaller and 25% closer to Earth than previously thought. Although the European Space Agency's current Gaia mission was not expected to produce good results for stars brighter than the approximately V=6 saturation limit of the mission's instruments, actual operation has shown good performance on objects to about magnitude +3. Forced observations of brighter stars mean that final results should be available for all bright stars and a parallax for Betelgeuse will be published an order of magnitude more accurate than currently available. There is no data on Betelgeuse in Gaia Data Release 2. ### Variability Betelgeuse is classified as a semiregular variable star, indicating that some periodicity is noticeable in the brightness changes, but amplitudes may vary, cycles may have different lengths, and there may be standstills or periods of irregularity. It is placed in subgroup SRc; these are pulsating red supergiants with amplitudes around one magnitude and periods from tens to hundreds of days. Betelgeuse typically shows only small brightness changes near to magnitude +0.5, although at its extremes it can become as bright as magnitude 0.0 or as faint as magnitude +1.6. Betelgeuse is listed in the General Catalogue of Variable Stars with a possible period of 2,335 days. More detailed analyses have shown a main period near 400 days, a short period of 185 days, and a longer secondary period around 2,100 days. The lowest reliably-recorded V-band magnitude of +1.614 was reported in February 2020. Radial pulsations of red supergiants are well-modelled and show that periods of a few hundred days are typically due to fundamental and first overtone pulsation. Lines in the spectrum of Betelgeuse show doppler shifts indicating radial velocity changes corresponding, very roughly, to the brightness changes. This demonstrates the nature of the pulsations in size, although corresponding temperature and spectral variations are not clearly seen. Variations in the diameter of Betelgeuse have also been measured directly. First overtone pulsations of 185 days have been observed, and the ratio of the fundamental to overtone periods gives valuable information about the internal structure of the star and its age. The source of the long secondary periods is unknown, but they cannot be explained by radial pulsations. Interferometric observations of Betelgeuse have shown hotspots that are thought to be created by massive convection cells, a significant fraction of the diameter of the star and each emitting 5–10% of the total light of the star. One theory to explain long secondary periods is that they are caused by the evolution of such cells combined with the rotation of the star. Other theories include close binary interactions, chromospheric magnetic activity influencing mass loss, or non-radial pulsations such as g-modes. In addition to the discrete dominant periods, small-amplitude stochastic variations are seen. It is proposed that this is due to granulation, similar to the same effect on the sun but on a much larger scale. ### Diameter On 13 December 1920, Betelgeuse became the first star outside the Solar System to have the angular size of its photosphere measured. Although interferometry was still in its infancy, the experiment proved a success. The researchers, using a uniform disk model, determined that Betelgeuse had a diameter of 0.047′′, although the stellar disk was likely 17% larger due to the limb darkening, resulting in an estimate for its angular diameter of about 0.055". Since then, other studies have produced angular diameters that range from 0.042 to 0.069′′. Combining these data with historical distance estimates of 180 to 815 ly yields a projected radius of the stellar disk of anywhere from 1.2 to 8.9 AU. Using the Solar System for comparison, the orbit of Mars is about 1.5 AU, Ceres in the asteroid belt 2.7 AU, Jupiter 5.5 AU—so, assuming Betelgeuse occupying the place of the Sun, its photosphere might extend beyond the Jovian orbit, not quite reaching Saturn at 9.5 AU. The precise diameter has been hard to define for several reasons: 1. Betelgeuse is a pulsating star, so its diameter changes with time; 2. The star has no definable "edge" as limb darkening causes the optical emissions to vary in color and decrease the farther one extends out from the center; 3. Betelgeuse is surrounded by a circumstellar envelope composed of matter ejected from the star—matter which absorbs and emits light—making it difficult to define the photosphere of the star; 4. Measurements can be taken at varying wavelengths within the electromagnetic spectrum and the difference in reported diameters can be as much as 30–35%, yet comparing one finding with another is difficult as the star's apparent size differs depending on the wavelength used. Studies have shown that the measured angular diameter is considerably larger at ultraviolet wavelengths, decreases through the visible to a minimum in the near-infrared, and increase again in the mid-infrared spectrum; 5. Atmospheric twinkling limits the resolution obtainable from ground-based telescopes since turbulence degrades angular resolution. The generally reported radii of large cool stars are Rosseland radii, defined as the radius of the photosphere at a specific optical depth of two-thirds. This corresponds to the radius calculated from the effective temperature and bolometric luminosity. The Rosseland radius differs from directly measured radii, with corrections for limb darkening and the observation wavelength. For example, a measured angular diameter of 55.6 mas would correspond to a Rosseland mean diameter of 56.2 mas, while further corrections for the existence of surrounding dust and gas shells would give a diameter of 41.9 mas. To overcome these challenges, researchers have employed various solutions. Astronomical interferometry, first conceived by Hippolyte Fizeau in 1868, was the seminal concept that has enabled major improvements in modern telescopy and led to the creation of the Michelson interferometer in the 1880s, and the first successful measurement of Betelgeuse. Just as human depth perception increases when two eyes instead of one perceive an object, Fizeau proposed the observation of stars through two apertures instead of one to obtain interferences that would furnish information on the star's spatial intensity distribution. The science evolved quickly and multiple-aperture interferometers are now used to capture speckled images, which are synthesized using Fourier analysis to produce a portrait of high resolution. It was this methodology that identified the hotspots on Betelgeuse in the 1990s. Other technological breakthroughs include adaptive optics, space observatories like Hipparcos, Hubble and Spitzer, and the Astronomical Multi-BEam Recombiner (AMBER), which combines the beams of three telescopes simultaneously, allowing researchers to achieve milliarcsecond spatial resolution. Observations in different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum—the visible, near-infrared (NIR), mid-infrared (MIR), or radio—produce very different angular measurements. In 1996, Betelgeuse was shown to have a uniform disk of 56.6±1.0 mas. In 2000, a Space Sciences Laboratory team measured a diameter of 54.7±0.3 mas, ignoring any possible contribution from hotspots, which are less noticeable in the mid-infrared. Also included was a theoretical allowance for limb darkening, yielding a diameter of 55.2±0.5 mas. The earlier estimate equates to a radius of roughly 5.6 AU or , assuming the 2008 Harper distance of 197.0±45 pc, a figure roughly the size of the Jovian orbit of 5.5 AU. In 2004, a team of astronomers working in the near-infrared announced that the more accurate photospheric measurement was 43.33±0.04 mas. The study also put forth an explanation as to why varying wavelengths from the visible to mid-infrared produce different diameters: the star is seen through a thick, warm extended atmosphere. At short wavelengths (the visible spectrum) the atmosphere scatters light, thus slightly increasing the star's diameter. At near-infrared wavelengths (K and L bands), the scattering is negligible, so the classical photosphere can be directly seen; in the mid-infrared the scattering increases once more, causing the thermal emission of the warm atmosphere to increase the apparent diameter. Studies with the IOTA and VLTI published in 2009 brought strong support to the idea of dust shells and a molecular shell (MOLsphere) around Betelgeuse, and yielded diameters ranging from 42.57 to 44.28 mas with comparatively insignificant margins of error. In 2011, a third estimate in the near-infrared corroborating the 2009 numbers, this time showing a limb-darkened disk diameter of 42.49±0.06 mas. The near-infrared photospheric diameter of 43.33 mas at the Hipparcos distance of 152±20 pc equates to about 3.4 AU or . A 2014 paper derives an angular diameter of 42.28 mas (equivalent to a 41.01 mas uniform disc) using H and K band observations made with the VLTI AMBER instrument. In 2009 it was announced that the radius of Betelgeuse had shrunk from 1993 to 2009 by 15%, with the 2008 angular measurement equal to 47.0 mas. Unlike most earlier papers, this study used measurements at one specific wavelength over 15 years. The diminution in Betelgeuse's apparent size equates to a range of values between 56.0±0.1 mas seen in 1993 to 47.0±0.1 mas seen in 2008—a contraction of almost 0.9 AU in 15 years. The observed contraction is generally believed to be a variation in just a portion of the extended atmosphere around Betelgeuse, and observations at other wavelengths have shown an increase in diameter over a similar period. The latest models of Betelgeuse adopt a photospheric angular diameter of around 43 mas, with multiple shells out to 50-60 mas. Assuming a distance of 197 pc, this means a stellar diameter of 887±203 R<sub>☉</sub>. Once considered as having the largest angular diameter of any star in the sky after the Sun, Betelgeuse lost that distinction in 1997 when a group of astronomers measured R Doradus with a diameter of 57.0±0.5 mas, although R Doradus, being much closer to Earth at about 200 ly, has a linear diameter roughly one-third that of Betelgeuse. ### Occultations Betelgeuse is too far from the ecliptic to be occulted by the major planets, but there is a predicted occultation by the 14th magnitude asteroid 319 Leona on 12 December 2023. The occultation will only last about twelve seconds and occur on a narrow path over the Earth's surface, the exact width and location uncertain due to lack of precise knowledge of the size and path of the asteroid. A partial occultation by the 19th magnitude asteroid occurred on 2 January 2012. The occultation was partial because the angular diameter of the star is actually larger than that of the asteroid, and the brightness of Betelgeuse dropped by only about 0.01 magnitudes. ## Physical characteristics Betelgeuse is a very large, luminous but cool star classified as an M1-2 Ia-ab red supergiant. The letter "M" in this designation means that it is a red star belonging to the M spectral class and therefore has a relatively low photospheric temperature; the "Ia-ab" suffix luminosity class indicates that it is an intermediate-luminosity supergiant, with properties partway between a normal supergiant and a luminous supergiant. Since 1943, the spectrum of Betelgeuse has served as one of the stable anchor points by which other stars are classified. Uncertainty in the star's surface temperature, diameter, and distance make it difficult to achieve a precise measurement of Betelgeuse's luminosity, but research from 2012 quotes a luminosity of around , assuming a distance of 200 pc. Studies since 2001 report effective temperatures ranging from 3,250 to 3,690 K. Values outside this range have previously been reported, and much of the variation is believed to be real, due to pulsations in the atmosphere. The star is also a slow rotator and the most recent velocity recorded was 5.45 km/s—much slower than Antares which has a rotational velocity of 20 km/s. The rotation period depends on Betelgeuse's size and orientation to Earth, but it has been calculated to take 36 years to turn on its axis, inclined at an angle of around 60° to Earth. In 2004, astronomers using computer simulations speculated that even if Betelgeuse is not rotating it might exhibit large-scale magnetic activity in its extended atmosphere, a factor where even moderately strong fields could have a meaningful influence over the star's dust, wind and mass-loss properties. A series of spectropolarimetric observations obtained in 2010 with the Bernard Lyot Telescope at Pic du Midi Observatory revealed the presence of a weak magnetic field at the surface of Betelgeuse, suggesting that the giant convective motions of supergiant stars are able to trigger the onset of a small-scale dynamo effect. ### Mass Betelgeuse has no known orbital companions, so its mass cannot be calculated by that direct method. Modern mass estimates from theoretical modelling have produced values of , with values of – from older studies. It has been calculated that Betelgeuse began its life as a star of , based on a solar luminosity of 90,000–150,000. A novel method of determining the supergiant's mass was proposed in 2011, arguing for a current stellar mass of with an upper limit of 16.6 and lower of , based on observations of the star's intensity profile from narrow H-band interferometry and using a photospheric measurement of roughly 4.3 AU or . Model fitting to evolutionary tracks give a current mass of , from an initial mass of . ### Motion The kinematics of Betelgeuse are complex. The age of Class M supergiants with an initial mass of is roughly 10 million years. Starting from its present position and motion a projection back in time would place Betelgeuse around 290 parsecs farther from the galactic plane—an implausible location, as there is no star formation region there. Moreover, Betelgeuse's projected pathway does not appear to intersect with the 25 Ori subassociation or the far younger Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC, also known as Ori OB1d), particularly since Very Long Baseline Array astrometry yields a distance from Betelgeuse to the ONC of between 389 and 414 parsecs. Consequently, it is likely that Betelgeuse has not always had its current motion through space but has changed course at one time or another, possibly the result of a nearby stellar explosion. An observation by the Herschel Space Observatory in January 2013 revealed that the star's winds are crashing against the surrounding interstellar medium. The most likely star-formation scenario for Betelgeuse is that it is a runaway star from the Orion OB1 association. Originally a member of a high-mass multiple system within Ori OB1a, Betelgeuse was probably formed about 10–12 million years ago, but has evolved rapidly due to its high mass. In 2015, H. Bouy and J. Alves suggested that Betelgeuse may instead be a member of the newly discovered Taurion OB association. ### Circumstellar dynamics In the late phase of stellar evolution, massive stars like Betelgeuse exhibit high rates of mass loss, possibly as much as every 10,000 years, resulting in a complex circumstellar environment that is constantly in flux. In a 2009 paper, stellar mass loss was cited as the "key to understanding the evolution of the universe from the earliest cosmological times to the current epoch, and of planet formation and the formation of life itself". However, the physical mechanism is not well understood. When Martin Schwarzschild first proposed his theory of huge convection cells, he argued it was the likely cause of mass loss in evolved supergiants like Betelgeuse. Recent work has corroborated this hypothesis, yet there are still uncertainties about the structure of their convection, the mechanism of their mass loss, the way dust forms in their extended atmosphere, and the conditions which precipitate their dramatic finale as a type II supernova. In 2001, Graham Harper estimated a stellar wind at every 10,000 years, but research since 2009 has provided evidence of episodic mass loss making any total figure for Betelgeuse uncertain. Current observations suggest that a star like Betelgeuse may spend a portion of its lifetime as a red supergiant, but then cross back across the H-R diagram, pass once again through a brief yellow supergiant phase and then explode as a blue supergiant or Wolf–Rayet star. Astronomers may be close to solving this mystery. They noticed a large plume of gas extending at least six times its stellar radius indicating that Betelgeuse is not shedding matter evenly in all directions. The plume's presence implies that the spherical symmetry of the star's photosphere, often observed in the infrared, is not preserved in its close environment. Asymmetries on the stellar disk had been reported at different wavelengths. However, due to the refined capabilities of the NACO adaptive optics on the VLT, these asymmetries have come into focus. The two mechanisms that could cause such asymmetrical mass loss, were large-scale convection cells or polar mass loss, possibly due to rotation. Probing deeper with ESO's AMBER, gas in the supergiant's extended atmosphere has been observed vigorously moving up and down, creating bubbles as large as the supergiant itself, leading his team to conclude that such stellar upheaval is behind the massive plume ejection observed by Kervella. #### Asymmetric shells In addition to the photosphere, six other components of Betelgeuse's atmosphere have now been identified. They are a molecular environment otherwise known as the MOLsphere, a gaseous envelope, a chromosphere, a dust environment and two outer shells (S1 and S2) composed of carbon monoxide (CO). Some of these elements are known to be asymmetric while others overlap. At about 0.45 stellar radii (\~2–3 AU) above the photosphere, there may lie a molecular layer known as the MOLsphere or molecular environment. Studies show it to be composed of water vapor and carbon monoxide with an effective temperature of about 1,500±500 K. Water vapor had been originally detected in the supergiant's spectrum in the 1960s with the two Stratoscope projects but had been ignored for decades. The MOLsphere may also contain SiO and Al<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>—molecules which could explain the formation of dust particles. The asymmetric gaseous envelope, another cooler region, extends for several radii (\~10–40 AU) from the photosphere. It is enriched in oxygen and especially in nitrogen relative to carbon. These composition anomalies are likely caused by contamination by CNO-processed material from the inside of Betelgeuse. Radio-telescope images taken in 1998 confirm that Betelgeuse has a highly complex atmosphere, with a temperature of 3,450±850 K, similar to that recorded on the star's surface but much lower than surrounding gas in the same region. The VLA images also show this lower-temperature gas progressively cools as it extends outward. Although unexpected, it turns out to be the most abundant constituent of Betelgeuse's atmosphere. "This alters our basic understanding of red-supergiant star atmospheres", explained Jeremy Lim, the team's leader. "Instead of the star's atmosphere expanding uniformly due to gas heated to high temperatures near its surface, it now appears that several giant convection cells propel gas from the star's surface into its atmosphere." This is the same region in which Kervella's 2009 finding of a bright plume, possibly containing carbon and nitrogen and extending at least six photospheric radii in the southwest direction of the star, is believed to exist. The chromosphere was directly imaged by the Faint Object Camera on board the Hubble Space Telescope in ultraviolet wavelengths. The images also revealed a bright area in the southwest quadrant of the disk. The average radius of the chromosphere in 1996 was about 2.2 times the optical disk (\~10 AU) and was reported to have a temperature no higher than 5,500 K. However, in 2004 observations with the STIS, Hubble's high-precision spectrometer, pointed to the existence of warm chromospheric plasma at least one arcsecond away from the star. At a distance of 197 pc, the size of the chromosphere could be up to 200 AU. The observations have conclusively demonstrated that the warm chromospheric plasma spatially overlaps and co-exists with cool gas in Betelgeuse's gaseous envelope as well as with the dust in its circumstellar dust shells. The first claim of a dust shell surrounding Betelgeuse was put forth in 1977 when it was noted that dust shells around mature stars often emit large amounts of radiation in excess of the photospheric contribution. Using heterodyne interferometry, it was concluded that the red supergiant emits most of its excess radiation from positions beyond 12 stellar radii or roughly the distance of the Kuiper belt at 50 to 60 AU, which depends on the assumed stellar radius. Since then, there have been studies done of this dust envelope at varying wavelengths yielding decidedly different results. Studies from the 1990s have estimated the inner radius of the dust shell anywhere from 0.5 to 1.0 arcseconds, or 100 to 200 AU. These studies point out that the dust environment surrounding Betelgeuse is not static. In 1994, it was reported that Betelgeuse undergoes sporadic decades-long dust production, followed by inactivity. In 1997, significant changes in the dust shell's morphology in one year were noted, suggesting that the shell is asymmetrically illuminated by a stellar radiation field strongly affected by the existence of photospheric hotspots. The 1984 report of a giant asymmetric dust shell 1 pc (206,265 AU) has not been corroborated by recent studies, although another published the same year said that three dust shells were found extending four light-years from one side of the decaying star, suggesting that Betelgeuse sheds its outer layers as it moves. Although the exact size of the two outer CO shells remains elusive, preliminary estimates suggest that one shell extends from about 1.5 to 4.0 arcseconds and the other expands as far as 7.0 arcseconds. Assuming the Jovian orbit of 5.5 AU as the star radius, the inner shell would extend roughly 50 to 150 stellar radii (\~300 to 800 AU) with the outer one as far as 250 stellar radii (\~1,400 AU). The Sun's heliopause is estimated at about 100 AU, so the size of this outer shell would be almost fourteen times the size of the Solar System. #### Supersonic bow shock Betelgeuse is travelling supersonically through the interstellar medium at a speed of 30 km/s (i.e. \~6.3 AU/a) creating a bow shock. The shock is not created by the star, but by its powerful stellar wind as it ejects vast amounts of gas into the interstellar medium at a speed of 17 km/s, heating the material surrounding the star, thereby making it visible in infrared light. Because Betelgeuse is so bright, it was only in 1997 that the bow shock was first imaged. The cometary structure is estimated to be at least one parsec wide, assuming a distance of 643 light-years. Hydrodynamic simulations of the bow shock made in 2012 indicate that it is very young—less than 30,000 years old—suggesting two possibilities: that Betelgeuse moved into a region of the interstellar medium with different properties only recently or that Betelgeuse has undergone a significant transformation producing a changed stellar wind. A 2012 paper, proposed that this phenomenon was caused by Betelgeuse transitioning from a blue supergiant (BSG) to a red supergiant (RSG). There is evidence that in the late evolutionary stage of a star like Betelgeuse, such stars "may undergo rapid transitions from red to blue and vice versa on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, with accompanying rapid changes to their stellar winds and bow shocks." Moreover, if future research bears out this hypothesis, Betelgeuse may prove to have traveled close to 200,000 AU as a red supergiant scattering as much as 3 M<sub>☉</sub> along its trajectory. ## Life phases Betelgeuse is a red supergiant that has evolved from an O-type main-sequence star. Its core will eventually collapse, producing a supernova explosion and leaving behind a compact remnant. The details depend on the exact initial mass and other physical properties of that main sequence star. ### Main sequence The initial mass of Betelgeuse can only be estimated by testing different stellar evolutionary models to match its current observed properties. The unknowns of both the models and the current properties mean that there is considerable uncertainty in Betelgeuse's initial appearance, but its mass is usually estimated to have been in the range of , with modern models finding values of . Its chemical makeup can be reasonably assumed to have been around 70% hydrogen, 28% helium, and 2.4% heavy elements, slightly more metal-rich than the Sun but otherwise similar. The initial rotation rate is more uncertain, but models with slow to moderate initial rotation rates produce the best matches to Betelgeuse's current properties. That main sequence version of Betelgeuse would have been a hot luminous star with a spectral type such as O9V. A star would take between 11.5 and 15 million years to reach the red supergiant stage, with more rapidly-rotating stars taking the longest. Rapidly-rotating stars take 9.3 million years to reach the red supergiant stage, while stars with slow rotation take only 8.1 million years. These are the best estimates of Betelgeuse's current age, as the time since its zero age main sequence stage is estimated to be 8.0–8.5 million years as a star with no rotation. ### After core hydrogen exhaustion Betelgeuse's time spent as a red supergiant can be estimated by comparing mass loss rates to the observed circumstellar material, as well as the abundances of heavy elements at the surface. Estimates range from 20,000 years to a maximum of 140,000 years. Betelgeuse appears to undergo short periods of heavy mass loss and is a runaway star moving rapidly through space, so comparisons of its current mass loss to the total lost mass are difficult. The surface of Betelgeuse shows enhancement of nitrogen, relatively low levels of carbon, and a high proportion of <sup>13</sup>C relative to <sup>12</sup>C, all indicative of a star that has experienced the first dredge-up. However, the first dredge-up occurs soon after a star reaches the red supergiant phase and so this only means that Betelgeuse has been a red supergiant for at least a few thousand years. The best prediction is that Betelgeuse has already spent around 40,000 years as a red supergiant, having left the main sequence perhaps one million years ago. The current mass can be estimated from evolutionary models from the initial mass and the expected mass lost so far. For Betelgeuse, the total mass lost is predicted to be no more than about , giving a current mass of , considerably higher than estimated by other means such as pulsational properties or limb-darkening models. Betelgeuse's mass can also be estimated based on its position on the colormagnitudediagram (CMD). Betelgeuse's color may have changed from yellow (or possibly orange) to red in the last few thousand years, based on a 2022 review of historical records. This color change combined with CMD suggest a mass of and age of 14 Myr. All stars more massive than about are expected to end their lives when their cores collapse, typically producing a supernova explosion. Up to about , a type II-P supernova is always produced from the red supergiant stage. More massive stars can lose mass quickly enough that they evolve towards higher temperatures before their cores can collapse, particularly for rotating stars and models with especially high mass loss rates. These stars can produce type II-L or type IIb supernovae from yellow or blue supergiants, or type I b/c supernovae from Wolf-Rayet stars. Models of rotating stars predict a peculiar type II supernova similar to SN 1987A from a blue supergiant progenitor. On the other hand, non-rotating models predict a type II-P supernova from a red supergiant progenitor. The time until Betelgeuse explodes depends on the predicted initial conditions and on the estimate of the time already spent as a red supergiant. The total lifetime from the start of the red supergiant phase to core collapse varies from about 300,000 years for a rotating star, 550,000 years for a rotating star, and up to a million years for a non-rotating star. Given the estimated time since Betelgeuse became a red supergiant, estimates of its remaining lifetime range from a "best guess" of under 100,000 years for a non-rotating model to far longer for rotating models or lower-mass stars. Betelgeuse's suspected birthplace in the Orion OB1 association is the location of several previous supernovae. It is believed that runaway stars may be caused by supernovae, and there is strong evidence that OB stars μ Columbae, AE Aurigae, and 53 Arietis all originated from such explosions in Ori OB1 2.2, 2.7, and 4.9 million years ago. A typical type II-P supernova emits 2×10<sup>46</sup> J of neutrinos and produces an explosion with a kinetic energy of 2×10<sup>44</sup> J. As seen from Earth, Betelgeuse as a type IIP supernova would have a peak apparent magnitude somewhere in the range −8 to −12. This would be easily visible in daylight, with a possible brightness up to a significant fraction of the full moon, though likely not exceeding it. This type of supernova would remain at roughly constant brightness for 2–3 months before rapidly dimming. The visible light is produced mainly by the radioactive decay of cobalt, and sustains its brightness due to the increasing transparency of the cooling hydrogen ejected by the supernova. #### Media reporting Due to misunderstandings caused by the 2009 publication of the star's 15% contraction, apparently of its outer atmosphere, Betelgeuse has frequently been the subject of scare stories and rumors suggesting that it will explode within a year, and leading to exaggerated claims about the consequences of such an event. The timing and prevalence of these rumors have been linked to broader misconceptions of astronomy, particularly to doomsday predictions relating to the Mayan calendrical apocalypse. Betelgeuse is not likely to produce a gamma-ray burst and is not close enough for its X-rays, ultraviolet radiation, or ejected material to cause significant effects on Earth. Following the dimming of Betelgeuse in December 2019, reports appeared in the science and mainstream media that again included speculation that the star might be about to explode as a supernova – even in the face of scientific research that a supernova is not expected for perhaps 100,000 years. Some outlets reported the magnitude as faint as +1.3 as an unusual and interesting phenomenon, like Astronomy magazine, the National Geographic, and the Smithsonian. Some mainstream media, like The Washington Post, ABC News in Australia, and Popular Science, reported that a supernova was possible but unlikely, whilst other outlets falsely portrayed a supernova as an imminent realistic possibility. CNN, for example, chose the headline "A giant red star is acting weird and scientists think it may be about to explode", while the New York Post declared Betelgeuse as "due for explosive supernova". Phil Plait, in his Bad Astronomy blog, noting that Betelgeuse's recent behaviour, "[w]hile unusual . . . isn't unprecedented," argued that the star is not likely to explode "for a long, long time." Dennis Overbye of The New York Times agreed that an explosion was not imminent but added that "astronomers are having fun thinking about it." Following the eventual supernova, a small dense remnant will be left behind, either a neutron star or black hole. Betelgeuse does not seem to have a core massive enough for a black hole, so the remnant will probably be a neutron star of approximately . ## Ethnological attributes ### Spelling and pronunciation Betelgeuse has also been spelled Betelgeux and, in German, Beteigeuze (according to Bode). Betelgeux and Betelgeuze were used until the early 20th century, when the spelling Betelgeuse became universal. Consensus on its pronunciation is weak and is as varied as its spellings: - /ˈbɛtəldʒuːz/ BET-əl-jooz – Oxford English Dictionary and Royal Astronomical Society of Canada - /ˈbiːtəldʒuːz, -dʒɜːz/ BEET-əl-jooz, -⁠jurz – Oxford English Dictionary - /ˈbiːtəldʒuːs/ BEET-əl-joos – (Canadian Oxford Dictionary, Webster's Collegiate Dictionary) - /bɛtəlˈɡɜːrz/ bet-əl-GURZ – (Martha Evans Martin, The Friendly Stars) The -urz pronunciations are attempts to render the French eu sound; they only work in r-dropping accents. ### Etymology Betelgeuse is often mistranslated as "armpit of the central one". In his 1899 work Star-Names and Their Meanings, American amateur naturalist Richard Hinckley Allen stated the derivation was from the ابط الجوزاء Ibṭ al-Jauzah, which he claimed degenerated into a number of forms, including Bed Elgueze, Beit Algueze, Bet El-gueze, and Beteigeuze, to the forms Betelgeuse, Betelguese, Betelgueze and Betelgeux. The star was named Beldengeuze in the Alfonsine Tables, and Italian Jesuit priest and astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli had called it Bectelgeuze or Bedalgeuze. Paul Kunitzsch, Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Munich, refuted Allen's derivation and instead proposed that the full name is a corruption of the Arabic يد الجوزاء Yad al-Jauzā', meaning "the Hand of al-Jauzā'"; i.e., Orion. European mistransliteration into medieval Latin led to the first character y (ي, with two dots underneath) being misread as a b (ب, with only one dot underneath). During the Renaissance, the star's name was written as بيت الجوزاء Bait al-Jauzā' ("house of Orion") or بط الجوزاء Baţ al-Jauzā', incorrectly thought to mean "armpit of Orion" (a true translation of "armpit" would be ابط, transliterated as Ibţ). This led to the modern rendering as Betelgeuse. Other writers have since accepted Kunitzsch's explanation. The last part of the name, "-elgeuse", comes from the Arabic الجوزاء al-Jauzā', a historical Arabic name of the constellation Orion, a feminine name in old Arabian legend, and of uncertain meaning. Because جوز j-w-z, the root of jauzā', means "middle", al-Jauzā' roughly means "the Central One". The modern Arabic name for Orion is الجبار al-Jabbār ("the Giant"), although the use of الجوزاء al-Jauzā' in the star's name has continued. The 17th-century English translator Edmund Chilmead gave it the name Ied Algeuze ("Orion's Hand"), from Christmannus. Other Arabic names recorded include Al Yad al Yamnā ("the Right Hand"), Al Dhira ("the Arm"), and Al Mankib ("the Shoulder"), all of al-Jauzā, Orion, as منكب الجوزاء Mankib al Jauzā'. ### Other names Other names for Betelgeuse included the Persian Bašn "the Arm", and Coptic Klaria "an Armlet". Bahu was its Sanskrit name, as part of a Hindu understanding of the constellation as a running antelope or stag. In traditional Chinese astronomy, the name for Betelgeuse is 参宿四 (Shēnxiùsì, the Fourth Star of the constellation of Three Stars) as the Chinese constellation 参宿 originally referred to the three stars in Orion's Belt. This constellation was ultimately expanded to ten stars, but the earlier name stuck. In Japan, the Taira, or Heike, clan adopted Betelgeuse and its red color as its symbol, calling the star Heike-boshi, (平家星), while the Minamoto, or Genji, clan chose Rigel and its white color. The two powerful families fought a legendary war in Japanese history, the stars seen as facing each other off and only kept apart by the Belt. In Tahitian lore, Betelgeuse was one of the pillars propping up the sky, known as Anâ-varu, the pillar to sit by. It was also called Ta'urua-nui-o-Mere "Great festivity in parental yearnings". A Hawaiian term for it was Kaulua-koko ("brilliant red star"). The Lacandon people of Central America knew it as chäk tulix ("red butterfly"). Astronomy writer Robert Burnham Jr. proposed the term padparadaschah, which denotes a rare orange sapphire in India, for the star. ### Mythology With the history of astronomy intimately associated with mythology and astrology before the scientific revolution, the red star, like the planet Mars that derives its name from a Roman war god, has been closely associated with the martial archetype of conquest for millennia, and by extension, the motif of death and rebirth. Other cultures have produced different myths. Stephen R. Wilk has proposed the constellation of Orion could have represented the Greek mythological figure Pelops, who had an artificial shoulder of ivory made for him, with Betelgeuse as the shoulder, its color reminiscent of the reddish yellow sheen of ivory. Aboriginal people from the Great Victoria Desert of South Australia incorporated Betelgeuse into their oral traditions as the club of Nyeeruna (Orion), which fills with fire-magic and dissipates before returning. This has been interpreted as showing that early Aboriginal observers were aware of the brightness variations of Betelgeuse. The Wardaman people of northern Australia knew the star as Ya-jungin ("Owl Eyes Flicking"), its variable light signifying its intermittent watching of ceremonies led by the Red Kangaroo Leader Rigel. In South African mythology, Betelgeuse was perceived as a lion casting a predatory gaze toward the three zebras represented by Orion's Belt. In the Americas, Betelgeuse signifies a severed limb of a man-figure (Orion)—the Taulipang of Brazil know the constellation as Zililkawai, a hero whose leg was cut off by his wife, with the variable light of Betelgeuse linked to the severing of the limb. Similarly, the Lakota people of North America see it as a chief whose arm has been severed. A Sanskrit name for Betelgeuse is ārdrā ("the moist one"), eponymous of the Ardra lunar mansion in Hindu astrology. The Rigvedic God of storms Rudra presided over the star; this association was linked by 19th-century star enthusiast Richard Hinckley Allen to Orion's stormy nature. The constellations in Macedonian folklore represented agricultural items and animals, reflecting their way of life. To them, Betelgeuse was Orach ("the ploughman"), alongside the rest of Orion, which depicted a plough with oxen. The rising of Betelgeuse at around 3 a.m. in late summer and autumn signified the time for village men to go to the fields and plough. To the Inuit, the appearance of Betelgeuse and Bellatrix high in the southern sky after sunset marked the beginning of spring and lengthening days in late February and early March. The two stars were known as Akuttujuuk ("those [two] placed far apart"), referring to the distance between them, mainly to people from North Baffin Island and Melville Peninsula. The opposed locations of Orion and Scorpius, with their corresponding bright red variable stars Betelgeuse and Antares, were noted by ancient cultures around the world. The setting of Orion and rising of Scorpius signify the death of Orion by the scorpion. In China they signify brothers and rivals Shen and Shang. The Batak of Sumatra marked their New Year with the first new moon after the sinking of Orion's Belt below the horizon, at which point Betelgeuse remained "like the tail of a rooster". The positions of Betelgeuse and Antares at opposite ends of the celestial sky were considered significant, and their constellations were seen as a pair of scorpions. Scorpion days marked as nights that both constellations could be seen. ### In popular culture As one of the brightest and best-known stars, Betelgeuse has featured in many works of fiction. The star's unusual name inspired the title of the 1988 film Beetlejuice, referring to its titular antagonist, and script writer Michael McDowell was impressed by how many people made the connection. In the popular science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Ford Prefect was from "a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse." Two American navy ships were named after the star, both of them World War II vessels, the USS Betelgeuse (AKA-11) launched in 1939 and USS Betelgeuse (AK-260) launched in 1944. In 1979, the French supertanker Betelgeuse was moored off Whiddy Island, discharging oil when it exploded, killing 50 people in one of the worst disasters in Ireland's history. The Dave Matthews Band song "Black and Blue Bird" references the star. The Blur song "Far Out" from their 1994 album Parklife mentions Betelgeuse in its lyrics. The Philip Larkin poem "The North Ship", found in the collection of the same name, references the star in the section "Above 80° N", which reads: > " 'A woman has ten claws,' / Sang the drunken boatswain; / Farther than Betelgeuse, / More brilliant than Orion / Or the planets Venus and Mars, / The star flames on the ocean; / 'A woman has ten claws,' / Sang the drunken boatswain." Humbert Wolfe wrote a poem about Betelgeuse, which was set to music by Gustav Holst. ## Table of angular diameter estimates This table provides a non-exhaustive list of angular measurements conducted since 1920. Also included is a column providing a current range of radii for each study based on Betelgeuse's most recent distance estimate (Harper et al.) of 197±45 pc. ## See also - List of stars in Orion - List of stars that have unusual dimming periods
17,648,563	Spanish battleship Alfonso XIII	1,144,084,384	Dreadnought warship that served in the Spanish and Nationalist Spanish navies	[ "1913 ships", "Atlantic naval operations of the Spanish Civil War", "España-class battleships", "Maritime incidents in 1937", "Military units and formations of the Spanish Civil War", "Ships built in Spain", "Ships sunk by mines", "Shipwrecks in the Bay of Biscay", "Shipwrecks of the Spanish Civil War", "Spanish Republican Navy" ]	Alfonso XIII was the second of three España-class dreadnought battleships built in the 1910s for the Spanish Navy. Named after King Alfonso XIII of Spain, the ship was not completed until 1915 owing to a shortage of materials that resulted from the start of World War I the previous year. The España class was ordered as part of a naval construction program to rebuild the fleet after the losses of the Spanish–American War; the program began in the context of closer Spanish relations with Britain and France. The ships were armed with a main battery of eight 305 mm (12 in) guns and were intended to support the French Navy in the event of a major European war. Despite the reason for the ships' construction, Spain remained neutral during World War I. Alfonso XIII's early career passed largely uneventfully with routine training exercises in Spanish waters, though she was used to assist civilian vessels in distress and her crew was deployed to suppress civil unrest in Spain. In the 1920s, she took part in the Rif War in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco, where her sister España was wrecked. In 1931, Alfonso XIII abdicated and the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed; the new republic sought to erase remnants of the royal order, and so Alfonso XIII was renamed España. As part of cost-cutting measures, the ship was then reduced to reserve. Plans to modernize España and her sister Jaime I in the mid-1930s came to nothing when the Spanish coup of July 1936 initiated the Spanish Civil War. At the start of the conflict, the crew murdered the ship's officers and attempted to resist the Nationalist rebels in Ferrol, but after the Nationalists seized coastal artillery batteries, they surrendered. España then became the core of the Nationalist fleet and she was used to enforce a blockade of the north coast of Spain, frequently patrolling and stopping freighters that attempted to enter the Republican-controlled ports of Gijón, Santander, and Bilbao. During these operations on 30 April 1937, she was fatally damaged when she accidentally struck a mine that had been laid by a Nationalist minelayer. Most of her crew was evacuated by the destroyer Velasco before España capsized and sank; only four were killed in the sinking. The wreck was discovered and examined in 1984. ## Design Following the destruction of much of the Spanish fleet in the Spanish–American War of 1898, the Spanish Navy began a series of failed attempts to begin the process of rebuilding. After the First Moroccan Crisis strengthened Spain's ties to Britain and France and public support for rearmament increased in its aftermath, the Spanish government came to an agreement with those countries for a plan of mutual defense. In exchange for British and French support for Spain's defense, the Spanish fleet would support the French Navy in the event of war with the Triple Alliance. A strengthened Spanish fleet was thus in the interests of Britain and France, which accordingly provided technical assistance in the development of modern warships, the contracts for which were awarded to the Spanish firm Sociedad Española de Construcción Naval (SECN), which was formed by the British shipbuilders Vickers, Armstrong Whitworth, and John Brown & Company. The vessels were authorized some six months after the British had completed the "all-big-gun" HMS Dreadnought, and after discarding plans to build pre-dreadnought-type battleships, the naval command quickly decided to build their own dreadnoughts. Alfonso XIII was 132.6 m (435 ft) long at the waterline and 140 m (460 ft) long overall. She had a beam of 24 m (79 ft) and a draft of 7.8 m (26 ft); her freeboard was 15 ft (4.6 m) amidships. The ship displaced 15,700 t (15,500 long tons) as designed and up to 16,450 t (16,190 long tons) at full load. Her propulsion system consisted of four-shaft Parsons steam turbines driving four screw propellers, with steam provided by twelve Yarrow boilers. The engines were rated at 15,500 shaft horsepower (11,600 kW) and produced a top speed of 19.5 knots (36.1 km/h; 22.4 mph). Alfonso XIII had a cruising radius of 5,000 nautical miles (9,300 km; 5,800 mi) at a speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph). Her crew consisted of 854 officers and enlisted men. Alfonso XIII was armed with a main battery of eight 305 mm (12 in) 50-caliber guns, mounted in four twin gun turrets. One turret was placed forward, two were positioned en echelon amidships, and the fourth was aft of the superstructure. This mounting scheme was chosen in preference to superfiring turrets, as was done in the American South Carolina-class battleships, to save weight and cost. For defense against torpedo boats, she carried a secondary battery that consisted of twenty 102 mm (4 in) guns mounted individually in casemates along the length of the hull. They were too close to the waterline, however, making them unusable in heavy seas. She was also armed with four 3-pounder guns and two machine guns. Her armored belt was 203 mm (8 in) thick amidships; the main battery turrets were protected with the same amount of armor plate. The conning tower had 254 mm (10 in) thick sides. Her armored deck was 38 mm (1.5 in) thick. ## Service history ### Early career The keel for Alfonso XIII was laid down at the SECN shipyard in Ferrol on 23 February 1910 and her completed hull was launched on 7 May 1913. Fitting-out work was delayed by the start of World War I in July 1914, since much of the equipment, including her guns and fire-control systems, were supplied by British manufacturers that were now occupied with production for the British war effort. Alfonso XIII was completed on 16 August 1915, albeit with an improvised fire-control system that was secured through neutral countries. After Italy, a member of the Triple Alliance, declared neutrality at the start of the war, Spain followed suit, since the participation of its fleet in the pre-war agreements with Britain and France had been predicated on the need to reinforce the French fleet against the combined Italian and Austro-Hungarian navies. After entering service, Alfonso XIII sailed with her sister España to Santander, where the ship's namesake, King Alfonso XIII was aboard his yacht Giralda. The two battleships then took part in training exercises off Galicia. At the end of the year, Alfonso XIII's crew won the Spanish Christmas Lottery. The peacetime routine of the Spanish fleet included training exercises, frequently held off Galicia, and a fleet review off Santander during the King's usual summer vacation there. The year 1916 passed uneventfully until September, when Alfonso XIII joined the search for the destroyer Terror, which had encountered severe weather in the Bay of Biscay and had been disabled by storm damage. The battleship assisted the tugboat Antelo in April 1917 after the latter vessel had run aground off Cabo Prior. The tug had been carrying a load of mines, which Alfonso XIII took aboard to lighten Antelo so she could be pulled free. By this time, socialist and anarchist groups in Spain campaigned for a general strike and a revolution against the monarchy, prompting the military governor of Bilbao to request Alfonso XIII's presence to help restore order in August. The ship's landing party went ashore to guard a rail line and several mines. In a clash with revolutionaries, one man from the ship's crew was killed and several were injured, while twenty-two revolutionaries were arrested and held aboard the ship. Alfonso XIII again helped to suppress striking workers in early 1919, when, after having sailed to Barcelona for the commissioning of the submarine Narciso Monturiol, she arrived in the midst of the La Canadiense strike against the Barcelona Traction company. Alfonso XIII again sent men ashore to protect the company during the strike that lasted for 44 days. In 1920, the Spanish Navy embarked on a series of long-distances cruises to show the flag, in part to demonstrate its growing power. Alfonso XIII was sent to tour the Caribbean Sea and visit the United States, departing Ferrol for Havana, Cuba, by way of a stop in the Canary Islands on 22 June. On arriving in Havana on 9 July, she met an enthusiastic reception that belied the Cuban rebellion against Spanish rule in the 1890s. Alfonso XIII then steamed to Puerto Rico, which had also been part of the Spanish colonial empire until the war of 1898, and where the ship was also warmly received. The ship also visited Annapolis in the United States; the unprotected cruiser USS Reina Mercedes, a former Spanish cruiser that had been captured during the war with the United States and commissioned into the US Navy, flew the Spanish flag to honor her visit. Alfonso XIII concluded the tour with a stop in New York City in mid-October, after which she re-crossed the Atlantic, arriving back in Spain in November. In April 1921, the ship visited Lisbon, Portugal, during ceremonies held to commemorate the country's soldiers who had been killed during World War I. ### Rif War Throughout the early 1920s, she provided naval fire support to the Spanish Army in its campaigns in Morocco during the Rif War that had broken out in mid-1921. At the start of the conflict on 16 July 1921, Alfonso XIII was operating on the northern coast of Spain. She took on a full stock of coal at Santander on 22 July and immediately got underway to provide gunfire support to Spanish forces in the colony. She arrived off Melilla on 10 August and began shelling rebel positions the next day. Her landing party went ashore to reinforce the Spanish soldiers in the area. On 17 September, she and España bombarded Rif positions south of Melilla while Spanish Foreign Legion troops assaulted the positions. Alfonso XIII continued to operate off the coast of Spanish Morocco through 1922, including a bombardment of Rif artillery batteries that were being used to target coastal shipping. The batteries scored several hits on the ship, but she was not significantly damaged and her crew suffered no casualties. In August 1923, she participated in the first combined arms operation in Spanish military history that included aircraft, warships, and ground forces operating together. The fleet was used to support an amphibious assault west of Melilla. On 26 August, during the operation, España was wrecked off Cape Tres Forcas. Alfonso XIII came alongside to take off her crew, ammunition, and other supplies to lighten the vessel so she could be pulled free. Over the next year, work continued to refloat the vessel that ended in failure when a storm destroyed the ship in November 1924. During this period, tensions over the European colonial holdings in North Africa—predominantly stoked by Italy's fascist leader Benito Mussolini over the perceived lack of prizes for Italy's eventual participation in World War I on the side of the Entente—had led to a rapprochement between Italy and Spain in 1923, which was at that time ruled by the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera. Primo de Rivera sent a fleet consisting of Alfonso XIII, her sister Jaime I, the light cruiser Reina Victoria Eugenia, two destroyers, and four submarines to visit the Italian fleet in late 1923. They departed Valencia on 16 November and stopped in La Spezia and Naples, arriving back in Barcelona on 30 November. By 1925, the Rif rebels had widened the war by surrounding and taking over several French positions in neighboring French Morocco. Spain and France planned a major landing at Alhucemas, consisting of some 13,000 soldiers, 11 tanks, and 160 aircraft, to attack the core rebel territory in early September. The Spanish Navy supplied Alfonso XIII, Jaime I, four cruisers, the seaplane tender Dédalo, and several smaller craft, with Alfonso XIII serving as the Spanish flagship. The French added the battleship Paris, two cruisers, and several other vessels. Both fleets provided gunfire support as the ground forces landed on 8 September; the amphibious assault was a success, and after heavy fighting over the next two years, and by 1927 the last Rifian rebels surrendered to the allied troops. ### Decommissioning and planned modernization After completing the annual training routine in 1927, Alfonso XIII embarked her namesake and his wife Victoria Eugenie in September for a cruise along the coast of Galicia. They returned to the ship in October to visit Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa, where rebellions against Spanish rule had recently been suppressed. Alfonso XIII was escorted by the cruisers Reina Victoria Eugenia and Mendez Nunez and the destroyer Bustamante. Alfonso XIII participated in a fleet review with British, French, Italian, and Portuguese warships during the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition that began in May and continued until January 1930. By this time, the effects of the Great Depression had spurred significant domestic opposition to the regime of Primo de Rivera, leading to his resignation on 28 January, and ultimately to Alfonso XIII's exile in April 1931. On 17 April, three days after the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, the new government ordered Alfonso XIII renamed España. Immediately thereafter, the new government began a series of cost-cutting measures to offset the deficits that had been incurred during the Rif War, and as a result, both España and Jaime I were placed in reserve in Ferrol on 15 June 1931. España was decommissioned on 15 November and remained out of service for the next five years, during which time some of her secondary battery and anti-aircraft guns were removed for use ashore. By the early 1930s, the warming of Spanish relations with Italy proved to be short-lived, owing to Alfonso XIII's choice of Rome as his residence in exile and the Spanish government's preference for republican France over Fascist Italy. Plans to modernize the España-class battleships traced their origin to the 1920s, but the increased risk of conflict with Italy by the mid-1930s put increased pressure to begin the work. One proposal, advanced in 1934, advocated rebuilding the ships into analogs to the German Deutschland-class cruisers with new oil-fired boilers. The ships' hulls would have been lengthened, and the main battery turrets rearranged so they would all be on the centerline. The ships' secondary batteries would have been replaced with dual-purpose (DP) 120 mm (4.7 in) guns. The plan ultimately came to nothing, the result of financial weakness during the Great Depression and continued political instability. The finalized plan for España and Jaime I involved increasing the height of the wing turrets' barbettes, improving their fields of fire and allowing them to fire over the new secondary battery, which was to consist of twelve 120 mm DP guns placed on the upper deck in open mounts. A new anti-aircraft battery of either ten 25 mm (1 in) or eight 40 mm (1.6 in) guns were to be fitted. Other changes were to be made to improve fire-control systems, increase crew accommodation spaces, and install anti-torpedo bulges, among other improvements. Work was slated to begin in early 1937, and a limited refit was conducted in 1935–1936 in preparation for her recommissioning. Her fore and aft turrets were restored to operational status (though the wing turrets remained out of service) and her boilers were re-tubed. The scheduled modernization was interrupted by the Spanish coup of July 1936, which plunged the country into the Spanish Civil War. ### Spanish Civil War and loss When the coup, led by Francisco Franco, against the Republican government began on 17 July, España was at anchor in Ferrol, in use as a barracks ship. After a brief period of uncertainty, Lieutenant Commander Gabriel Rozas, the acting commander of España, ordered a landing party to go ashore, though he refused to explain his intentions, prompting elements of the crew to murder Rozas and several other officers. They then went ashore to assist the Republican forces attempting to break into the Ferrol Arsenal, then held by Nationalist rebels. They were repulsed by Nationalist fire and returned to the ship. Some army detachments, including some coastal artillery units around the harbor, sided with Franco. The destroyer Velasco also defected to the Nationalist side. An artillery duel between the batteries and Velasco on the Nationalist side and España and the cruiser Almirante Cervera, the crew of which also decided to side with the government, resulted in considerable destruction in the harbor and significant damage to Velasco. After two days of fighting, the crews of España and Almirante Cervera reached a negotiated settlement with the Nationalists who had gained control of the harbor, surrendering their vessels to the Nationalists. With the shipyard under Nationalist control, work began to ready España for offensive operations as quickly as possible. She set sail on 12 August; by that time, her wing turrets were still not operational, and she carried only twelve of her 102 mm guns. The crew was composed of volunteers and cadets from the Escuela Naval Militar (Naval Academy) in Marín. In company with Almirante Cervera and the repaired Velasco, she patrolled the coast of Cantabria and enforced a blockade of the northern coast of Spain. The Republican government designated the ships as pirate vessels on 14 August, while they patrolled as far east as the French border. On 15 August, España bombarded Republican positions in Gijón, which housed significant industrial resources. She and Almirante Cervera then shelled fortifications in Gipuzkoa that blocked the advance of Nationalist forces; over the span of the next few days, she fired 102 shells from her main battery. The ship returned to Ferrol on 20 August, where her port wing turret was returned to service. On 25 August, España sortied in company with Velasco to make further attacks on the Republican-held coast between Santander and San Sebastián. They captured the Republican freighter SS Kostan (1,857 GRT) on 26 August and later seized the small fishing boat Peñas (209 GRT) before returning to Ferrol on 1 September. She sortied again to bombard Gijón again shortly thereafter and arrived back in Ferrol to be dry-docked for maintenance on 14 September. In response to these attacks, the Republicans sent a flotilla of five submarines from the Mediterranean, though one was sunk by Nationalist forces en route. They also briefly deployed Jaime I, a pair of light cruisers, and six destroyers to Gijón, arriving on 25 September, but the squadron departed already on 13 October without having engaged España or any other elements of the Nationalist fleet. España was still dry-docked during this period, and she was ready to go to sea again by mid-October. On the 21st, she captured a pair of fishing boats—Apagador (210 GRT) and Musel (165 GRT)—and on 30 October, she seized the freighter SS Manu (3,314 GRT). Early that morning, while España was on patrol, the submarine C-5 launched four torpedoes at the ship in two attacks, but all four missed. The battleship seized another freighter the next day: SS Arrate-Mendi (2,667 GRT). España underwent a refit in November that included the installation of four German-supplied 8.8 cm (3.5 in) SK C/30 anti-aircraft guns and their corresponding fire-control directors and a pair of 2 cm (0.79 in) Flak 30 autocannon. She returned to service by December for further attacks on the Republican coast. On 20 December, she attacked El Musel, the port of Gijón, where the Republican destroyer José Luis Díez and other Republican vessels were anchored. She was joined in the attack by Velasco and the auxiliary cruisers Dómine and Ciudad de Valencia, though they failed to sink the Republican ships. On 30 December, España shelled the lighthouse at Cabo Mayor near Santander. Republican bombers attacked Ferrol in early January 1937 but inflicted little damage. At the same time, the Republicans laid a series of defensive minefields off Gijón and Santander. España captured the Norwegian freighter SS Carrier (3,105 GRT) on 22 January and three days later, she seized the coaster Alejandro (345 GRT). The ship, escorted again by Velasco, carried out another bombardment of Bilbao in February. España seized the Republican freighter SS Mar Báltico with a cargo of iron ore on 13 February. After returning to Ferrol, she once again entered the dry dock for maintenance that lasted until 3 March. Another patrol along the northern coast followed immediately after España emerged from the dry dock and on 8 March, she stopped the freighter Achuri (2,733 GRT). While on patrol on 30 March, she encountered José Luis Díez but neither side pressed the attack. The next day, she captured the merchant ship Nuestra Señora del Carmen (3,481 GRT); during the seizure, a group of Republican aircraft attacked the ship but inflicted no damage. She also came under fire from coastal artillery that day, but again emerged unscathed. The battleship returned to shell El Musel on 13 April in another failed attempt to sink José Luis Díez. During her patrols in March and April, she repeatedly encountered units of the Royal Navy that had been sent to ensure that British-flagged vessels safely passed through the Nationalist blockade. A pair of these incidents took place on 30 April; while searching for blockade runners off Santander, España and Velasco encountered the British steamer SS Consett, which was fired upon by España and forced to sail away, assisted by the destroyer HMS Forester. Later that morning, at around 07:00, the Nationalist vessels spotted the British steamer SS Knistley. Velasco fired warning shots to force the freighter to alter course, but when España turned to support Velasco, she inadvertently entered one of the minefields that Nationalist minelayers had set in an attempt to block the port. She struck one of the mines at 07:15, which detonated against her port side engine room and boiler room, tearing a large hole in the hull and causing significant flooding. España took on a list to port but remained afloat for some time, which allowed Velasco to come alongside and evacuate most of her crew, apart from three men who had been killed by the mine explosion. A fourth man died of his wounds aboard Velasco. During the evacuation, Republican aircraft launched three strikes on the vessels, but anti-aircraft gunners aboard both ships successfully drove them off. By around 08:30, España's crew had been taken off. Her list was increasing, and by the time Velasco departed, her decks were awash. Shortly thereafter, she capsized to port and sank. ## Wreck In May 1984, divers from the Spanish Navy's salvage vessel Poseidon located España's wreck at a depth of about 60 m (200 ft), lying upside down, displaying the large hole created by the mine explosion. Contemporary, official reports from the Nationalist government claimed that the sinking had been the result of a Republican mine that had broken loose from its mooring, but an examination of the wreck proved that it had been a Nationalist mine, making the loss of España one of the largest self-inflicted casualties in naval history. Several proposals to raise the wreck to be scrapped have been made since her discovery, but the cost of such an enterprise have prevented any work being done.
66,363,991	Allied logistics in the Southern France campaign	1,155,959,699	1944 logistics plan during World War II	[ "Allies of World War II", "Military logistics of World War II", "Military logistics of the United States", "Operation Dragoon" ]	Logistics played a key role in the success of Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of Southern France during World War II that commenced with the US Seventh Army landings on the French Riviera on 15 August 1944. On 12 September, the Seventh Army made contact with Allied forces that had landed in Normandy earlier that year as part of Operation Overlord. The supporting logistical organizations continued to operate separately, with the Southern Line of Communications supporting the Seventh Army drawing its supplies from the North African Theater of Operations until it merged with the Communications Zone of the European Theater of Operations on 20 November. The primary objective of the campaign was to capture the ports of Marseille and Toulon, preceding a drive northward up the Rhone valley to connect with Allied forces from Normandy. Both ports were captured, but they had been badly damaged by German demolitions and Allied bombing, so considerable effort was required to bring them into service. The unexpectedly rapid Allied advance was the principal cause of logistical problems, although a theater-wide shortage of service units and an unanticipated dearth of French civilian labor also contributed. Operations in southern France gave French troops a chance to assist in the liberation of their country, but the French units also created an additional logistical burden because they lacked the service troops required to provide their support. These logistical constraints prevented the operational commanders from taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by the German retreat. To facilitate the advance, engineers repaired bridges, rehabilitated railways, and laid pipelines. The logistics plan gave priority to ammunition during combat loading, in the expectation that the Germans would stubbornly resist the invasion. When this proved to not be the case, the ammunition in the assault and follow-up convoys had to be moved out of the way to reach other materiel, which slowed unloading. Efforts to alter the shipping schedules met with mixed success. The operations of the Seventh Army were hampered by these logistical constraints. Many soldiers had to subsist on K-rations for extended periods, because fresh meat and produce were unavailable in the first month of the campaign due to a lack of refrigerator cars and trucks. Southern France did not produce sufficient food to feed itself, and food supplies for the civilian population had to be given additional priority. As the weather deteriorated in September, the advance slowed, and there was a rush to equip the soldiers with winter clothing. The October battles demonstrated that the German capacity for hard fighting had not been overestimated, and critical shortages of ammunition occurred. ## Background A direct Allied invasion of southern France was considered at the Trident Conference in May 1943, but it was regarded as too risky and was passed over in favor of an Allied invasion of Italy. Nonetheless, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff continued to consider the operation, as resources had accumulated in the North African Theater of Operations (NATOUSA), including a large French Army that was being raised and equipped in North Africa. Not all of these resources were required for operations in the Mediterranean, but shipping was scarce, and the resources needed for Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy, were often more easily moved from the United States to the United Kingdom than from North Africa to the United Kingdom. Plans for Overlord called for a concurrent diversionary effort against southern France, which was codenamed Operation Anvil. Anvil's objectives were the seizure of the ports of Marseille and Toulon, followed by a drive northward up the Rhone valley to link up with the Overlord forces. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, the Premier of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, came out in favor of operations in southern France. The Combined Chiefs of Staff therefore adopted a resolution to "launch Overlord during May, in conjunction with a supporting operation against the south of France on the largest scale that is permitted by the landing craft available at that time." Another consequence of the Tehran Conference was the appointment of General Dwight D. Eisenhower to command Overlord. On 8 January 1944, he handed over command in the Mediterranean to British General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson. To give Wilson the forces he needed to capture Rome, the British and American chiefs agreed to retain troops in Italy and postpone Anvil to 10 July. Additional assault shipping Eisenhower required for Overlord was sent from the Mediterranean. The Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to take 26 Landing Ships, Tank (LSTs) and 40 landing craft required for Anvil from the American-led Pacific theater. This was the first time that assault shipping would actually be withdrawn from the Pacific, as opposed to merely diverted, but this offer was contingent on Anvil going ahead on 10 July, so the British Chiefs of Staff turned the offer down. In April, the British chiefs suddenly announced that they were in favor of Anvil after all, to which the Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet, Admiral Ernest J. King replied that the offer to withdraw ships from the Pacific was still good. When the Combined Chiefs of Staff next met in London in mid-June, Eisenhower supported a three-division Anvil – which he saw not only as providing more troops, but as the best way to capture a major port quickly – something Overlord had not yet been able to accomplish. Wilson recommended a landing on the Istrian peninsula instead, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill suggested an operation to capture the Brittany ports. Churchill appealed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to cancel Anvil, but to no avail. On 2 July, Wilson was ordered to launch Anvil as a three-division assault by 15 August. The required assault shipping came from what remained in the Mediterranean, augmented by ships from the Pacific, and some released by Eisenhower. The Combined Chiefs of Staff changed the operation's codename to Dragoon on 1 August. ## Planning In January 1944, a planning staff known as Force 163 was formed in Palermo under the US Seventh Army's Chief Engineer, Brigadier General Garrison H. Davidson. Force 163 moved to Algiers, near Wilson's Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ), where it began working on Anvil. Force 163 rejected the first proposed landing site near Hyères, as it was dominated by German guns on the Cap Benat and Giens Peninsulas and the Hyères Islands, as well as within range of the heavy guns protecting the Toulon naval base. The islands also obstructed the approaches to the beaches and the restricted areas where the minesweepers and bombardment ships had to operate. The planners therefore looked further afield, to a series of beaches around Cavalaire-sur-Mer, Saint-Tropez and Saint-Raphaël. These beaches were far from perfect, being separated by cliffs and rock outcrops, backed by dominating high ground, and possessing only restricted entries and exits. Force 163's planning effort was hampered by the on-again, off-again nature of Anvil. There was uncertainty about the target date, and whether it would be a one-, two- or three-division operation. The departure of Lieutenant General George S. Patton for the United Kingdom along with key members of the staff left numerous unfilled positions at Seventh Army headquarters. This was remedied in March 1944 with the arrival of Lieutenant General Alexander Patch, who brought in members of the headquarters his former command, IV Corps, in to fill the vacancies. The Seventh Army and Vice Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt's Eighth Fleet headquarters moved to Naples on 8 July. Most of the Force 163 planners traveled on Hewitt's flagship, USS Catoctin, so they could continue working during the voyage. On arrival, Force 163 was discontinued and Seventh Army officially took over planning. With the VI Corps and the XII Tactical Air Command headquarters also located in the Naples area, all the important headquarters were now located there, greatly facilitating planning. Working from a December 1943 plan, Services of Supply (SOS) NATOUSA began placing supply requisitions for Anvil with the New York Port of Embarkation (POE) in January 1944. Starting in February, convoys sailing for the Mediterranean were partially loaded with Anvil supplies using a procedure known as "flatting". Cargo was placed in a ship's hold and then boarded over. The ships then carried cargo for other purposes above board and on their weather decks. The cancellation of Anvil in April left 64 ships in the Mediterranean with half their cargo capacity taken up with flatted Anvil supplies. Over the next few months, General Jacob L. Devers, the commander of NATOUSA, and Major General Thomas B. Larkin, the commander of SOS NATOUSA, protected the supplies, both afloat and ashore, that had been stockpiled for Anvil against being diverted to the Italian campaign. As a result, when Anvil was revived in June, 75 percent of the required supplies for a two-division assault were on hand, although there were critical shortages of engineer, signals and transportation equipment. A convoy carrying Anvil supplies departed New York on 1 July. When it arrived on 15 July, SOS NATOUSA calculated that all the supplies required for Anvil up to D plus 90 (ninety days after the landing date) were on hand or en route. Devers's decision to protect the supplies that had been assembled for Anvil had a second beneficial effect. The Anvil planners had estimated that, in addition to the ships required to support the Italian campaign, Anvil would require another 100 cargo ships to carry supplies for the assault, and 200 more sailings by D plus 90. The 64 ships with flatted Anvil cargo constituted the first instalment of additional shipping. Another 135 vessels arrived from the United States in convoys in June and July. AFHQ rounded up the remainder from ships already in the theater and from British sources. There was also a deficit of 65 LSTs. King promised 28 more, and Eisenhower another 24, still leaving Anvil 13 LSTs short. Based on an assumption that German air and naval activity would be weak, the planners decided to include the 64 flatted cargo ships in the assault convoy. SOS NATOUSA created the Northern Base Section under the command of Colonel John P. Ratay in Corsica on 1 January 1944. Its initial assignment was to support air operations on the island, but it also became engaged in staging troops and loading supplies for Anvil. Most of the air units operating in support of Anvil would be based on Corsica, which had been in Allied hands since October 1943. The island had some disadvantages; malaria was endemic, and the transportation and communications infrastructure was underdeveloped. The best port was Bastia on the east coast. Engineers constructed and improved the roads, bridges and airfields, and signal units laid 2,500 miles (4,000 km) of telephone lines. By mid-June, 136,000 bombs, 3.5 million rounds of ammunition and 2,500 drop tanks were present on the island. The 21st Port was activated in Algiers by SOS NATOUSA on 25 June as a logistical planning unit for Anvil. It was followed by the Coastal Base Section (CBS), which was activated in Naples on 7 July under the command of Major General Arthur R. Wilson, formerly the commander of the Peninsula Base Section. Initially the headquarters was located at 370 Via dei Tribunali, Naples, but it moved to the Provincia Building in Piazzetta Duca d'Aosta next to the headquarters of the Peninsula Base Section. By 1 August, 162 personnel were assigned to CBS headquarters and 532 to the 21st Port, although some were still serving with their former units. Plans for Anvil called for landing 151,151 personnel and 19,271 vehicles on the first day. In the first 45 days, 478,931 personnel and 74,386 vehicles would be landed. Some 72,410 personnel were assigned to the CBS. Of these, 43,406 would come from North Africa, 24,015 from Italy and 4,989 from Corsica; 55,772 would be American and 16,638 French. In addition to the Allied troops, around 20,000 Italian prisoners of war (POWs) would arrive in southern France by the end of September. They were organized into Italian Service Units of 250 men and commanded by Italian officers and noncommissioned officers. Unreliable elements were supposed to be screened out, but in the rush to form the units, this was often ignored. All American service units were inspected by 6 September, and none needed to be relieved from their assignment to Dragoon. The logistics plan provided for delivery of five days' supply of petrol, oil and lubricants (POL) and subsistence every three days, thus building up reserves by two days every three. The troops would land with five units of fire of ammunition. A unit of fire was a somewhat arbitrary measurement for accounting purposes, and was different for each type of ammunition. It was 60 rounds for the M1 carbine, 150 for the M1 Garand rifle, 750 for the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) and 900 for the M1919 Browning machine gun. Each day five units of fire would arrive with the troops landing that day, plus 1+2⁄3 or 3+1⁄3 additional units of fire to maintain those already ashore, alternating on successive convoys. ## Base 901 The United States had undertaken to re-equip French Army units in North Africa under what was known as the Anfa agreement, after the suburb of Casablanca where it had been negotiated. To provide logistical support for the French Army units, Base 901 was formed in North Africa. It moved to Naples on 22 November 1943, where it came under the American Peninsula Base Section (PBS), and operated in support of the French Expeditionary Corps (CEF) in Italy. The French were urged to assume as much responsibility for the support of the CEF as possible in order to take the pressure off the PBS. To that end a list of the required logistical units was drawn up, but none of them had been activated by the end of January 1944. The Armee d'Afrique, the French Army's North African forces, was significantly drawn from soldiers from French Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia; French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. None of these territories had seen much industrial development. As a result, sourcing the requisite skilled personnel for service units from this recruit pool proved challenging. When Général d'Armée Henri Giraud met with Wilson and Devers on 9 March to discuss the arrangements for Anvil, he ventured the opinion that it would be "a pity to waste excellent combat troops by converting them into service units in which duty they were poor", and expressed the hope that the US Army could supply logistical support to the French forces. Devers was sympathetic, but NATOUSA was itself short 10,000 logistical personnel, and Devers's requests to the War Department for additional service units to support the French were denied. Giraud therefore attempted to do what he could. By the end of March some service units were ready for deployment to Italy, where they came under the CEF or Base 901, which was now commanded by Général de brigade Jean Gross. The effort to produce the required service units was unsuccessful, and by the end of June some forty logistical units were yet to be activated. The French division slice was estimated to be around 32,500 men, well short of the 40,000 considered desirable for US Army divisions. On 14 June, the War Department was forced to concede that the US Army would have to provide logistical support to the French, but only when deployed together with US forces under US command. When the French decided in early August to defer the activation of some service units, including truck battalions and ordnance maintenance companies, AFHQ informed Général d'armée Alphonse Juin that no further requests for equipment would be entertained for units not on the Operation Anvil troop list until the service units were activated. Towards the end of July it was discovered that of 27 French truck companies with 48 trucks each, just ten had been activated, and of these only two had been equipped. The French forces were plagued by shortages of all kinds. Requests for equipment from US sources were frequently denied because the items were unobtainable, or because the War Department deemed them nonessential, or simply because the French failed to submit the required paperwork in a timely manner. Only when equipment was unobtainable from French sources, including units not on the Anvil troop list, was it drawn from US stocks, and then only if it was not required by US forces. NATOUSA did not request equipment be shipped from the United States unless it was unavailable in the Mediterranean theater. Brigadier General Harold F. Loomis, the head of the Joint Rearmament Commission (JRC), which had responsibility for rearming French units in North Africa, carefully scrutinized French requests. The French provided items peculiar to French units such as wine, brandy, and olive oil, but all other supplies were ordered by the CBS through US Army channels. Base 901 was assigned to the CBS on 1 August, and Gross became a CBS deputy commander with responsibility for French units. By August, 150,000 French and 750,000 American troops had been withdrawn from combat in Italy, and were regrouping in Corsica, southern Italy and North Africa in preparation for Anvil. Items of equipment that had been worn out, damaged or lost in action were replaced by SOS NATOUSA. Enough supplies had been accumulated to support 450,000 troops for thirty days. ## Mounting The primary mounting port for Operation Dragoon was Naples, where 75 merchant ships and 307 landing craft were loaded by the Peninsula Base Section. Priority was given to outbound loading (outloading), which caused a backlog of ships awaiting to be discharged; only ships containing ammunition and perishables were discharged until outloading operations were complete. Drawing on experience gained in mounting the Anzio operation, each type of ship was loaded in a specific part of the Naples area: the attack transports, attack cargo ships and Liberty ships in Naples harbor, the LSTs in Nisida, the Landing Craft Infantry (LCIs) in Pozzuoli, and the Landing craft tank (LCTs) in Baiae. To minimize congestion at Naples, the French forces in Italy, the 1st Motorized Infantry Division and the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division, embarked from Brindisi and Taranto. The 1st Special Service Force and the Commandos d'Afrique [fr] embarked at Agropoli. Oran was the secondary mounting port where most of the follow-on French forces were embarked, the exception being the 9th Colonial Infantry Division, which was on Corsica, and was loaded at Ajaccio. Air Force units coming from Corsica were loaded at Calvi and L'Île-Rousse. All ships were loaded and ready to sail on 8 August. Hewitt's Western Naval Task Force consisted of 885 ships and landing craft that sailed under their own power with 1,375 smaller landing craft carried on board them. It was anticipated that Marseilles and Toulon would not be captured quickly, and that when they were captured, that they would be badly damaged. Logistic plans therefore provided for the possibility that Operation Dragoon would have to be maintained over the beaches for a prolonged period of time. The logistic support provided for and by the fleet was therefore more extensive than in previous operations in the Mediterranean. The store ship USS Ariel arrived on 15 July with 1,848 long tons (1,878 t) of fresh, refrigerated and frozen produce, which was discharged at Naples, Bizerte, Palermo and Oran. It was followed by the store ships USS Merak, Yukon and Polaris. The USS Tarazed reached Oran on 4 September and was able to discharge in the assault area. The Royal Fleet Auxiliary oil tankers and , each carrying 7,000 US barrels (830,000 L) of marine diesel oil and 28,000 US barrels (3,300,000 L) of fuel oil, accompanied the assault forces. LST mother ships were refueled from the tankers and in turn provided fuel for the landing craft. Six British motor fuel vessels, four of which were manned by French crews, accompanied the LCTs and acted as mobile fuel stations for them. In previous operations in the Mediterranean, the US Navy had not deployed ships larger than light cruisers, but this time battleships were available. Reserves of ammunition for American ships were carried by the ammunition ships USS Nitro, which came from the United Kingdom, and Mount Baker, which sailed from the United States. The French ships participating created a resupply problem; only 191 rounds of high-capacity ammunition were available for the 13.4-inch (340 mm) guns of the French battleship Lorraine. ## Assault ### Seaborne The main landings were made on 15 August on three beaches on a front of 60 miles (97 km). Task Force 84 under Rear Admiral Frank J. Lowry landed Major General John W. O'Daniel's 3rd Infantry Division on the Alpha beaches at Cavalaire-sur-Mer and Saint-Tropez; Task Force 85 under Rear Admiral Bertram J. Rodgers landed Major General William W. Eagles's 45th Infantry Division on the Delta beaches at Baie de Bougnon and Sainte-Maxime; and Rear Admiral Spencer S. Lewis's Task Force 87 landed Major General John E. Dahlquist's 36th Infantry Division on the Camel beaches east of Saint-Raphaël. The infantry divisions all had carried out at least one amphibious operation before. Each beach had a beach control group, built around a reinforced combat engineer regiment. The 36th Combat Engineer Regiment and the 1st Naval Beach Battalion were assigned to the Alpha beaches; the 40th Combat Engineer Regiment and the 4th Naval Beach Battalion to the Delta beaches; and the 540th Combat Engineer Regiment and the 8th Naval Beach Battalion to the Camel beaches. Each beach control group had attached port, quartermaster and medical units. Like the infantry divisions, combat engineer regiments were all veterans of at least one amphibious operation; the 36th Combat Engineer Regiment was participating in its fifth. For the first time, the US Navy provided a liaison officer, Captain Sydney B. Dodds, to coordinate the naval beach battalions. This allowed the Seventh Army and beach control groups to call ships forward based on the needs of the entire force. The beach control groups assumed overall responsibility for the operation of the beaches from Seventh Army on 17 August, one day ahead of schedule. In response to the changed tactical situation, the arrival of two French divisions was advanced by two days, and subsequent convoys by up to ten days. Beach operations proceeded smoothly, aided by fine weather, good surf conditions, the absence of strong tides, and weaker than anticipated German opposition. A delay in the 36th Infantry Division capturing Camel Red beach caused a 36-hour delay in unloading operations there, but Camel Green beach proved to be a good substitute. It not only received cargo intended for Camel Red, but also some intended for the Agay beach. Camel Red was opened on 17 August, and Agay beach was closed two days later, with its cargo sent to Camel Red. The Delta beaches were found to have poor exits, and operations were transferred to beaches in the Gulf of Saint-Tropez. Most difficulty was encountered at the Alpha beaches where operations were delayed by underwater mines. A sandbar at Alpha Yellow caused some LSTs to beach prematurely, and several vehicles drowned before a ponton causeway was erected. Soft sand also caused problems, and the engineers laid a roadway using logs. Seventh Army assigned port battalion crews to specific ships. The stevedores loaded the ship, then traveled on it to southern France, where they unloaded it. Since they knew the contents of the ship and the location of items on board, this permitted the quick unloading of specific and urgent items. Convoys arrived in daylight and departed at night. Cargo was unloaded using cargo nets. Each of the engineer combat regiments in the beach groups was provided with 600 cargo nets, and each cargo ship arriving off the beach brought another 110, which were retained on the beaches. Nets were placed on the shore where LCTs beached, and cargo was piled onto them. Motor cranes, A-frames mounted on DUKWs and 6x6 trucks with Quickway cranes were then used to lift the cargo onto trucks, which took it to a dump where it was unloaded using a crane. The trucks then returned to the LCTs with nets from the dump. Cargo ships were unloaded by lowering cargo in cargo nets onto DUKWs. There was a general shortage of cargo nets owing to too many ships being unloaded at once, too few trucks to move the cargo to the dumps, and insufficient personnel to unload the cargo at the dump sites. As an expedient, cargo was often tipped from the net onto the ground at the dump site, with consequent breakages. Despite the favorable conditions, unloading soon fell behind schedule. The ships were combat loaded, but in the expectation that there would be heavy fighting, ammunition was loaded on top, and had to be removed to access other stores. Nor did trucks arrive fast enough to keep up with the pace of the advance. There was also a shortage of labor. Newly arrived service units were expected to provide additional labor on the beaches, but the advance proceeded too fast, and these units moved forward to operate the dump sites. Italian service units proved extremely useful, and POWs were used where allowed by the Third Geneva Convention, but there were language barriers since they spoke German, Russian, Polish and occasionally other languages. POWs needed guarding to prevent their escape or reprisal attacks on them by civilians, and insufficient military police or combat unit personnel were available for guard duty. Local civilian labor proved difficult to find, as most able-bodied men had been deported for forced labor, joined the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) or fled to North Africa to join the Free French forces. Only a thousand, mostly teenagers and old men, had been hired by 20 August, and only seven thousand French civilians were working for the US forces by mid-September. Dump sites were selected before the landing from aerial photographs based on their accessibility to road and rail transport, and the area available for storage facilities, but when reconnaissance teams surveyed the dump sites after the landing, large numbers of land mines were discovered, which had to be removed before they could be used for storage. Some of the dump areas were found to become swampy after rain, and had to be moved to higher and drier ground, which often lacked the access to transport. Between 15 August and 8 September 265,939 long tons (270,206 t) of supplies and 46,505 vehicles were landed over the beaches. About 33,000 POWs and 6,200 casualties were evacuated. By 14 September the beach dumps held 11,740 long tons (11,930 t) of subsistence, 8,821 long tons (8,963 t) of POL, and 58,488 long tons (59,427 t) of ammunition. Another 10,252 long tons (10,417 t) of POL were held at Marseille and Port de Bouc. The Coastal Base Section assumed responsibility for the beaches on 9 September, a week earlier than planned. The Alpha beaches were closed that day, followed by the Delta beaches on 16 September, and the camel beaches on 28 September. By this time 324,069 personnel, 68,419 vehicles, 490,237 long tons (498,104 t) of supplies and 325,730 US barrels (38,840,000 L) of fuel had been landed. ### Airborne For the airborne operation, the troop carrier force in the NATOUSA, the 51st Troop Carrier Wing, was joined by the 50th and 53rd Troop Carrier Wings, which flew out from the UK to Italy via Gibraltar and Marrakesh to avoid overflying German-occupied France and neutral Spain. All troop carrier units were at their designated airfields in the Rome area by 20 July. Between them, the three wings had 413 aircraft. Only 130 Waco CG-4 and 50 Airspeed Horsa gliders were on hand, but 350 more were on order from the United States. The order was expedited, and the gliders were assembled in time. To fly them, the three troop carrier wings had 375 glider pilots. So that each glider would have a pilot and a copilot, another 350 glider pilots were flown in from the UK. Some 600,000 pounds (270,000 kg) of cargo parachutes and aerial delivery equipment arrived by 11 August. Major General Paul L. Williams arrived on 16 July and assumed command of the Provisional Troop Carrier Air Division, which was formed for this operation. On 15 August, 444 paratroop and 408 glider sorties were flown, which delivered 6,488 paratroops and 2,611 glider troops, with 221 vehicles, 213 artillery pieces and 500 short tons (450 t) of supplies. The first resupply mission was flown on 16 August, and delivered 246 short tons (223 t) of supplies, mostly ammunition. Three small emergency supply missions were flown the following day, which delivered 60 short tons (54 t) of rations, medical supplies and signal equipment. Within 48 hours all the airborne objectives had been taken and the airborne forces had linked up with the seaborne ones. ## Base organization The advance party of the Coastal Base Section arrived on 24 August. Under the original plan, Toulon was to be captured by D plus 15, followed by Marseille by D plus 45, and it was expected that the CBS would operate from Toulon until Marseille was captured, but on seeing the progress made towards the capture of Marseille, the advance party decided to move thence at once, and began requisitioning hotels and restaurants for the use of the CBS and Base 901 even though the city had not yet been secured, and German demolitions were ongoing. The advance party established its headquarters in the Astoria Hotel. A small advance party of Base 901 arrived on 16 August, but it was quickly swamped by the demands placed upon it. As a result, support of the French forces in the initial stages of Dragoon became the responsibility of the CBS. The first echelon of Base 901 arrived at Marseille on 31 August, followed by the second echelon on 15 September, and the third and fourth echelons two weeks later. With just 1,200 men and 200 vehicles, Base 901 was inadequately resourced for the campaign ahead; by American standards, it should have had at least 112,000 personnel. On 10 September, the Coastal Base Section was renamed the Continental Base Section. Dijon was captured the following day, and on 18 September the advance party of the Continental Base Section headquarters moved there, followed by the main body on 1 October. It was initially established in the Grand Hôtel La Cloche, but later moved to the former Gestapo headquarters at 32 Rue Talant. On 26 September, the Continental Base Section was redesignated the Continental Advance Section (CONAD), effective 1 October. The Marseille area was turned over to the new Delta Base Section, under Ratay's command. The boundary between the two was the northern boundaries of the French departments of Ain, Rhône, Loire and Allier. The Delta Base Section became responsible for 190,000 troops spread over 110,000 square miles (280,000 km<sup>2</sup>). The change to CONAD represented a change of role and not just designation; as an advance section, CONAD worked closely with the Seventh Army and retained minimal levels of stocks in its depots, usually a 15day supply. Although the Mediterranean theater had a great deal of experience, the concept of an advance section was a new one, and some degree of trial and error was required to work out the proper relationship between CONAD and the Delta Base Section. The split forced the understaffed Base 901 to also split, with part under Général de brigade Georges-Vincent-André Granier joining CONAD in Dijon on 12 October. The US Seventh Army linked up with the Allied forces coming from Normandy on 12 September, and AFHQ transferred operational control of the forces in southern France to Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) on 15 September. This officially marked the end of the campaign, but the logistical organizations remained separate. An advance echelon of SOS NATOUSA was organized in Italy and arrived at Dijon on 12 September to control both the Delta Base Section and CONAD. SOS NATOUSA became Communications Zone (COMZONE) NATOUSA on 1 October, Lieutenant General Joseph T. McNarney succeeded Devers as the Deputy Commander of NATOUSA on 22 October, allowing Devers to devote all his time and energy to running the Sixth United States Army Group in France. When NATOUSA was renamed the Mediterranean Theater of Operations, United States Army (MTOUSA), on 1 November, COMZONE NATOUSA Advance became COMZONE MTOUSA Advance. On 20 November, COMZONE MTOUSA Advance was detached from MTOUSA and became part of Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee's COMZONE, European Theater of Operations (ETO) as the Southern Line of Communications (SOLOC), under Larkin's command, with Granier as his deputy. In addition to the Delta Base Section and CONAD, the 1st Military Railways Service was also directly subordinated to SOLOC. The logistical organizations in northern and southern France were now merged into one, but SOLOC continued to exercise a considerable degree of autonomy, and still drew supplies from MTOUSA and directly from the United States. ## Ports ### Marseille The early capture of Toulon and Marseille led Davidson to revise the scheduled arrival of engineer units and equipment for port reconstruction. He opposed the Navy's plan to rehabilitate both Marseille and Toulon, and he recommended that efforts be concentrated on the former. Toulon was primarily a naval base, with narrow wharves and only single-track rail access, whereas Marseille was France's major port. Before the war it had received fifty cargo ships and passenger liners on an average day. It had 300 acres (120 ha) of deep water anchorages, a 3+1/2-mile (5.6 km) jetty that protected a harbor with ten basins, and rail facilities capable of handling 350 boxcars per day. A conference on 1 September chaired by Major General A. Arnim White, the chief of staff of the Seventh Army, ruled in Davidson's favor. The port of Marseille had been subject to extensive demolitions. Not one of the 23 piers or berths along the mole was usable. The warehouses and sorting sheds had been destroyed, the unloading cranes rendered inoperable through toppling or sabotage, and the railway tracks ripped up. The docks were strewn with improvised explosive devices made from pairs of drums of picric acid each weighing 300 pounds (140 kg). Teller mines, schu mines and booby traps were also present in abundance. Sea mines weighing 1 long ton (1 t) were found embedded in the docks, but in most cases the timers intended to detonate them had not been installed. One was found with three 21-day timers, set so that it would go off after 63 days. Port operations commenced using the beaches on the northern part of the port. Three beaches were used, and one known as Martin Beach remained in use until 1945. During September, 87,000 troops disembarked over the beaches from 84 landing ships and transports. The first engineer units to arrive were the 2nd Battalion, 36th Engineer Combat Regiment, and the 355th Engineer General Service Regiment. The former concentrated on clearing away the mines around Vieux Port area while the latter concentrated on the deep water harbor. The 355th Engineer General Service Regiment had previously been involved in mine clearance operations in Tunisia and Corsica. It removed over 61,500 pounds (27,900 kg) of explosives from the docks, along with 2,000 Teller mines. Many had to be detonated in place because the fuses had deteriorated too badly to permit them to be deactivated safely. The unit suffered 17 casualties, including one dead, but there were no more mine explosions on the docks. Craters were filled in, and the dock walls were repaired. A US Navy salvage party and a detachment of the 1051st Engineer Port Construction and Repair Group arrived on 1 September. The 1051st was a specialized formation that had previously handled the rehabilitation of the ports of Palermo and Naples. The divers of the 1051st discovered that the port and berth entrances had been blocked by 33 ships. Some 65 ships had been scuttled in the harbor channels in a criss-cross arrangement, sometimes in two or three layers. Seven large ocean-going ships had been sunk in a heap at the harbor mouth to block it. The pattern of scuttling and demolition was designed to preclude the laying of piers over sunken ships, as had been done in Naples. Harbor clearance was undertaken by two groups from the US Navy, each consisting of about ten officers and a hundred enlisted men, plus two smaller groups from the British Royal Navy. Mines had been used prodigiously; some 172 were removed from the main basin. Minesweeper operations outside the breakwater set off mines in the inner basins. Navy minesweepers and salvage teams removed 5,000 mines of 15 different types. The engineers decided to bypass the harbor entrance by blowing a gap in the breakwater, but before this occurred the Navy managed to topple one of the seven sunken vessels in the pile, and this permitted ships to enter. The first to do so was the Liberty ship Robert Treat Paine, followed by its sister ships Henry W. Longfellow and Christopher Gale. They brought troops and equipment of Colonel R. Hunter Clarkson's 6th Port, and were unloaded in the stream by DUKWs. The 6th Port had previously operated the ports of Casablanca and Naples. The 6th Port brought four large cranes and a floating crane with it from Naples. Other cranes were repaired or brought from the beaches. By the end of September 39 cranes were in operation at Marseille. The first ship, another Liberty, Samsteel was able to dock on 15 September, and by the end of the month, 18 berths were available for use. On 19 September, the Swiss-registered Generosa, carrying a cargo of honey and powdered eggs, struck a mine, and the master and several crew members were lost. Tugs and barges to work the port were drawn from other ports in the MTO and directly from the United States. In September, 36 disassembled 100-measurement-ton (110 m<sup>3</sup>) Quonset barges arrived in Naples, where they were assembled and then towed to Marseilles by tugs. Another 18 barges arrived in October. The project was set back when one of the four large tugs used to tow the barges between Naples and Marseille capsized and sank. Pilferage was a problem at Marseille, with 600 arrests in October and 1,744 in November. Theft of gasoline was a major problem, and contributed to the POL shortage. By the end of September, 188 ships had discharged 113,499 long tons (115,320 t) of cargo, 32,798 vehicles and 10,000 US barrels (1,200,000 L) of POL through the port of Marseille, and two hospital ships had taken on casualties. During November, Marseille handled 486,574 long tons (494,382 t) of cargo. ### Port-de-Bouc Port-de-Bouc was a satellite port of Marseille about 25 miles (40 km) by sea to the northwest. Before the war it was the hub of a canal system that allowed barges to travel from the Rhône to Marseille. Docks were laid out along a 3+1/2-mile (5.6 km) strait connected to the Étang de Berre, a salt lake, and there was a complex of canals, small wharves and an oil refinery. The port was small compared to Marseille, with a prewar capacity of 7,000 long tons (7,100 t) of cargo, but German demolitions were not as extensive. The wharves had been demolished in such a way as to blast large stones into the water to render the berths unusable. The channel was blocked and the cranes were wrecked. Salvage vessels entered the harbor on 27 August. LST-134 arrived with Seabees of the 1040th Construction Battalion Detachment and Company A of the 355th Engineer General Service Regiment arrived at Port-de-Bouc on 27 August. A French contractor offered to assist with repairs immediately, accepting on faith that he would be fairly reimbursed by the US Army. The stones that had been toppled into the waters were replaced, and craters were filled in. The US Navy swept the mines, and the lone sunken vessel blocking the channel was removed. Two cranes were repaired, and three berths were opened on the quays and a T-shaped jetty. On 4 September, the rescue and salvage ship USS Tackle (ARS-37) was being towed to the fueling and watering berth in the Basin Petrolier by the French tug Provencal when she grazed a buoy and set off a mine that had been attached to it. Provencal sank, and two men were killed and nine wounded on Tackle, which was towed to Toulon, where her crew and salvage equipment were unloaded, and then to Palermo for repairs. Port-de-Bouc became the main port of entry in southern France for POL, supplying seventy percent of Allied requirements. The FFI secured the oil refineries, which were only lightly damaged, having suffered no more than a few bullet holes from the XII Tactical Air Command. The oil storage facilities could hold 250,000 US barrels (30,000,000 L), and were quickly restored to working order by the 697th and 1379th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Companies and oil company employees. Eventually storage was provided for 1,500,000 US barrels (180,000,000 L). The storage tanks were ready to receive the first shipment by 29 August, but had to wait another nine days for minesweeping operations to complete. By the end of September, 23 ships had discharged 36,837 long tons (37,428 t) of general cargo and 38,558 long tons (39,177 t) or 331,600 US barrels (39,540,000 L) of POL at Port-de-Bouc. Army cargo discharged at Port-de-Bouc rose to 51,481 long tons (52,307 t) of general cargo and 70,070 long tons (71,190 t) of POL in October, and 62,817 long tons (63,825 t) of general cargo and 79,750 long tons (81,030 t) of POL in November. ### Toulon Although the Army had decided to concentrate on the rehabilitation of Marseille, Hewitt resolved to do what he could in Toulon, as preliminary surveys indicated that some berths could be opened in Toulon before Marseille. Like the latter, Toulon had been badly damaged by German demolitions and Allied bombing. Almost all the buildings had been destroyed, the roads had been obstructed, the docks had been damaged and the berths had been obstructed with sunken vessels. The task of reconstruction of Toulon was undertaken by the French Navy and the US Navy's 611th Construction Battalion Maintenance Unit. Since the US Navy had not expected to have to undertake the rehabilitation of a port with its own resources, the materials required such as lumber and welding and cutting gases were procured from French naval and civilian sources. Although no cranes were available, the Seabees managed to clear the docks, bridge wrecks, and provide road access to the berths. No work was carried out except that which would immediately free up berths. A large swing bridge that had been collapsed had to be cut up to remove it from the channel and provide access to the berths in the inner basins. Three sunken ships then had to be removed from the channel. The largest obstacles were the 12,000-gross-register-ton (34,000 m<sup>3</sup>) liner SS Andre Lebon and the French destroyer Vauban, which were each blocking a berth and had to be shifted. In the end, it was decided that the damage to Vauban was too extensive, and drydock No. 1 was cleared instead. The first ship to dock at Toulon was the Liberty ship SS F. Marion Crawford, which began discharging on 5 September. A second berth was ready the following day, and nine Liberty ship berths were available by 25 September, along with 31 bow-on sites suitable for LCTs. The port was mainly used for the delivery of civil affairs supplies. By the end of September, 3,441 long tons (3,496 t) of military supplies, about 9,000 long tons (9,100 t) of civil affairs supplies, and 23,629 vehicles had been unloaded at Toulon. Tonnage unloaded through the ports of southern France increased from 174,500 long tons (177,300 t) in August to 326,813 long tons (332,057 t) in September, 524,894 long tons (533,317 t) in October, and 547,602 long tons (556,389 t) in November. ## Transport ### Railways The first railways operations began on 17 August, when the Seventh Army opened 15 miles (24 km) of narrow-gauge railway between Saint-Tropez and Cogolin. The 40th Engineer Beach Group found twelve intact locomotives and eighty cars at Carnoules, and a standard-gauge railway between Frejus and Sainte-Maxime commenced operations on the night of 23–24 August, albeit without signals and lights. The first train carried 300 long tons (300 t) of POL, rations and ammunition. Another train departed the same day for Draguignan, using a branch line. On 27 August, loading moved from Frejus to Saint-Raphaël, where there was a better railway station. As the advance continued, the first major break in the railway line was encountered at Meyrargues. The railways at the port had been wrecked, and new tracks had to be laid. By 20 October only eight piers were serviced by railway tracks. However, the nearby Gare de Marseille-Canet [fr], the main freight railway station in Marseille, suffered only minor damage. The railway roundhouses were intact, and thirty serviceable locomotives and around 450 railway cars were found there. Enough coal was located to fuel the trains. Railway operations therefore initially commenced from there instead of the port. Beyond the Marseille area, the damage was often slight, and railways were usually blocked only with debris. French workers were able to restore the sections where the rails had been torn up. Orders that had been placed for replacement tracks to be shipped from the United States were cancelled, and some of the stockpile in North Africa was given to the French railways there under Lend-Lease. Locomotives were in short supply, though, and by the end of September twelve had been delivered from the US. North of Aix-en-Provence, the railway network split, with dual tracks running along both sides of the Rhône, and a single-track line branching off through Sisteron towards Grenoble. The latter was given priority because it was less badly damaged and could be restored to service more quickly, but it was much steeper, limiting capacity to 125 long tons (127 t) per train, and subject to flooding and to deep snows in the winter. Engineers reconnoitered the line in a Stinson L-5 Sentinel aircraft. In the campaign plan, the task of rehabilitation of the railway system had been assigned to the engineers of the 1st Military Railway Service, who were scheduled to start arriving around D plus 30, but now the task of railway rehabilitation fell to the Seventh Army engineers. Moreover, the more rapid than expected Allied advance caught much of the equipment intended to repair the railways in transit from stockpiles in the Mediterranean or the United States. The arrival of railway units was expedited, with the 703rd Railway Grand Division, which was originally scheduled to arrive on 25 September, and the 713th Railway Operating Battalion, which was supposed to arrive on 5 September, reaching Marseille on 29 August. Improvisation was called for. At Aix-en-Provence, the 343rd Engineer General Service Regiment used the 104-foot (32 m) base of a captured German 270 mm railway gun to span two 51-foot (16 m) gaps in the railway bridge there, allowing the first train to cross on 29 August. The same unit built a Bailey bridge over the Durance at Meyrargues, which was opened on 17 September. The final link was completed by the 40th Engineer Combat Regiment, which used a Bailey bridge to replace a 91-foot (28 m) gap in the bridge over the Buëch, and local lumber and steel to replace two other missing spans. By 3 September, freight was being moved by rail from Camel Beach to Meyrargues, then by truck to Sisteron, and by rail to Grenoble. On 15 September, French civilian workers at the Gare de Marseille-Canet who were smoking in a train carrying ammunition for the ground forces, 500-pound (230 kg) bombs for the air forces, and chemical warfare material, set off an explosion that killed ten French civilians and ten American servicemen, and started a fire. Tanks were used to remove other trains from the area. Quick thinking by Lieutenant Colonel George F. Glass, the Coastal Base Section ammunition officer, prevented the fire from reaching a nearby area where 105 mm ammunition was loaded. The fire was eventually brought under control by the 1208th Engineer Composite Fire Fighting Platoon. The director general of the 1st Military Railway Service, Brigadier General Carl R. Gray Jr., arrived by air from Rome on 14 September with his advance party, and established his headquarters in Lyon. He conducted a reconnaissance of the railway system, and decided to reverse the original order of priorities, and concentrate on the high capacity dual-track railway up the Rhône valley to Lyon. The first task was to repair the bridges over the Durance at Avignon, the Drôme at Livron, and the Isère north of Valence. The 343rd General Service Regiment completed work on all three by 20 September. The 540th Engineer Combat Regiment opened the route from Marseille to Bourg-en-Bresse with two bridges over the Ain near Pont-d'Ain. Meanwhile, the 344th Engineer General Service Regiment erected a 460-foot (140 m) Bailey bridge over the Doubs at Dole, Jura, which was opened for traffic on 5 October. This moved the railhead forward to Besancon and Vesoul. The railway on the east bank was rehabilitated by the 713th, 727th and 759th Railway Operating Battalions and French railway personnel. By 2 October, freight was moving from Marseille to Vesoul at the rate of 275,000 ton-miles (401,000 tkm) per day. Trucks still remained the main form of haulage in September though, moving 220,000 long tons (220,000 t) of freight compared with 63,000 long tons (64,000 t) moved by rail. At a meeting on 26 September, bids were taken from the various commands and agencies for delivery of their freight by rail. Only 4,923 long tons (5,002 t) per day was accepted, just over half of what was available for shipment, except on 4 October, when bids totaling 8,350 long tons (8,480 t) per day were accepted. This was lifted to 12,000 long tons (12,000 t) per day a week later, and in November 16,000 long tons (16,000 t) per day were carried, and the CONAD railheads in Dijon handled 13,259 long tons (13,472 t) daily. ### Motor transport The main highway route used in August was the one that ran between Aix-en-Provence and Grenoble. The Seventh Army set priorities and controlled road movements. Fifteen quartermaster truck companies arrived in the first four days of Dragoon, but the swift movement of operational units meant that they were hard-pressed to keep up with demand for their services. The schedules were altered to permit more units to arrive faster than originally planned, but this failed to provide sufficient relief. The situation became serious in September when the Seventh Army began deploying its truck companies to the forward area in support of the advance. The Coastal Base Section required all newly arrived units to load their trucks with Seventh Army cargo and make at least one round trip to the beach dumps. The road network in southern France was extensive, but restricted by bridges, many of which were limited to loads of 5 metric tons (5 long tons) or less. The most important highways during the southern France campaign from a tactical and logistical point of view were the Route Napoléon, which ran from the beaches to Grenoble, and Route nationale 7, which ran along the left bank of the Rhône, passing through Montelimar, Valence and Lyon. As with the railways, the rapid Allied advance left the Germans with insufficient time to carry out a comprehensive program of demolitions. By the end of September, the Seventh Army engineers had built 88 highway bridges, of which 19 were classified as major works, and 28 Bailey bridges. Work was then undertaken to replace the Bailey bridges with wooden structures, as tactical bridging material was in short supply. By September, trucks were hauling freight from the coast to the Haute-Saône Department. In addition to the beaches and ports, some were engaged in shuttle operations to cover gaps in the railway network, mainly caused by the demolition of bridges. Movement control was concentrated at the end points, and fine weather allowed vehicles to halt for the night at almost any point along the route. On 25 September, a movement control office opened at the Continental Base Section headquarters in Dijon, and soon after road traffic was shifted from the mountainous Grenoble route to the Rhône valley, rejoining the old route at Bourges. Traffic control stations were established at Aix-en-Provence, Vienne, Lancin and Bourg-en-Bresse. To provide more transport units, two anti-aircraft artillery battalions were converted into quartermaster truck battalions, and additional truck units were organized from Italian POWs. The French continued to use the old route, thereby separating American and French traffic. The truck units of the Coastal Base Section were concentrated in Marseille, and by the end of September there were 18 truck companies working the port, of which six were equipped with DUKWs. During October, the American truck units were joined by ten Italian and five French companies, and a civilian driver pool with 213 Army and 131 civilian vehicles. On paper there were 2,535 trucks, but only 1,670 were still serviceable. Every available vehicle was put to use to help clear the backlog of ships awaiting discharge, including horse-drawn carts, and additional sailings from Italian and North African ports had to be suspended for a time. This left only one truck company available in the CONAD area. On 10 October long-distance hauls by truck were prohibited. ### Inland waterways The opening of Port-de-Bouc also permitted barge traffic on the Rhône, and on 1 September fourteen LCMs from the attack cargo ships USS Arcturus and Procyon made their way up the Rhône to Arles, where they assisted US and French troops in crossing the river. Consideration was given to using the river to take the pressure of the railways and highways. The Rhône was navigable from Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône in the Marseille area as far as Lyon, where it was obstructed by nine demolished bridges. There were two more demolished bridges at Collonges-au-Mont-d'Or, and the river was also obstructed at Uchizy and Tournus. Plans were made to remove the obstructions by 8 November, but plans to use the Rhône were abandoned owing to a shortage of suitable tugs for use on its swift-flowing and relatively shallow waters. The use of inland waterways was restricted to a few hundred tons per day in the Marseille and Port-de-Bouc areas. ### Air transport The CONAD Air Transport Section commenced operation from Dijon Airport on 9 October. Some air cargo had already been delivered, and steps were taken to forward it. The Air Transport Command initially made two flights per day, one going north and one south. Connections for personnel and air cargo were available to London, Paris, Edinburgh, Lyon, Marseille, Bastia, Naples and Algiers. From there passengers could catch connections to other theaters. ## Supply and services ### POL (petrol, oil and lubricants) The rapid Allied advance inland created a greater than expected demand for POL, with fuel shortages appearing as early as the second day. A ship carrying 50,000 US gallons (190,000 L) of packaged fuel was called forward. By 19 August, the situation had become critical. Forces were operating 100 miles (160 km) from the beaches, and VI Corps was using 100,000 US gallons (380,000 L) of fuel a day, but only 11,000 US gallons (42,000 L) remained in the beach dumps. Seventh Army was forced to prioritize the unloading of fuel, and to restrict consumption by the combat units. Some relief was obtained from captured German fuel dumps at Draguignan, Le Muy, and Digne, and some fuel was recovered from the French refineries in the Port-de-Bouc area. The shortage was alleviated when a tanker with 6 million U.S. gallons (23 Ml) arrived on 27 August. (A large German dump containing 183,000 US gallons (690,000 L) of high-octane gasoline and 36,500 US gallons (138,000 L) of diesel fuel at Besançon was later captured on 9 September.) The 697th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company arrived on Camel Green on 15 August. This unit was commanded by Captain Carl W. Bills, an Oklahoma oil man who became the technical supervisor of the pipeline system. Materials for POL storage began arriving on disparate landing craft and beaches on 19 August, and the 697th constructed three 10,000 US barrels (1,200,000 L) storage tanks in Saint-Raphaël, less than 1 mile (1.6 km) from the beach, and connected them to the beach with a 4-inch (10 cm) and a 6-inch (15 cm) pipe. Another 4-inch pipeline connected the docks with a 1,000 US barrels (120,000 L) storage tank for avgas at the airfield at Fréjus. It also built a decanting point where five-US-gallon (20 L) jerry cans could be refilled, and tanker truck dispensing point at Saint-Raphaël, where it refilled up to 7,000 forty-two-US-gallon (160 L) barrels and 5,000 jerry cans per day. On 26 August, the 697th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company began running 19 miles (31 km) of 4-inch (10 cm) Victaulic pipe to connect the Lavéra Refinery at Port-de-Bouc, the La Provence refinery [fr] at La Mède, and the Berre refinery [fr] on the shores of the Etang de Berre. A parallel 4-inch (10 cm) pipeline for avgas was also run from Port-de-Bouc to La Mède, where a 1,000-US-barrel (120,000 L) storage tank was erected. These pipelines were operational by 12 September. The pipeline was extended to Salon-de-Provence. where a road convoy refueling and jerry can refilling point was established. On 25 September the pipeline reached the Durance, where the 697th ran it over a 1,480-foot (450 m) timber trestle bridge. It was then linked to a section completed by the 784th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company that ran another 32 miles (51 km) to a railway tank car installation at Le Pontet, where another road convoy refueling point was established. Meanwhile, the 1379th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company took over responsibility for the tanker discharge facilities at Port-de-Bouc and began laying a 6-inch pipeline around the Etang de Berre, running parallel to the 4-inch pipeline. The 696th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company arrived in Berre on 21 September, and extended the pipeline to just north of Avignon. From there the 701st Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company, which arrived at Marseille on 9 October, laid pipeline to Piolenc, whence the 696th took over again and continued the work to north of Valence. The Rhône flooded and burst its banks in late October, and the pipe was floated into position. In November, water used to test the pipe for leaks before using it for fuel froze and burst the couplings between Lyon and Mâcon. By this time, 875 miles (1,408 km) of 4-inch and 532 miles (856 km) of 6-inch pipe was in use. ### Subsistence The loading of ammunition on top of the rations inhibited the timely delivery of food supplies. Although no one went malnourished, many units had to live on K-rations when other forms of rations were temporarily unavailable. Sometimes they had only two instead of three meals a day. During the first month and a half of operations, both the Seventh Army and French Army B lived entirely on packaged rations. Some soldiers were able to supplement their rations with gifts from French farmers or purchases on the black market, but there was a general food shortage in southern France, which did not produce sufficient food to feed itself. This was exacerbated by the retreating Germans gathering up everything they could. Under the logistical plan, three Liberty ships carrying civil affairs food supplies were to arrive at five-day intervals between D plus 40 and D plus 80. Supplies were initially drawn from theater stockpiles, with later shipments coming directly from the United States. Due to the Seventh Army's rapid advance, the shipments of civil affairs relief supplies were expedited. Emergency food supplies were hastily loaded onto ships in North Africa and Italy, which began arriving on 25 August, and the first of the ships loaded with civil affairs supplies reached the Gulf of Saint-Tropez on 10 September, fifteen days ahead of schedule. By the end of September, 35,000 long tons (36,000 t) of civil affairs relief supplies had been landed in southern France. Meanwhile, the Seventh Army released 100,000 tins of condensed milk and 3,450 pounds (1,560 kg) of dried milk for the children in the region. American troops did not receive freshly-baked bread until 26 September, and only 5,000 long tons (5,100 t) of refrigeration space was available in Marseille for fresh produce. Refrigerator cars and trucks had not arrived by the end of September, and therefore there were no issues of fresh meat, On 6 October Larkin decreed that five days' supply of subsistence would be kept in the combat zone, fifteen days' supply by CONAD, and anything more by the Delta Base Section. It was expected that total reserves would reach 45 days' supply by December. Colonel John P. Neu was appointed the quartermaster of the Delta Base Section on 19 October. He created three major distribution centers at Nice, Lyon and Marseille. At Marseille a dump for Class I supplies had been established at the Gare du Prado, but this was surrounded by narrow, crooked city streets that made access difficult for military vehicles. He therefore created a new dump at Rognac, a small town on the Étang de Berre with a railway station. A dump was established next to an olive orchard by the 240th Quartermaster Service Battalion, which was soon joined by the 619th Depot Supply Company, the 3091st Refrigeration Company, and the 4134th Quartermaster Service Battalion. Flatted rations were unloaded at Marseille, and arrived at Rognac by train or barge. Two trains arrived each day that were unloaded with roller conveyors that allowed twelve cars to be unloaded simultaneously. One train was loaded and dispatched each day. About 2,500 US personnel worked at Rognac, along with a battalion of French troops who handled French Army supplies, and 3,000 Italian service troops. The Italians were later replaced by 6,000 German POWs, who also operated a large bakery. By November 150 reefer cars were operating on the railways, and 2,000 long tons (2,000 t) of cold storage was available in Dijon, but 15 million rations of frozen meat and 18 million rations of butter were in cold storage in Marseille. Since only one mobile refrigeration company was available, combat units received four issues of perishables per week. The 108th Bakery Company arrived on the beaches at Saint-Tropez on 30 August, but was separated from its equipment, and only began baking 32,000 pounds (15,000 kg) fresh bread each day in Vesoul on 26 September. The 178th Bakery Company established itself in Épinal on 2 October, and the 108th joined it there between 19 and 23 October, while the 7553rd (Italian) Bakery Company moved in to Vesoul. The 167th Bakery Company arrived from Italy on 2 September, and took over the operation of two commercial bakeries in Marseille. When CONAD was formed it sent detachments of the 167th to Dijon, Vittel (where the Sixth Army Group had its headquarters), Langres, and Besançon, where they supervised the operation of civilian bakeries. ### Ammunition A critical ammunition shortage occurred in October. On 2 October, the 3rd Infantry Division's 30th Infantry Regiment reported that it was down to its last 300 rounds of 81 mm M1 mortar ammunition, and was nearly out of M1 Garand rifle ammunition. Rationing was introduced. The division limited expenditure of 60 mm M2 mortar to eight rounds per weapon per day, 81 mm M1 mortar ammunition to eleven rounds per weapon per day, 105 mm howitzer ammunition to thirty-two rounds per gun per day, and 155 mm howitzer ammunition to thirty rounds per gun per day. Even at this restricted rate, ammunition stocks ran short, and the 3rd Infantry Division stripped its support units of ammunition to keep the rifle companies and machine gun platoons in ammunition. For a time there was no rifle ammunition in the Seventh Army's depots. Seventh Army blamed the situation on COMZONE NATOUSA, for failing to deliver the required quantities of ammunition. Ammunition consumption averaged around 1,000 long tons (1,000 t) per day, but some days as little as 20 long tons (20 t). Between 1 and 7 October, Seventh Army put in bids for 750 long tons (760 t) per day of ammunition, and 225 long tons (229 t) per day of other ordnance items, but Sixth Army Group cut this back to 512 long tons (520 t) per day of all classes of ordnance supply. Moreover, what was shipped did not always coincide with what was requested. By the end of the first week of October, Seventh Army's stock of 105 mm howitzer ammunition averaged 5,627 rounds, which worked out to about twelve rounds per gun per day compared with the ETOUSA 40 rounds per gun per day considered a day's supply. (NATOUSA allotted 50 rounds per gun per day.) Similarly, the availability of 155 mm howitzer ammunition was about 15 rounds per day instead of 25. The decline had occurred in spite of rationing. Due to uncertainty of receipts, Seventh Army abandoned rationing after the first two weeks of October and instead instituted a system whereby it advised VI Corps of the available ammunition on a daily basis. Receipts rose as the railways were brought into operation, allowing reserves to be built up. By 28 October, the Seventh Army depots held 8.2 days' supply of 105 mm M2, 8.8 days' of 155 mm howitzer, 9.8 days' of 155 mm gun M1 and 7.4 days' of 81 mm mortar, but there were still supply issues with 105 mm howitzer ammunition, and stocks declined to 3.8 days' supply by 27 November. Part of the problem was the transfer of the XV Corps from the Third United States Army with its artillery assets but without the requisitions for its ammunition from the War Department. Additional shipments were made to cover this. Ammunition expenditures in November were high; Seventh Army's 648 105 mm howitzers fired 49 rounds per gun per day. On 17 November, the War Department announced that ammunition expenditures in all theaters of war had exceeded production, resulting in a depletion of stocks in the United States, and it reduced a day's supply to 18 rounds per gun per day. This was the result of cutbacks ordered in 1943 in response to the Truman Committee's criticism of what it regarded as excessive stocks of ammunition in NATOUSA. ### Ordnance Material losses during the pursuit were high. Between 15 August and the end of the year, Seventh Army wrote off 213 medium tanks, 63 light tanks and 158 other armored vehicles. By the end of the year the Seventh Army reported that it was short 25 M8 armored cars, 15 M10 tank destroyers, three M36 tank destroyers, 53 M4 Sherman tanks with 75 mm or 76 mm guns, 26 M4 Sherman tanks with 105 mm howitzers, and 72 T41 armored utility vehicles. This exceeded its ability to provide replacements. Losses of other vehicles were also high: 302 GMC CCKW 21⁄2-ton 6×6 trucks and 627 1⁄4-ton trucks (jeeps). By the end of the year it was still short 115 1⁄4-ton trucks, 305 11⁄2-ton trucks and 321 21⁄2-ton 6×6 trucks. Weapons lost included 327 .30-caliber machine guns, 278 M2 Browning .50-caliber machine guns, 1,824 Thompson submachine guns, 2,684 M1911 .45-caliber pistols, 4,701 M1 carbines, 585 BARs and 3,949 M1 Garand semi-automatic rifles. Losses of artillery pieces were not as severe, but were keenly felt. They included five 75 mm pack howitzers, ten 105 mm howitzers, eleven 155 mm howitzers and four 155 mm guns. By the end of the year all losses had been replaced except for the .30-caliber machine guns, which were on order. The 77th Ordnance Depot Company supporting the Seventh Army's 43rd and 45th Ordnance Battalion had difficulty obtaining spare parts from the depots, which were still around the beaches. Some 300 civilian vehicles that the Germans had confiscated were found in a warehouse in Besançon, and about a third of them were given a coat of olive drab paint and pressed into service as staff and command cars. By October, the Seventh Army area was filled with civilian and captured German vehicles, often ingeniously repaired or adapted by ordnance units. ### Medical services The 52nd, 56th and 58th Medical Battalions landed on 15 August to supplement the organic medical units of the divisions. Between 15 and 18 August 2,996 casualties were admitted to hospitals, of whom 17 died, 199 returned to duty, and 2,229 were evacuated. Casualties on D-Day were evacuated to the 40th Station Hospital in Corsica by LSTs, from whence serious cases were flown to Naples. Starting on 16 August, three hospital ships began taking casualties to Naples. Hospital ships carried surgical teams drawn from the 3rd, 36th, and 43rd General Hospitals and the 59th Evacuation Hospital. Air evacuation of casualties to Naples from airfields near the beaches was instituted on 22 August by the 802d and 807th Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadrons. Thereafter the hospital ships carried mostly French patients, who were taken to Oran. After the capture of Marseille, French casualties remained in France, and the use of hospital ships was discontinued on 30 August. The use of air evacuation declined in September as flying conditions deteriorated and facilities became available in southern France. Between 22 August and 7 November, 7,377 patients were evacuated to Italy by air. Another 9,878 were evacuated by air to Istres, an airbase near Marseille. Three 400-bed evacuation hospitals, the 11th, 93rd and 95th Evacuation Hospitals, one for each division, were in operation by 19 August, when United States Army Nurse Corps personnel began arriving in southern France. Four large 750-bed evacuation hospitals, the 9th, 27th, 51st and 59th Evacuation Hospitals, arrived between 25 and 27 August. In the original plan they were to provide services to the French Army B, but after the capture of Marseille French medical officers found that they could take advantage of civilian hospitals in the vicinity, and the large evacuation hospitals were primarily used to treat US troops. Like other logistical units, the hospitals had difficulty keeping up with the pace of the advance. Long lines of evacuation to the rear often left the hospitals overcrowded when there was a sudden surge of casualties. Resources were further strained when hospitals often had to leave detachments behind to care for immobile cases when they moved forward. They made use of civilian personnel in many capacities, but particularly as stretcher bearers. The 11th Evacuation Hospital moved from Le Muy to Aspremont, where it admitted 300 patients on its first day of operation. The 9th Evacuation Hospital opened in Beaumont-en-Diois, about 30 miles (48 km) further down the road to Crest. Within 24 hours of opening it had admitted 260 patients and performed 39 surgical operations. On 1 September, the 93rd Evacuation Hospital displaced forward to Rives, where it admitted 127 patients and performed 28 surgical procedures in 12 hours. Except for the 27th Evacuation Hospital, which took the train, all had to move using their own organic transport and what they could borrow. By the end of September all were clustered near the highway from Besançon to Epinal. The last two weeks of September were cold and wet, and only with difficulty could the patients be kept warm. Air evacuation from Ambérieu-en-Bugey became possible on 9 September, but the deteriorating weather made it uncertain. Once the railways became operational again, hospital trains began running. The 42nd Hospital Train, which had served in North Africa and Italy, made its first run between Mouchard and Marseille on 25 September. It was followed by the 66th Hospital Train, another veteran of the Italian campaign, which made its first run on 9 October. Both used reconditioned French passenger cars. The first fixed hospital to open in southern France was the 36th General Hospital, which opened in a former German hospital at Les Milles on 17 September and in Aix-en-Provence two days later. It moved to Dijon on 13 October, where it opened in a former French cavalry barracks, while the site at Les Milles was occupied by the 43rd General Hospital and that in Aix-en-Provence. Within a week the 36th General Hospital had 1,400 patients. It was followed by the 46th General Hospital, which opened at Caserne Vauban near Besançon on 20 September; the 21st General Hospital, which opened in an unfinished French psychiatric hospital at Mirecourt on 21 October; and the 23d General Hospital, which opened at Vittel on 5 November. By 20 November, CONAD hospitals had 5,000 beds and the Delta Base Section hospitals had 9,250 beds. In addition, a special hospital, the 7607th Station Hospital (Italian) cared for Italian service units. By end of September, US Army hospitals in southern France had admitted 20,775 patients, of whom 160 had died, 8,380 had been evacuated to Italy or North Africa, and 8,525 had been returned to duty, leaving 3,710 in the hospitals. Around this time, neuropsychiatric (combat fatigue) cases began to rise, and with the deteriorating weather trench foot also started to become a problem. A dedicated neuropsychiatric hospital, the 51st Station Hospital, opened at Auxonne on 4 November. During the first sixty days of the campaign medical supplies were drawn from NATOUSA; after that they came directly from the United States. Medical supply was handled by the 7th Medical Depot Company, which followed the Seventh Army's advance. It had to haul supplies from the beaches with its own transport until November, when CONAD opened an intermediate medical depot in Dijon. The Seventh Army also had its own blood service in the form of the 6703rd Blood Transfusion Unit. Blood was initially flown in from Naples, but after 29 October it was drawn from service troops in the Delta Base Section. When supplies ran low in late October, additional blood was flown in from the ETO stocks in Paris. The use of blood transfusions to treat shock resulted in higher usage than the medical authorities in the United States had anticipated. The Air Transport Command began flying blood from the United States to the UK in August. Starting in October supplies were flown directly to Orly Field near Paris. ### Other activities A dump for class II and IV (clothing and general supplies) was established at Miramas at a site built by the French Army during World War I for ammunition storage. The 622nd Railhead Company arrived there on 17 November, followed by the 240th Supply Depot Company on 26 November. Daily trains departed from there for depots to the north, and there were often urgent requests that required loads to be prepared for air delivery. Supplies were supplemented by local purchases, which were estimated to have saved 9,634 measurement tons (10,912 m<sup>3</sup>) of shipping in the final quarter of 1944. The 814th Sterilization and Bath Company and 7071st and 7171st Laundry Companies took over a large plant with fourteen buildings that they brought into operation as a laundry by 6 October, and the 223rd Salvage Collecting Company and 3068th Salvage Repair Company opened a scrap metal yard at Frejus using POW labor. Soldiers had been landed with the lightest possible packs, and shipments of clothing had been delayed in favor of rations and POL. The sudden onset of cold and wet weather in early September led to urgent requests for winter clothing and footwear. The problem was exacerbated by the addition of XV Corps, since requisitions had been made on the basis of the Dragoon troop list. Under the circumstances, the Seventh Army quartermaster decided that each command would receive 75 percent of its allotment, with combat troops being the first to get winter clothing. By the end of October each man in a combat unit had received an overcoat, two sets of woolen underwear, an extra blanket, a pair of woolen gloves, a pair of shoe-pacs (rubberized boots) and three pairs of ski socks. The infantry considered the overcoats to be too heavy, and the armored troops considered them too bulky. Combat units preferred the M1943 field jacket, worn with a high-necked sweater underneath. Issues of these commenced in late October, and the 3rd Infantry Division managed to amass enough of them to equip all of its infantry battalions. By the end of October all infantry divisions had received a full issue of sleeping bags and winter clothing, and 97 percent of their shoe-pacs. ## Outcome The primary objective of Operation Dragoon was the capture of the ports of Marseille and Toulon, and in this it was successful. It was estimated that the ports in northern France could support up to 35 divisions, while those in southern France support another 35. As 68 divisions were assigned to SHAEF in 1945, both were required. In October, three divisions scheduled for shipment to northern France were diverted to Marseille. The port of Marseille ultimately handled more cargo than any other port in Allied hands. There was much debate, before and after, about the relative merits of Operation Dragoon versus retaining the forces in Italy. Dragoon stripped Italy of troops, supplies, shipping and support that was needed to carry on the fight there. Logistical problems arose from over-insurance against German resistance and not providing for a more agile pursuit of the retreating Germans, but the fighting in October (and even more dramatic events in December) demonstrated that the German propensity for fighting had not been overestimated. What the logistical plan lacked was flexibility, which was difficult to achieve within the constraints of the global shipping situation and a theater-wide shortage of logistical units. This was offset by the experience that staffs and troops in the North African Theater of Operations had gained carrying out active operations for nearly two years. Nonetheless, logistical constraints prevented the operational commanders from taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by the German retreat. ## See also - American logistics in the Northern France campaign
62,358,927	M113 armoured personnel carriers in Australian service	1,167,371,144	Australian Army armoured fighting vehicle	[ "Armoured fighting vehicles of Australia", "Armoured personnel carriers of the post–Cold War period" ]	The Australian Army has operated M113 armoured personnel carriers since 1964. An initial pair of M113s was purchased for trials purposes in 1962. Either 817 or 840 were acquired by 1979, comprising nine different variants. A long-running modernisation program that commenced in the 1990s resulted in 431 M113s being upgraded between 2007 and 2012. All of the upgraded M113s remain in service as of 2020. In Australian service, the M113 has equipped armoured transport and reconnaissance units as well as mechanised infantry formations. It has also been used as a support vehicle by many other units. The type played an important role in Australia's commitment to the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1972. Some M113s were deployed as part of peacekeeping missions in Somalia during 1993 and Rwanda between 1994 and 1995. Larger numbers of M113s operated in East Timor from 1999 to 2002 and 2006 to 2008. Despite the upgrade program, the Australian Army's M113s are now obsolete and they have not been included in recent deployments due to their vulnerability to attack. A project to replace the M113s with infantry fighting vehicles is underway, with a decision on the type to be procured scheduled for 2023. It is planned that the replacement vehicles will begin to enter service from 2025 and the M113s will be retired when this process is complete. ## Acquisition ### Trials In 1958, the Chief of the Australian Army's General Staff, Lieutenant-General Ragnar Garrett, initiated a program to modernise the Army's organisation and equipment so that it was compatible with those of Australia's allies, particularly the United States Army. This program included the acquisition of armoured personnel carriers (APCs), as well as FN FAL rifles, M60 machine guns, M2A2 howitzers, M40 recoilless rifles, L16 81mm mortars and radios. The adoption of the pentropic organisation in 1960 led to a requirement for APCs to equip the Army's armoured units within the Royal Australian Armoured Corps (RAAC). This organisation included two APC regiments, the 12th/16th Hunter River Lancers and the 8th/13th Victorian Mounted Rifles; both were reserve Citizen Military Forces (CMF) units. Each regiment was authorised 119 APCs. A further two APCs were planned to be issued to each of the Army's two armoured regiments and nine were to form part of the equipment of the two divisional reconnaissance squadrons. The reconnaissance regiment in the pentropic divisions' combat support group was to have 25 APCs. The pentropic structure was abandoned in 1965, before M113s had been delivered in significant numbers. A formal Weapons and Equipment Policy Statement specifying the Army's requirements for tracked APCs was issued on 26 June 1960. This document was very similar to a British War Office Policy Statement issued in the late 1950s. It called for the Army to acquire tracked APCs that were amphibious and could be carried by aircraft. These vehicles were to replace the Army's wheeled scout cars and APCs which had been purchased in the 1950s, as well as obsolete armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs) dating from the Second World War. It was believed that the wheeled armoured vehicles were no longer suitable, as the Australian Army expected that it would need to fight in tropical conditions in South East Asia. Tracked vehicles were preferred for these conditions as they had superior off-road performance, including in jungle terrain. The statement specified that the new vehicles would be used to equip the Army's APC, armoured and reconnaissance units. At this time the Army did not include any mechanised infantry units which were permanently issued APCs, and separate APC-equipped units were used to provide protected transport for light infantry. The Weapons and Equipment Policy Statement included a requirement that potentially suitable designs be subjected to extensive trials in tropical conditions before an order was placed. The American M113, the British FV432 and the Canadian Bobcat were considered. The Bobcat was the least advanced and no prototype had been completed, so it was rejected before trials were conducted. After negotiations between the Australian and British governments between 1960 and 1962, the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) requested that Australia conduct a trial of the FV432 in tropical conditions. The Australian Army rapidly agreed to this request, and two FV432s were shipped to Australia, arriving in September 1962. These were prototypes, as the FV432 was yet to enter production. It proved simpler to acquire M113s for trial as the type had been in mass production since 1960. Two were ordered in 1961, and they arrived in Australia on 9 October 1962. From November 1962 to April 1963, the two FV432s and two M113s were subjected to trials at several locations with different climatic conditions in the state of Queensland. The trials began with crew familiarisation and driver training on both types in the Innisfail area. Once this was complete, the four vehicles were driven 1,100 kilometres (680 mi) to Mount Isa to conduct trials in hot and dry conditions. These included automotive and physiological tests, the latter of particular interest to the MOD. Testing in extreme heat during this phase found the M113's poor ventilation took a heavy toll on crew and passengers; one driver lost 5 kilograms (11 lb) in two hours. The FV432's forced air ventilation system proved superior. At the conclusion of this stage of the trials, the vehicles were driven a further 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) back to Innisfail for hot and wet trials at nearby Mourilyan. This phase included extensive driving through jungles and on sandy beaches, amphibious testing and being left unattended for 14 days. The M113 outperformed the FV432 in almost every aspect; its smooth sides and roof stowage proved far superior when driving through overgrown jungle, the lower track pressure and better track design proved superior on sand and it was significantly more waterproof. It was also found that the M113 required significantly less time to prepare for amphibious operations, though it was slightly slower than the FV432 in the water. The FV432's amphibious preparations included the removal of every inspection plate and the erection of a large rubber flotation screen; the latter was seen as a major drawback as it completely blocked the driver's vision and the rubber screen was easily punctured by debris or vegetation. At the conclusion of the trials, the FV432s were shipped back to the United Kingdom. One was later used by the British Army for trials purposes during the development of the FV438 Swingfire. The M113s were retained by the Australian Army, which used them to trial several modifications to the type. Both were eventually transferred to the Royal Australian Armoured Corps Memorial and Army Tank Museum. ### Purchase and deliveries The trials demonstrated that the M113 was much better suited to the Army's requirements than the FV432, and accordingly the M113 was selected. Several improvements to the type were recommended before final acceptance. These modifications included the installation of a ventilation system and, in coordination with engineers from the vehicle's manufacturer FMC, a ventilation system unique to Australian vehicles was developed. Orders were placed during the 1963–1964 financial year. At this time, it was planned to retain the M113 in service until 1995. The M113A1 variant was ordered for the Army, the first deliveries being scheduled for 1964. This vehicle had a crew of two and could carry up to eleven passengers. Its armour provided protection against small arms and shrapnel. While the original US Army M113s were powered by a petrol engine, the Australian Army selected the M113A1 variant that used the General Motors 6V-53 Detroit Diesel engine. This is a V-6 displacing 5.2 liters (318 cubic inches), developing up to 300 bhp (220 kW) @2,800 rpm and 666 lb⋅ft (903 N⋅m) of torque @1,400 rpm. This was chosen because the variant had greater range and the diesel fuel it used was less likely to combust if the APC was damaged in combat. As the same engine was used to power buses in Australia, spare parts were also readily available. The Australian M113A1s were initially armed with a single pintle-mounted 0.5 inch calibre M2 Browning heavy machine gun. In 1962 the Army decided that cavalry regiments equipped with lightly armoured vehicles would be its main armoured units. It was believed at the time that tanks were unsuited for the tropical environments the Army expected to fight in, and that lightly armoured vehicles would provide adequate support for the infantry. The structure of the cavalry regiments was established in 1964, the same year as the decision to abandon the Pentropic structure was made. They were to include three fighting squadrons, each with three troops equipped with APCs, a fire support troop and an anti-tank and surveillance troop. At the time the Army did not have any fire support vehicles; the M113A1 Fire Support Vehicle (FSV) later filled this role. In 1965 it was decided to structure the RAAC as armoured (tank), cavalry and APC regiments. The M113s were to be operated by RAAC personnel, and be treated as fighting vehicles rather than only armoured troop transports. The CMF armoured units were to be equipped with M113s for training purposes. In his history of the RAAC, Major General Ronald Hopkins judged that the cavalry regiment structure produced "handy" units with considerable mobility and firepower, but their effectiveness "rested on not being opposed by medium tanks or heavy anti-tank weapons". Deliveries of the M113 began in 1964 but proved slow, the first bulk shipment of the type arriving in early 1965. The first vehicles to be delivered included specialist variants, including fitters vehicles (which carried maintenance personnel) and mortar carriers. M113s were initially issued to the Armoured Centre at Puckapunyal for crew training, which was conducted by US Army personnel at first. The type began to be issued to RAAC units on 19 March 1965. Priority was given to the Australian Regular Army's APC units, where the M113s initially replaced Alvis Saracen wheeled APCs. CMF units were accorded a low priority for M113s due to the need to allocate them to units involved in the Vietnam War, and some did not receive any until the late 1960s. Deliveries of the M113s were completed in 1979. The planned cavalry and APC regiments were established in 1966. The 1st Cavalry Regiment was formed in January, and renamed the 2nd Cavalry Regiment later that year. The APC regiment was established as the 3rd Cavalry Regiment. The CMF 4th/19th Prince of Wales's Light Horse, 10th Light Horse Regiment, 2nd/14th Light Horse Regiment and 3rd/9th Light Horse (South Australian Mounted Rifles) were also converted to the cavalry regiment structure during 1966. The 4th Cavalry Regiment, a cavalry formation, was established in 1971. ## M113A1 variants and modifications ### M113A1 variants The original orders of M113s included several variants in addition to the M113A1 APC: - M125A1: These vehicles were based on the M113A1 and fitted with a single 81 mm mortar. The mortar was mounted inside the rear hull on a turntable, and racking was fitted inside the vehicle to carry mortar ammunition. The variant had a large hatch on the roof of its hull which the mortar was fired through. The M125A1 was armed with a M2 Browning for self-protection. - M113A1 Fitters: These vehicles were also based on the M113A1 and were used to repair equipment in combat areas. They were fitted with a hydraulic crane on their roof capable of lifting an engine and transmission pack. The vehicles also carried tools, spare parts and technicians. They were armed with a M2 Browning. - M113 Armoured Recovery Vehicle Light (ARVL): This variant was used to recover other vehicles from the field. - M577A1 Armoured Command Vehicle (ACV): This variant had a raised rear hull to accommodate working spaces for headquarters staff. The working space could be extended by erecting a canvas tent which was attached to the hull. The M577A1 was originally armed with a 0.3 inch M1919 Browning machine gun, though a M60 machine gun was sometimes fitted instead. - M548 Tracked Load Carrier (TLC): The M548 was an unarmoured logistics variant of the M113. The type was acquired in the early 1970s to replace wheeled logistics carriers within armoured units. ### Vietnam War-era modifications In common with almost all the other countries that have operated M113s, a number of Australia-specific variants of the type were developed. Operational experience in South Vietnam rapidly demonstrated a need to provide armour protection for the M113's machine gun, as the crew commander who operated the machine gun was highly vulnerable when using the weapon. From August 1965, M113A1s began to be fitted with armoured shields that comprised a front plate and angled wings on each side. They were built by Army workshops in South Vietnam to varying designs, and were similar to shields fitted to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam's M113s. While the shields provided some protection, the gun position remained unprotected from the sides and rear. As an interim measure to improve protection, 19 M113A1s in Vietnam and one in Australia were fitted with Model 74C turrets between September and November 1966. These provided all-round protection, and were armed with two M1919A4 Browning machine guns. The turret was very cramped, and its traverse mechanisms rapidly wore out. All of the Model 74C turrets were withdrawn by December 1968. The T50 turret was selected as the standard turret for Australian M113s. The US Army had fitted one of these turrets to an M113 on an experimental basis in 1964. The Australian Army was aware of this experiment, and began its own trials of the turret in April 1966. The trials team delivered a favourable report, and the turret was approved for service in late 1966. M113A1s fitted with T50 turrets began to arrive in South Vietnam in August 1968. Almost all of the Australian Army's M113A1s were eventually fitted with these turrets. The turret was initially armed with two L3A3 machine guns (an improved version of the M1919A4), but some were later fitted with a M2 Browning and a M1919A3. The turret was regarded as unsatisfactory by soldiers, as it was cramped and it proved difficult to keep the guns aimed when the vehicle was moving. The turret was also very slow to rotate, which led to delays in engaging targets. To free up space, the right-hand side L3A3 machine gun was removed from all the T50 turrets in South Vietnam by early 1970; these guns were instead fitted to the roof of the turret using a pintle mount. Fitting the machine gun on the turret roof also allowed it to be quickly brought to bear on targets, though the commander lacked armoured protection while using the weapon. The Australian Army is one of only two M113 operators to have fitted turrets to the type. Combat experience also led to improved protection against land mines. From July 1969, an armoured plate was welded to the sponson above the first three road wheels on each side of vehicles. This modification was eventually fitted to all Australian M113s. From May 1970, all of the Army's M113s were also fitted with a shock-absorbing footrest for the driver. Finally, a 38-millimetre (1.5 in) thick aluminium armoured plate was installed on the underside of all M113s starting from August 1970. While the plate added an extra 680 kilograms (1,500 lb) in weight, this was considered acceptable given the improvement to crew protection. The addition of the armoured plate led to a large reduction in casualties from mine explosions. The armoured plates were removed from the underside of the M113s following the Australian Army's withdrawal from South Vietnam as they slightly hindered the type's mobility and it was not considered necessary to retain them in peacetime. The plates were placed in storage. During 1967 a M113A1 in South Vietnam was fitted with a 7.62 mm GAU-2B/A Minigun on an experimental basis. The gun was mounted on the commander's cupola. This was undertaken to improve the vehicle's firepower. The gun proved unsatisfactory, as it was very difficult to accurately aim and keep supplied with ammunition. The problems with aiming the gun meant that it could not be safely used to support infantry. It was also judged that few targets the Australian Army was likely to encounter required this much firepower. As a result, the project was abandoned. In 1969 three M113A1s were modified in South Vietnam to dedicated mine clearance vehicles. These M113A1s were fitted with a boom of truck tyres on each side of their hull, which were used to detonate mines. They were also later modified to be driven from the turret. These APCs were operated by the 1st Field Squadron, which nicknamed them Her Majesty's APC (HMAPC) Flint, HMAPC Steele and HMAPC George. These vehicles proved successful in helping to clear a large barrier minefield that had originally been laid by Australian forces but was being used as a source of mines by the Communist forces they were fighting. ### Fire support vehicles Experience in South Vietnam led to the development of fire support variants of the M113 armed with medium-calibre guns. These variants were unique to Australia. The initial M113A1 FSVs were fitted with a turret taken from the Army's Alvis Saladin armoured cars. This was intended to be an interim design, used until an air-portable armoured fighting vehicle was procured. The turret was armed with a 76 mm L5A1 gun which could fire high explosive, canister and smoke rounds. One .30 calibre machine gun was mounted coaxially with the 76 mm gun, and another was installed on the roof of the turret. Trials of the M113A1 FSV began in 1967, and continued for almost three years. Two M551 Sheridan light tanks were also trialled in Australia during early 1968 to determine if this type could meet the requirement for an air-portable armoured fighting vehicle. This included comparative trials against a M113A1. The trials found that the Sheridan was unsuitable, which led to a decision to accelerate the M113A1 FSV project. Production of M113A1 FSVs commenced during 1970, and involved fitting newly acquired M113A1s with Saladin turrets. The work was undertaken by 4 Base Workshop Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (RAEME) at Bandiana, Victoria. A total of 15 were produced, using the turrets of all the Australian Army's Saladins. The development of a second tranche of FSVs began in 1972, when a requirement for further such AFVs was issued. It was decided that the new AFV would use the turret of a FV101 Scorpion fitted to the chassis of a M113A1 APC. This turret was armed with a 76 mm L23A1 gun. Buoyancy aids were also installed on the sides and front of the hull so that the vehicles remained amphibious. The prototype vehicles began to be constructed by the Ordnance Factory in Maribyrnong, Victoria, during 1974; three were completed in mid-1975. The design was approved for production in 1978, and another 45 FSVs were eventually completed by converting newly acquired M113A1s. The type was later designated the Medium Reconnaissance Vehicle (MRV). ### Post-Vietnam modifications Despite the T50 turret's shortcomings, it remained in service with all of the M113A1 APCs for over 30 years. Minor modifications were made to improve the turret's performance, but it was never considered genuinely satisfactory. For instance, the turret lacked predictive gun sights and had no integral night vision capabilities. An improved variant of the turret was developed during 1990 and early 1991; this design sought to address problems with the weapons mounting, gun sight and ammunition feed system. The variant also had improved elevation and transverse systems. In the late 1980s, several M113A1s were modified to carry RASIT ground surveillance radars and AN/TAS 6A Thermal Imaging Units. These vehicles were assigned to the 2nd Cavalry Regiment's Surveillance Troop. ### Other variants Between February and May 1965 a M113 command and reconnaissance vehicle on loan from the US Army was trialled near Innisfail. Two command and reconnaissance variants of the M114 armoured fighting vehicle had been trialled in early 1964. These trials produced mixed results, and it was decided to not purchase either AFV. In late 1971 a mine-damaged M113A1 was converted to a mechanical training aid. This comprised the forward section of the vehicle that was mounted on a stand so that instructors and students could easily observe its mechanical layout. ### Numbers The total numbers of M113s acquired by the Australian Army differ between sources: ## M113AS4 variants ### M113 upgrade program A project to replace the M113s began in the 1980s, but was abandoned in favour of upgrading the type. In October 1980 the Army initiated Project Waler which aimed to replace the M113s with new armoured vehicles by the mid-1990s. Between 500 and 1,000 AFVs were to be procured, the Army considering both wheeled and tracked armoured vehicles. A total of 14 companies submitted proposals to initial phase of the project, that closed in February 1982. Three proposals were selected for further consideration in July that year; each comprised four different wheeled and tracked options. Project Waler was cancelled in July 1985, the government deciding to upgrade the M113 fleet instead. Minister for Defence Kim Beazley stated that while the designs under consideration for Project Waler would have been superior to the M113, they would be very costly to procure. The Canberra Times reported that it had also proven difficult to tailor the designs to Australian conditions, and that the government regarded them as unsuited to Australia's needs. Work on the upgrade project began in the early 1990s. The 1992 Defence Review found that the M113 fleet could remain viable until 2010 if the vehicles were upgraded. This finding was generally supported within the Army, though there were concerns over whether it would be economical to retain the M113s until 2010. The Department of Defence agreed to a limited upgrade of 537 M113A1s in October 1992, and the government approved the project in November the next year. In 1994 the Army decided to split the project into two phases. Under Phase 1, the vehicles' suspension and engine cooling systems would be upgraded to M113A2 standard and they would be fitted with a new turret, spall liners and a cooled drinking water system. Night-vision goggles would also be acquired for M113 drivers and commanders. As part of Phase 2, the vehicles would be upgraded further to M113A3 standard, which would involve fitting them with a new engine, a new transmission system, appliqué armour and a climate control system. Tenix Defence was selected as the prime contractor for Phase 1, the contract being signed in May 1997. Tenix delivered four M113A2s in 1998, and they were used for trials by the School of Armour and B Squadron, 3rd/4th Cavalry Regiment between August and October that year. In November 1997 Tenix proposed combining both phases of the upgrade program. The Department of Defence accepted this proposal in November 1998, but further design and developmental work demonstrated that the intended savings from combining the phases would not eventuate. As a result, the Department of Defence cancelled all further work on this approach to the upgrade program in October 2000. The Army and Department of Defence remained committed to upgrading the M113s, however. The 2000 Defence White Paper included a commitment to upgrade 350 M113s to improve their capabilities and retain the type in service until around 2020. As part of the development of a business case for the upgrade, consideration was given to replacing the M113s with infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) such as the American M2 Bradley. It was decided to not procure IFVs on the grounds that they would be too expensive and difficult to deploy by air given their weight. The Cabinet approved the M113 Major Upgrade Project in June 2002, and a contract was signed with Tenix the next month. While it was intended that the upgraded M113s would begin to enter service in the second half of 2006, technical problems with the prototype vehicles led to delays. These delays were in addition to those caused by the mismanagement of the upgrade project, which was extensively criticised by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) in 2005. In particular, the ANAO noted that the project had suffered "extensive scope changes and chronic schedule delays since its inception", the Department of Defence doing a poor job of managing the project until the Major Upgrade Project contract was signed in 2002. In 2008 the government approved the upgrade of a further 81 M113s, taking the total to 431. The M113s were upgraded at Tenix's facilities in Bandiana. The work on the vehicles included stripping them back to bare hulls and then installing new engines (MTU 6V 199 TE20, 11.9 litre diesel, 350 bhp (260 kW) @2100 rpm), armour and a range of other modifications. The Department of Defence accepted the first upgraded M113s in November 2007. The next year the Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Procurement announced that the technical problems affecting the vehicles had been resolved, and the upgrade project had been removed from the Defence Projects of Concern List. The last upgraded M113 was accepted in September 2012. By the time the M113 upgrade project was complete, the operational environment had changed with a new threat improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that made the vehicles unsuitable for combat. Although the hull had been reinforced during the upgrade to "improve mine blast protection" it did not provide protection against large IEDs. The vehicles also did not provide adequate protection against most forms of modern anti-tank missiles and anti-tank mines. The shortcomings of the upgraded M113s left the Army with a significant capability gap, requiring a replacement project to be launched. The M113s that were not upgraded were disposed of. In 2000 a M113A1 that had been deployed to South Vietnam, Rwanda and East Timor was transferred to the Australian War Memorial. The Memorial later received a M577A1. As of 2016, a further 201 M113s were to be scrapped and 31 preserved for heritage purposes. ### Variants The upgrade program involved seven variants: All of the variants other than the M806AS4 ARVL were built on extensively upgraded M113A1 APC hulls. M806A1 ARVLs were converted to M806AS4s. All AS4 variants have lengthened hulls, with the number of road wheels being increased from five to six, unlike the AS3 variants which have remained the same in length. Common upgrades to all variants include new suspension, a new power pack and engine, the addition of spall liners and appliqué armour, increased external stowage and the fuel tanks being moved from inside to outside the hull. All upgraded vehicles have been fitted with new T150F tracks and sprockets. The height and width of the AFVs was also increased. These modifications added 2.5 tonnes (2.8 short tons) of weight for the AS3 variants and up to 5.5 tonnes (6.1 short tons) for the AS4 variants. As a result of their larger dimensions, the upgraded M113s cannot be transported by air or road without some elements being disassembled and fewer can be embarked on each transport ship. They also lost their amphibious capabilities. In 2019 two M113AS4 APCs were converted to optionally crewed combat vehicles by BAE Systems Australia. These vehicles were used by the Army for trials to improve its understanding of how uncrewed vehicles could be used, the head of the project stating that "we are using M113s because we have them in service and we understand them really well." By 2022 the Army had a force of 20 optionally crewed M113AS4 which were being used for further trials. ## Operational history ### Vietnam War #### Numbers deployed M113s were extensively used by the Australian Army during the Vietnam War. M113A1, M113A1 Fitters vehicle, M577A1, M125A1 and M113A1 FSVs were deployed to South Vietnam, where they were employed in a wide range of roles. A troop of eight M113A1s from the 4th/19th Prince of Wales's Light Horse was assigned to the first Australian combat unit to deploy to South Vietnam, the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (1 RAR), and left Australia in May 1965. Two other M113A1s were allocated to this force as a reserve. The troop had replaced its wheeled APCs with M113A1s only shortly before departing for South Vietnam, and had conducted little training with the type. Further M113A1s and two M125A1 mortar carriers were dispatched in September that year. The APC force in South Vietnam was expanded to a squadron in 1966; this force was initially designated the 1st Armoured Personnel Carrier Squadron and was renamed A Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment in September 1967. At the time the 1st Armoured Personnel Carrier Squadron was established, the M113 fleet in South Vietnam was increased, with M113A1 Fitters variants and M577A1 ACVs joining the force. The squadron was redesignated B Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment in mid-1969 and A Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment in April 1971. While infantry units rotated in and out of South Vietnam as formed bodies, RAAC personnel were posted individually. The cavalry squadron usually comprised a squadron headquarters, three cavalry troops, a support troop and a light aid detachment. Each of the cavalry troops was equipped with thirteen M113A1s, and was organised into a headquarters with four APCs and three sections each with three APCs. The tank squadron which also formed part of the 1st Australian Task Force (1 ATF) between February 1968 and August 1971 was allocated two M113A1 APCs, three M113A1 Fitters vehicles and a M577A1 ACV to support the Centurion tanks. During the final stage of the withdrawal of Australian forces from South Vietnam, the cavalry squadron was reduced to a single troop equipped with 12 M113A1s, 6 Fire Support Vehicles, 2 M125s and a M577 from December 1971. The role of this troop was to protect the Australian logistics base at Vung Tau. The last Australian M113s left South Vietnam in May 1972. Overall, 200 M113s were deployed to South Vietnam. This made the type the most numerous armoured fighting vehicle used by the Australian Army during the war. The M113s were returned to Australia to be rebuilt after reaching a set mileage; only three were deployed twice. #### Employment The M113A1s were mainly used as armoured personnel carriers, and transported troops in and out of battle. In this role they were able to carry an infantry section with all of its combat equipment. The Battle of Long Tan on 18 August 1966 was the first major engagement involving Australian M113A1s. During this battle a troop of APCs carrying a company of infantry played a key role in preventing another Australian infantry company from being overrun. M113A1s operated in other roles. These included escorting convoys, conducting independent patrols and carrying supplies. They were also employed in ambushes and cordon and search operations. The M113A1s supported artillery units by transporting L5 Pack Howitzers internally and towing the larger M2A2 howitzers. During the later years of the Australian deployment to South Vietnam, when 1 ATF's area of operations was largely secure, groups of M113A1s frequently operated without infantry in a reconnaissance role. M113A1s proved to be highly effective, as they provided mobility, protection and firepower to support infantry operations, but their thin armour left them vulnerable to mines and other anti-tank weapons. Operations were at times hindered by infantry units not being sufficiently trained to make the best use of M113s' capabilities. M125A1 mortar carriers were usually used to provide fire support for the infantry with their 81mm mortar. They were also often employed as armoured personnel carriers with their mortar removed. The M113A1 Fitters variants were assigned to the light aid detachments that formed part of cavalry and tank squadrons. They were operated by RAEME personnel, and were heavily employed at both Australian Army bases and in the field during operations. The variant's crane proved particularly useful. Australia was the only country to use this M113 variant in the Vietnam War. Each cavalry and tank squadron headquarters was assigned a single M577A1, and a further five were allocated to the headquarters of 1 ATF. 547 Signal Troop, 1 ATF's signals intelligence element, was assigned an M577A1 from late 1968 and used it to support large-scale operations. The radio fit outs differed between M577A1s depending on their assigned role. The M577A1s were often stationed at fire support bases, and were rarely used in patrols and convoy escort tasks. The first M113A1 FSVs arrived in Vietnam during July and August 1971, and were initially used to establish a fire support troop in A Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment. Six were allocated to the squadron, and two others were held in reserve. After the Centurion tanks were withdrawn, the FSVs were assigned to support infantry units. They were used for patrols, protecting foliage-clearing teams and defending fixed positions, and typically operated with M113A1s. The FSVs proved unsatisfactory replacements for the Centurions, as they were too lightly armoured. The vehicles were also prone to throwing tracks, became bogged more easily than standard M113s and lacked gun sights for their main armament during the first months of their deployment. 1 ATF soon concluded that the FSVs were almost useless, and they never saw combat. The vehicles were withdrawn from South Vietnam in February 1972. Many of the M113s deployed to South Vietnam were damaged, most frequently by mines. In many cases the damage could be repaired in theatre, but 23 M113A1s and a M125A1 were written off. Most of these vehicles' hulls were shipped back to Australia for disposal. A further 28 M113s were returned to Australia for repair after incurring damage which was beyond the capabilities of the Army workshops in South Vietnam to handle. Of these M113s, 15 had sustained such serious damage that they needed to be rebuilt using newly purchased hulls. The cavalry squadron incurred significant casualties, 20 of its members being killed (including 17 in action) and 110 being seriously wounded in action; this represented approximately one in seven of the officers and men that served in it between 1966 and 1972. Many others suffered minor injuries. A M113A1 that was damaged in combat in South Vietnam was donated by the Army to the Australian War Memorial on 19 April 1972. The APC was later removed from the Memorial due to health and safety concerns and transferred to the Royal Australian Armoured Corps Memorial and Army Tank Museum. Extensive training was undertaken in Australia to prepare soldiers and units for service in South Vietnam. During 1969 alone M113s in Australia were driven for 530,000 miles (850,000 km) during training. Soldiers were trained by the squadron of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment which was stationed in Australia at the time immediately before being posted to the squadron in South Vietnam. ### After Vietnam In mid-1970 the M113A1 fitted with a T50 turret was selected as the standard vehicle for all RAAC units other than the armoured regiments, which primarily used tanks. The CMF RAAC units were each authorised eight M113A1s to replace their obsolete armoured cars, as well as a single M577A1 ACV. Deliveries of these M113s were completed in 1972. By this time, all the CMF RAAC units had been organised as cavalry or APC formations. The M113A1 FSVs were used by regular cavalry regiments and the Armoured Centre until 1979, when they were transferred to Army Reserve units. The Australian Army began to develop a mechanised infantry capability during the late 1970s. The 5th/7th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (5/7 RAR) began trialling mechanised tactics beginning in 1976. This reform aimed to improve the unit's mobility, and make better use of the capabilities of the APCs. The battalion was fully mechanised by mid-1977; in this role it was equipped with 72 M113s. Following the Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing in February 1978, 50 of 5/7 RAR's M113s were stationed along the Hume Highway to protect national leaders as they travelled from Sydney to Bowral for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting. There was scepticism within Army Headquarters over the cost-effectiveness of mechanisation and the viability of maintaining a single mechanised battalion. At the conclusion of the mechanisation trial in mid-1978, only one company of 5/7 RAR was retained as a mechanised unit with the others reverting to light infantry. In early 1983 a decision was made to permanently convert 5/7 RAR to a fully mechanised unit. The battalion transitioned to this role between July 1983 and 1984. Some supporting elements of the 1st Brigade were also mechanised. 5/7 RAR had completed its transformation to a mechanised battalion by 1986; as of early that year, it was equipped with 56 M113A1 APCs, 4 M125A1s, 4 M113A1 Fitters vehicles, 3 M577A1s, 1 M113 ARVL and 7 TLCs. The battalion cooperated closely with the 1st Armoured Regiment and a troop of mechanised engineers that was established within the 1st Field Squadron. The M113 fleet saw some changes over the 1980s and 1990s. All of the Army's M113A1s were "grounded" between September 1982 and July 1983 due to serious problems affecting their control differential. This greatly disrupted training activities. An audit undertaken by the Australian National Audit Office in 1985 found serious problems with how the M113 fleet was being managed. This had led to only 488 of the Army's 790 M113s being serviceable. The M113A1 FSVs were retired in 1986, and six of the vehicles were sold to the New Zealand Army after being converted back to standard M113A1s. The 1987 Defence White Paper called for the number of M113s to be reduced to below 600, with some of the remaining vehicles being upgraded. The White Paper also recommended that the 2nd Cavalry Regiment's M113s be replaced with wheeled vehicles. The ASLAV was selected for this role in 1992. The 2nd Cavalry Regiment was converted to ASLAVs during 1995 and 1996. The M113A1 MRVs were withdrawn from service in late 1996 due to shortages of spare parts for their turrets and concerns that the fumes ejected when their main gun was fired were toxic. In April 1993 a civilian stole a M113 from an Army facility in Perth, and rampaged through the city for two hours. The APC was used to damage the city's police headquarters, a police station, at least eight police cars and the Central Law Courts before the civilian was arrested by the Tactical Response Group. The man, who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, was sentenced to four and half year's jail in December 1993. ### Peacekeeping deployments Between January and May 1993, B Squadron, 3rd/4th Cavalry Regiment was deployed to Somalia to support 1 RAR during the Operation Solace peacekeeping operation. The unit was equipped with 36 M113A1 variants, including 28 APCs and two M125A1 mortar carriers. This deployment proved successful, the vehicles being used in similar roles to those they had undertaken during the Vietnam War. Australian soldiers found that mechanised infantry tactics using the M113s were highly effective in what proved to be a low-intensity conflict. The M113s were obsolete in comparison to the armoured vehicles other western militaries deployed to Somalia. B Squadron had difficulty maintaining the M113s, due in particular to a shortage of links for their caterpillar tracks. It also experienced shortages of other spare parts. After the withdrawal of 1 RAR, a ten-man team from the Special Air Service Regiment that was deployed to Somalia in 1994 used two United Nations' M113s. Three M113A1 APCs and a M113A1 Fitters vehicle were deployed to Rwanda between 1994 and 1995. These vehicles were used to protect Australian Army medical teams that had been assigned to the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda following the Rwandan genocide. The M113s were initially operated by B Squadron, 3rd/4th Cavalry Regiment, from August 1994 to March 1995, and 5/7 RAR subsequently. They were only occasionally used, as the Australian contingents did not face threats which required armoured support. Some of the Australian M113 crew members served as driving and gunnery instructors for a Ghana Army unit in Rwanda which had recently received 50 M113A1s donated by Germany and had not trained with the type before starting their deployment. In September 1999, B Squadron, 3rd/4th Cavalry Regiment was deployed to East Timor as part of the INTERFET peacekeeping mission. The unit supported light infantry units, and its M113s proved better suited to East Timor's rugged terrain and tropical climate than the 2nd Cavalry Regiment's ASLAVs, which at times were unable to operate off road due to muddy conditions. 5/7 RAR was subsequently deployed to East Timor and proved highly effective. It was found that the mechanised battalion could cover an area which had previously needed to be patrolled by several light infantry battalions. Australian M113s remained in East Timor until 2002 to support the infantry battalions deployed there. While the deployment of M113s to East Timor was considered successful, the age of the vehicles and their obsolescent communications and navigation systems proved to be a limitation; this included the absence of Global Positioning System equipment to aid navigation. There were also concerns regarding the lack of stabilisation and night sights for the vehicles' armament, and the driver being unable to use a night driving system which had a wide field of view. The M113s also proved less mechanically reliable than the newer ASLAVs, which were also better armed. The experiences gained from operating M113s in East Timor helped to validate and improve the Army's mechanised doctrine, and influenced the requirements which were set for the M113 upgrade project. ### Plan Beersheba The number of mechanised infantry units was increased in 2007 when 5/7 RAR was de-linked to form the 5th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (5 RAR) and 7th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (7 RAR). 7 RAR was the first combat unit to receive M113AS4s, with enough of the type to transport an infantry company being delivered in December 2007. Both battalions operated in the mechanised role until 2013, when they were converted to light infantry as part of the Plan Beersheba restructure. As part of this restructure, each of the Army's three brigades included two light infantry battalions that could access a squadron of M113s in the brigade's armoured cavalry regiment. This structure proved short-lived, and the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment and 7 RAR began converting to mechanised infantry units in 2018. This change was an interim measure to prepare infantry units to operate IFVs ahead of these vehicles being ordered and delivered. The Army Reserve RAAC units were not issued with upgraded M113s, and their M113A1s were progressively withdrawn from service during the mid-2000s. Most of these units were converted to a light cavalry role, and initially re-equipped with unarmoured Land Rovers. As part of Plan Beersheba, all of the Army Reserve RAAC units received Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicles from 2011. These vehicles are used in both reconnaissance and armoured transport roles. B Squadron, 3rd/4th Cavalry Regiment deployed 33 M113s and supporting vehicles again to East Timor in June 2006 as part of Operation Astute. M113s supported subsequent rotations of the ANZAC Battle Group until 2008, with 7 RAR providing mechanised infantry platoons during 2007 and 2008. No M113s have been deployed to Afghanistan during the long-running Australian operations there as the Army considered them to be too vulnerable to improvised explosive devices and other threats. The type was also not included in the deployments of Australian Army units to Iraq between 2003 and 2008. In 2010 the Department of Defence advised a parliamentary committee that the upgraded M113s would require additional protection to be able to serve in Afghanistan, and that ASLAVs and Bushmasters were best suited to conditions there. The department also noted that it was unlikely that the M113s would ever be deployed to "a place where there is sustained close combat expected on a daily basis". In 2015, Australian Strategic Policy Institute analyst Andrew Davies described the M113s as "essentially obsolete" and "no longer fit for purpose in anything but a benign operational environment". All 431 upgraded M113s remained in service as of 2020. On 19 May 2022, Defence Minister Peter Dutton announced that the government would gift 14 M113AS4s to Ukraine as part of Australia's assistance for the country following its invasion by Russia. The government had also committed to gift Bushmasters to Ukraine. On 4 July 2022, Defence Minister Richard Marles announced that the government had increased the number of M113AS4s to be gifted to 28. On 26 June 2023, the government announced that a further 28 M113s would be gifted to Ukraine. ## Replacement As part of the LAND 400 project, the Australian Government is currently aiming to procure IFVs to replace the M113s from 2025. The Army believes that the M113s are "not expected to be deployable for anything other than low intensity/low risk missions beyond 2025", and will reach the end of their service life in 2030. The introduction of IFVs will give the Australian Army a new capability, and better enable it to take part in high intensity warfare. A request for tender for IFVs was issued in mid-2018. At this time, it was intended to acquire up to 450 IFVs as well as 17 manoeuvre support vehicles. In September 2019, Hanwha Defense Australia's AS21 Redback and Rheinmetall Defence Australia's Lynx IFVs were selected for further evaluation. The number of vehicles to be acquired was reduced to 300 in mid-2022. A decision on the type of IFV to be purchased was originally scheduled for 2022, but was delayed until 2023 to align with completion of a Defence Strategic Review in March that year. The ABC reported in October 2022 that there was speculation that the project may be cancelled due to its cost. In April 2023 the number of IFVs to be acquired was reduced to 129 to free up funding for other defence priorities. This will be sufficient to equip a single mechanised battalion. It was announced in July 2023 that the AS21 Redback had been selected, with deliveries to begin in 2027. M113s will remain in service with the Army's combat units until they are replaced by the new IFVs.
11,408	Female genital mutilation	1,171,498,172	Ritual cutting or removal of some or all of the vulva	[ "Female genital modification", "Female genital mutilation", "Violence against women", "Violence against women in Africa", "Violence against women in Asia", "Vulva", "Wikipedia medicine articles ready to translate" ]	Female genital mutilation (FGM), also known as female genital cutting, female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) and female circumcision, is the ritual cutting or removal of some or all of the vulva. The practice is found in some countries of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and within their respective diasporas. As of 2023, UNICEF estimates that "at least 200 million girls... in 31 countries", including Indonesia, Iraq, Yemen, and 27 African countries including Egypt—had been subjected to one or more types of female genital mutilation. Typically carried out by a traditional circumciser using a blade, FGM is conducted from days after birth to puberty and beyond. In half of the countries for which national statistics are available, most girls are cut before the age of five. Procedures differ according to the country or ethnic group. They include removal of the clitoral hood (type 1-a) and clitoral glans (1-b); removal of the inner labia (2-a); and removal of the inner and outer labia and closure of the vulva (type 3). In this last procedure, known as infibulation, a small hole is left for the passage of urine and menstrual fluid; the vagina is opened for intercourse and opened further for childbirth. The practice is rooted in gender inequality, attempts to control women's sexuality, and ideas about purity, modesty, and beauty. It is usually initiated and carried out by women, who see it as a source of honour, and who fear that failing to have their daughters and granddaughters cut will expose the girls to social exclusion. Adverse health effects depend on the type of procedure; they can include recurrent infections, difficulty urinating and passing menstrual flow, chronic pain, the development of cysts, an inability to get pregnant, complications during childbirth, and fatal bleeding. There are no known health benefits. There have been international efforts since the 1970s to persuade practitioners to abandon FGM, and it has been outlawed or restricted in most of the countries in which it occurs, although the laws are often poorly enforced. Since 2010, the United Nations has called upon healthcare providers to stop performing all forms of the procedure, including reinfibulation after childbirth and symbolic "nicking" of the clitoral hood. The opposition to the practice is not without its critics, particularly among anthropologists, who have raised questions about cultural relativism and the universality of human rights. ## Terminology Until the 1980s, FGM was widely known in English as "female circumcision", implying an equivalence in severity with male circumcision. From 1929 the Kenya Missionary Council referred to it as the sexual mutilation of women, following the lead of Marion Scott Stevenson, a Church of Scotland missionary. References to the practice as mutilation increased throughout the 1970s. In 1975 Rose Oldfield Hayes, an American anthropologist, used the term female genital mutilation in the title of a paper in American Ethnologist, and four years later Fran Hosken called it mutilation in her influential The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females. The Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children began referring to it as female genital mutilation in 1990, and the World Health Organization (WHO) followed suit in 1991. Other English terms include female genital cutting (FGC) and female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C), preferred by those who work with practitioners. In countries where FGM is common, the practice's many variants are reflected in dozens of terms, often alluding to purification. In the Bambara language, spoken mostly in Mali, it is known as bolokoli ("washing your hands") and in the Igbo language in eastern Nigeria as isa aru or iwu aru ("having your bath"). A common Arabic term for purification has the root t-h-r, used for male and female circumcision (tahur and tahara). It is also known in Arabic as khafḍ or khifaḍ. Communities may refer to FGM as "pharaonic" for infibulation and "sunna" circumcision for everything else; sunna means "path or way" in Arabic and refers to the tradition of Muhammad, although none of the procedures are required within Islam. The term infibulation derives from fibula, Latin for clasp; the Ancient Romans reportedly fastened clasps through the foreskins or labia of slaves to prevent sexual intercourse. The surgical infibulation of women came to be known as pharaonic circumcision in Sudan and as Sudanese circumcision in Egypt. In Somalia, it is known simply as qodob ("to sew up"). ## Methods The procedures are generally performed by a traditional circumciser (cutter or exciseuse) in the girls' homes, with or without anaesthesia. The cutter is usually an older woman, but in communities where the male barber has assumed the role of health worker, he will also perform FGM. When traditional cutters are involved, non-sterile devices are likely to be used, including knives, razors, scissors, glass, sharpened rocks, and fingernails. According to a nurse in Uganda, quoted in 2007 in The Lancet, a cutter would use one knife on up to 30 girls at a time. In several countries, health professionals are involved; in Egypt, 77 percent of FGM procedures, and in Indonesia over 50 percent, were performed by medical professionals as of 2008 and 2016. ## Classification ### Variation The WHO, UNICEF, and UNFPA issued a joint statement in 1997 defining FGM as "all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural or other non-therapeutic reasons". The procedures vary according to ethnicity and individual practitioners; during a 1998 survey in Niger, women responded with over 50 terms when asked what was done to them. Translation problems are compounded by the women's confusion over which type of FGM they experienced, or even whether they experienced it. Studies have suggested that survey responses are unreliable. A 2003 study in Ghana found that in 1995 four percent said they had not undergone FGM, but in 2000 said they had, while 11 percent switched in the other direction. In Tanzania in 2005, 66 percent reported FGM, but a medical exam found that 73 percent had undergone it. In Sudan in 2006, a significant percentage of infibulated women and girls reported a less severe type. ### Types Standard questionnaires from United Nations bodies ask women whether they or their daughters have undergone the following: (1) cut, no flesh removed (symbolic nicking); (2) cut, some flesh removed; (3) sewn closed; or (4) type not determined/unsure/doesn't know. The most common procedures fall within the "cut, some flesh removed" category and involve complete or partial removal of the clitoral glans. The World Health Organization (a UN agency) created a more detailed typology in 1997: Types I–II vary in how much tissue is removed; Type III is equivalent to the UNICEF category "sewn closed"; and Type IV describes miscellaneous procedures, including symbolic nicking. #### Type I Type I is "partial or total removal of the clitoral glans (the external and visible part of the clitoris, which is a sensitive part of the female genitals), and/or the prepuce/clitoral hood (the fold of skin surrounding the clitoral glans)". Type Ia involves removal of the clitoral hood only. This is rarely performed alone. The more common procedure is Type Ib (clitoridectomy), the complete or partial removal of the clitoral glans (the visible tip of the clitoris) and clitoral hood. The circumciser pulls the clitoral glans with her thumb and index finger and cuts it off. #### Type II Type II (excision) is the complete or partial removal of the inner labia, with or without removal of the clitoral glans and outer labia. Type IIa is removal of the inner labia; Type IIb, removal of the clitoral glans and inner labia; and Type IIc, removal of the clitoral glans, inner and outer labia. Excision in French can refer to any form of FGM. #### Type III Type III (infibulation or pharaonic circumcision), the "sewn closed" category, is the removal of the external genitalia and fusion of the wound. The inner and/or outer labia are cut away, with or without removal of the clitoral glans. Type III is found largely in northeast Africa, particularly Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan (although not in South Sudan). According to one 2008 estimate, over eight million women in Africa are living with Type III FGM. According to UNFPA in 2010, 20 percent of women with FGM have been infibulated. In Somalia, according to Edna Adan Ismail, the child squats on a stool or mat while adults pull her legs open; a local anaesthetic is applied if available: > The element of speed and surprise is vital and the circumciser immediately grabs the clitoris by pinching it between her nails aiming to amputate it with a slash. The organ is then shown to the senior female relatives of the child who will decide whether the amount that has been removed is satisfactory or whether more is to be cut off. > > After the clitoris has been satisfactorily amputated ... the circumciser can proceed with the total removal of the labia minora and the paring of the inner walls of the labia majora. Since the entire skin on the inner walls of the labia majora has to be removed all the way down to the perineum, this becomes a messy business. By now, the child is screaming, struggling, and bleeding profusely, which makes it difficult for the circumciser to hold with bare fingers and nails the slippery skin and parts that are to be cut or sutured together. ... > > Having ensured that sufficient tissue has been removed to allow the desired fusion of the skin, the circumciser pulls together the opposite sides of the labia majora, ensuring that the raw edges where the skin has been removed are well approximated. The wound is now ready to be stitched or for thorns to be applied. If a needle and thread are being used, close tight sutures will be placed to ensure that a flap of skin covers the vulva and extends from the mons veneris to the perineum, and which, after the wound heals, will form a bridge of scar tissue that will totally occlude the vaginal introitus. The amputated parts might be placed in a pouch for the girl to wear. A single hole of 2–3 mm is left for the passage of urine and menstrual fluid. The vulva is closed with surgical thread, or agave or acacia thorns, and might be covered with a poultice of raw egg, herbs, and sugar. To help the tissue bond, the girl's legs are tied together, often from hip to ankle; the bindings are usually loosened after a week and removed after two to six weeks. If the remaining hole is too large in the view of the girl's family, the procedure is repeated. The vagina is opened for sexual intercourse, for the first time either by a midwife with a knife or by the woman's husband with his penis. In some areas, including Somaliland, female relatives of the bride and groom might watch the opening of the vagina to check that the girl is a virgin. The woman is opened further for childbirth (defibulation or deinfibulation), and closed again afterwards (reinfibulation). Reinfibulation can involve cutting the vagina again to restore the pinhole size of the first infibulation. This might be performed before marriage, and after childbirth, divorce and widowhood. Hanny Lightfoot-Klein interviewed hundreds of women and men in Sudan in the 1980s about sexual intercourse with Type III: > The penetration of the bride's infibulation takes anywhere from 3 or 4 days to several months. Some men are unable to penetrate their wives at all (in my study over 15%), and the task is often accomplished by a midwife under conditions of great secrecy, since this reflects negatively on the man's potency. Some who are unable to penetrate their wives manage to get them pregnant in spite of the infibulation, and the woman's vaginal passage is then cut open to allow birth to take place. ... Those men who do manage to penetrate their wives do so often, or perhaps always, with the help of the "little knife". This creates a tear which they gradually rip more and more until the opening is sufficient to admit the penis. #### Type IV Type IV is "[a]ll other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes", including pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterization. It includes nicking of the clitoris (symbolic circumcision), burning or scarring the genitals, and introducing substances into the vagina to tighten it. Labia stretching is also categorized as Type IV. Common in southern and eastern Africa, the practice is supposed to enhance sexual pleasure for the man and add to the sense of a woman as a closed space. From the age of eight, girls are encouraged to stretch their inner labia using sticks and massage. Girls in Uganda are told they may have difficulty giving birth without stretched labia. A definition of FGM from the WHO in 1995 included gishiri cutting and angurya cutting, found in Nigeria and Niger. These were removed from the WHO's 2008 definition because of insufficient information about prevalence and consequences. Angurya cutting is excision of the hymen, usually performed seven days after birth. Gishiri cutting involves cutting the vagina's front or back wall with a blade or penknife, performed in response to infertility, obstructed labour, and other conditions. In a study by Nigerian physician Mairo Usman Mandara, over 30 percent of women with gishiri cuts were found to have vesicovaginal fistulae (holes that allow urine to seep into the vagina). ## Complications ### Short term FGM harms women's physical and emotional health throughout their lives. It has no known health benefits. The short-term and late complications depend on the type of FGM, whether the practitioner has had medical training, and whether they used antibiotics and sterilized or single-use surgical instruments. In the case of Type III, other factors include how small a hole was left for the passage of urine and menstrual blood, whether surgical thread was used instead of agave or acacia thorns, and whether the procedure was performed more than once (for example, to close an opening regarded as too wide or re-open one too small). Common short-term complications include swelling, excessive bleeding, pain, urine retention, and healing problems/wound infection. A 2014 systematic review of 56 studies suggested that over one in ten girls and women undergoing any form of FGM, including symbolic nicking of the clitoris (Type IV), experience immediate complications, although the risks increased with Type III. The review also suggested that there was under-reporting. Other short-term complications include fatal bleeding, anaemia, urinary infection, septicaemia, tetanus, gangrene, necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease), and endometritis. It is not known how many girls and women die as a result of the practice, because complications may not be recognized or reported. The practitioners' use of shared instruments is thought to aid the transmission of hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV, although no epidemiological studies have shown this. ### Long term Late complications vary depending on the type of FGM. They include the formation of scars and keloids that lead to strictures and obstruction, epidermoid cysts that may become infected, and neuroma formation (growth of nerve tissue) involving nerves that supplied the clitoris. An infibulated girl may be left with an opening as small as 2–3 mm, which can cause prolonged, drop-by-drop urination, pain while urinating, and a feeling of needing to urinate all the time. Urine may collect underneath the scar, leaving the area under the skin constantly wet, which can lead to infection and the formation of small stones. The opening is larger in women who are sexually active or have given birth by vaginal delivery, but the urethra opening may still be obstructed by scar tissue. Vesicovaginal or rectovaginal fistulae can develop (holes that allow urine or faeces to seep into the vagina). This and other damage to the urethra and bladder can lead to infections and incontinence, pain during sexual intercourse and infertility. Painful periods are common because of the obstruction to the menstrual flow, and blood can stagnate in the vagina and uterus. Complete obstruction of the vagina can result in hematocolpos and hematometra (where the vagina and uterus fill with menstrual blood). The swelling of the abdomen and lack of menstruation can resemble pregnancy. Asma El Dareer, a Sudanese physician, reported in 1979 that a girl in Sudan with this condition was killed by her family. ### Pregnancy, childbirth FGM may place women at higher risk of problems during pregnancy and childbirth, which are more common with the more extensive FGM procedures. Infibulated women may try to make childbirth easier by eating less during pregnancy to reduce the baby's size. In women with vesicovaginal or rectovaginal fistulae, it is difficult to obtain clear urine samples as part of prenatal care, making the diagnosis of conditions such as pre-eclampsia harder. Cervical evaluation during labour may be impeded and labour prolonged or obstructed. Third-degree laceration (tears), anal-sphincter damage and emergency caesarean section are more common in infibulated women. Neonatal mortality is increased. The WHO estimated in 2006 that an additional 10–20 babies die per 1,000 deliveries as a result of FGM. The estimate was based on a study conducted on 28,393 women attending delivery wards at 28 obstetric centres in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan. In those settings all types of FGM were found to pose an increased risk of death to the baby: 15 percent higher for Type I, 32 percent for Type II, and 55 percent for Type III. The reasons for this were unclear, but may be connected to genital and urinary tract infections and the presence of scar tissue. According to the study, FGM was associated with an increased risk to the mother of damage to the perineum and excessive blood loss, as well as a need to resuscitate the baby, and stillbirth, perhaps because of a long second stage of labour. ### Psychological effects, sexual function According to a 2015 systematic review there is little high-quality information available on the psychological effects of FGM. Several small studies have concluded that women with FGM develop anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Feelings of shame and betrayal can develop when women leave the culture that practices FGM and learn that their condition is not the norm, but within the practicing culture, they may view their FGM with pride because for them it signifies beauty, respect for tradition, chastity and hygiene. Studies on sexual function have also been small. A 2013 meta-analysis of 15 studies involving 12,671 women from seven countries concluded that women with FGM were twice as likely to report no sexual desire and 52 percent more likely to report dyspareunia (painful sexual intercourse). One-third reported reduced sexual feelings. ## Distribution ### Household surveys Aid agencies define the prevalence of FGM as the percentage of the 15–49 age group that has experienced it. These figures are based on nationally representative household surveys known as Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), developed by Macro International and funded mainly by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) conducted with financial and technical help from UNICEF. These surveys have been carried out in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere roughly every five years since 1984 and 1995 respectively. The first to ask about FGM was the 1989–1990 DHS in northern Sudan. The first publication to estimate FGM prevalence based on DHS data (in seven countries) was written by Dara Carr of Macro International in 1997. ### Type of FGM Questions the women are asked during the surveys include: "Was the genital area just nicked/cut without removing any flesh? Was any flesh (or something) removed from the genital area? Was your genital area sewn?" Most women report "cut, some flesh removed" (Types I and II). Type I is the most common form in Egypt, and in the southern parts of Nigeria. Type III (infibulation) is concentrated in northeastern Africa, particularly Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan. In surveys in 2002–2006, 30 percent of cut girls in Djibouti, 38 percent in Eritrea, and 63 percent in Somalia had experienced Type III. There is also a high prevalence of infibulation among girls in Niger and Senegal, and in 2013 it was estimated that in Nigeria three percent of the 0–14 age group had been infibulated. The type of procedure is often linked to ethnicity. In Eritrea, for example, a survey in 2002 found that all Hedareb girls had been infibulated, compared with two percent of the Tigrinya, most of whom fell into the "cut, no flesh removed" category. ### Prevalence FGM is mostly found in what Gerry Mackie called an "intriguingly contiguous" zone in Africa—east to west from Somalia to Senegal, and north to south from Egypt to Tanzania. Nationally representative figures are available for 27 countries in Africa, as well as Indonesia, Iraqi Kurdistan and Yemen. Over 200 million women and girls are thought to be living with FGM in those 30 countries. The highest concentrations among the 15–49 age group are in Somalia (98 percent), Guinea (97 percent), Djibouti (93 percent), Egypt (91 percent), and Sierra Leone (90 percent). As of 2013, 27.2 million women had undergone FGM in Egypt, 23.8 million in Ethiopia, and 19.9 million in Nigeria. There is a high concentration in Indonesia, where according to UNICEF Type I (clitoridectomy) and Type IV (symbolic nicking) are practised; the Indonesian Ministry of Health and Indonesian Ulema Council both say the clitoris should not be cut. The prevalence rate for the 0–11 group in Indonesia is 49 percent (13.4 million). Smaller studies or anecdotal reports suggest that various types of FGM are also practised in various circumstances in Colombia, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and India, but there are no representative data on the prevalence in these countries. As of 2023, UNICEF reported that "The highest levels of support for FGM can be found in Mali, Sierra Leone, Guinea, the Gambia, Somalia, and Egypt, where more than half of the female population thinks the practice should continue". Prevalence figures for the 15–19 age group and younger show a downward trend. For example, Burkina Faso fell from 89 percent (1980) to 58 percent (2010); Egypt from 97 percent (1985) to 70 percent (2015); and Kenya from 41 percent (1984) to 11 percent (2014). Beginning in 2010, household surveys asked women about the FGM status of all their living daughters. The highest concentrations among girls aged 0–14 were in Gambia (56 percent), Mauritania (54 percent), Indonesia (49 percent for 0–11) and Guinea (46 percent). The figures suggest that a girl was one third less likely in 2014 to undergo FGM than she was 30 years ago. According to a 2018 study published in BMJ Global Health, the prevalence within the 0–14 year old group fell in East Africa from 71.4 percent in 1995 to 8 percent in 2016; in North Africa from 57.7 percent in 1990 to 14.1 percent in 2015; and in West Africa from 73.6 percent in 1996 to 25.4 percent in 2017. If the current rate of decline continues, the number of girls cut will nevertheless continue to rise because of population growth, according to UNICEF in 2014; they estimate that the figure will increase from 3.6 million a year in 2013 to 4.1 million in 2050. ### Rural areas, wealth, education Surveys have found FGM to be more common in rural areas, less common in most countries among girls from the wealthiest homes, and (except in Sudan and Somalia) less common in girls whose mothers had access to primary or secondary/higher education. In Somalia and Sudan the situation was reversed: in Somalia, the mothers' access to secondary/higher education was accompanied by a rise in prevalence of FGM in their daughters, and in Sudan, access to any education was accompanied by a rise. ### Age, ethnicity FGM is not invariably a rite of passage between childhood and adulthood but is often performed on much younger children. Girls are most commonly cut shortly after birth to age 15. In half the countries for which national figures were available in 2000–2010, most girls had been cut by age five. Over 80 percent (of those cut) are cut before the age of five in Nigeria, Mali, Eritrea, Ghana and Mauritania. The 1997 Demographic and Health Survey in Yemen found that 76 percent of girls had been cut within two weeks of birth. The percentage is reversed in Somalia, Egypt, Chad, and the Central African Republic, where over 80 percent (of those cut) are cut between five and 14. Just as the type of FGM is often linked to ethnicity, so is the mean age. In Kenya, for example, the Kisi cut around age 10 and the Kamba at 16. A country's national prevalence often reflects a high sub-national prevalence among certain ethnicities, rather than a widespread practice. In Iraq, for example, FGM is found mostly among the Kurds in Erbil (58 percent prevalence within age group 15–49, as of 2011), Sulaymaniyah (54 percent) and Kirkuk (20 percent), giving the country a national prevalence of eight percent. The practice is sometimes an ethnic marker, but it may differ along national lines. For example, in the northeastern regions of Ethiopia and Kenya, which share a border with Somalia, the Somali people practise FGM at around the same rate as they do in Somalia. But in Guinea all Fulani women responding to a survey in 2012 said they had experienced FGM, against 12 percent of the Fulani in Chad, while in Nigeria the Fulani are the only large ethnic group in the country not to practise it. In Sierra Leone, the predominantly Christian Creole people are the only ethnicity not known to practice FGM or participate in Bondo society rituals. ## Reasons ### Support from women Dahabo Musa, a Somali woman, described infibulation in a 1988 poem as the "three feminine sorrows": the procedure itself, the wedding night when the woman is cut open, then childbirth when she is cut again. Despite the evident suffering, it is women who organize all forms of FGM. Anthropologist Rose Oldfield Hayes wrote in 1975 that educated Sudanese men who did not want their daughters to be infibulated (preferring clitoridectomy) would find the girls had been sewn up after the grandmothers arranged a visit to relatives. Gerry Mackie has compared the practice to footbinding. Like FGM, footbinding was carried out on young girls, nearly universal where practised, tied to ideas about honour, chastity, and appropriate marriage, and "supported and transmitted" by women. FGM practitioners see the procedures as marking not only ethnic boundaries but also gender differences. According to this view, male circumcision defeminizes men while FGM demasculinizes women. Fuambai Ahmadu, an anthropologist and member of the Kono people of Sierra Leone, who in 1992 underwent clitoridectomy as an adult during a Sande society initiation, argued in 2000 that it is a male-centred assumption that the clitoris is important to female sexuality. African female symbolism revolves instead around the concept of the womb. Infibulation draws on that idea of enclosure and fertility. "[G]enital cutting completes the social definition of a child's sex by eliminating external traces of androgyny," Janice Boddy wrote in 2007. "The female body is then covered, closed, and its productive blood bound within; the male body is unveiled, opened, and exposed." In communities where infibulation is common, there is a preference for women's genitals to be smooth, dry and without odour, and both women and men may find the natural vulva repulsive. Some men seem to enjoy the effort of penetrating an infibulation. The local preference for dry sex causes women to introduce substances into the vagina to reduce lubrication, including leaves, tree bark, toothpaste and Vicks menthol rub. The WHO includes this practice within Type IV FGM, because the added friction during intercourse can cause lacerations and increase the risk of infection. Because of the smooth appearance of an infibulated vulva, there is also a belief that infibulation increases hygiene. Common reasons for FGM cited by women in surveys are social acceptance, religion, hygiene, preservation of virginity, marriageability and enhancement of male sexual pleasure. In a study in northern Sudan, published in 1983, only 17.4 percent of women opposed FGM (558 out of 3,210), and most preferred excision and infibulation over clitoridectomy. Attitudes are changing slowly. In Sudan in 2010, 42 percent of women who had heard of FGM said the practice should continue. In several surveys since 2006, over 50 percent of women in Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Gambia, and Egypt supported FGM's continuance, while elsewhere in Africa, Iraq, and Yemen most said it should end, although in several countries only by a narrow margin. ### Social obligation, poor access to information Against the argument that women willingly choose FGM for their daughters, UNICEF calls the practice a "self-enforcing social convention" to which families feel they must conform to avoid uncut daughters facing social exclusion. Ellen Gruenbaum reported that, in Sudan in the 1970s, cut girls from an Arab ethnic group would mock uncut Zabarma girls with Ya, ghalfa! ("Hey, unclean!"). The Zabarma girls would respond Ya, mutmura! (A mutmara was a storage pit for grain that was continually opened and closed, like an infibulated woman.) But despite throwing the insult back, the Zabarma girls would ask their mothers, "What's the matter? Don't we have razor blades like the Arabs?" Because of poor access to information, and because circumcisers downplay the causal connection, women may not associate the health consequences with the procedure. Lala Baldé, president of a women's association in Medina Cherif, a village in Senegal, told Mackie in 1998 that when girls fell ill or died, it was attributed to evil spirits. When informed of the causal relationship between FGM and ill health, Mackie wrote, the women broke down and wept. He argued that surveys taken before and after this sharing of information would show very different levels of support for FGM. The American non-profit group Tostan, founded by Molly Melching in 1991, introduced community-empowerment programs in several countries that focus on local democracy, literacy, and education about healthcare, giving women the tools to make their own decisions. In 1997, using the Tostan program, Malicounda Bambara in Senegal became the first village to abandon FGM. By August 2019, 8,800 communities in eight countries had pledged to abandon FGM and child marriage. ### Religion Surveys have shown a widespread belief, particularly in Mali, Mauritania, Guinea, and Egypt, that FGM is a religious requirement. Gruenbaum has argued that practitioners may not distinguish between religion, tradition, and chastity, making it difficult to interpret the data. FGM's origins in northeastern Africa are pre-Islamic, but the practice became associated with Islam because of that religion's focus on female chastity and seclusion. According to a 2013 UNICEF report, in 18 African countries at least 10 percent of Muslim females had experienced FGM, and in 13 of those countries, the figure rose to 50–99 percent. There is no mention of the practice in the Quran. It is praised in a few daʻīf (weak) hadith (sayings attributed to Muhammad) as noble but not required, although it is regarded as obligatory by the Shafi'i version of Sunni Islam. In 2007 the Al-Azhar Supreme Council of Islamic Research in Cairo ruled that FGM had "no basis in core Islamic law or any of its partial provisions". There is no mention of FGM in the Bible. Christian missionaries in Africa were among the first to object to FGM, but Christian communities in Africa do practise it. In 2013 UNICEF identified 19 African countries in which at least 10 percent of Christian women and girls aged 15 to 49 had undergone FGM; in Niger, 55 percent of Christian women and girls had experienced it, compared with two percent of their Muslim counterparts. The only Jewish group known to have practised it is the Beta Israel of Ethiopia. Judaism requires male circumcision but does not allow FGM. FGM is also practised by animist groups, particularly in Guinea and Mali. ## History ### Antiquity The practice's origins are unknown. Gerry Mackie has suggested that, because FGM's east–west, north–south distribution in Africa meets in Sudan, infibulation may have begun there with the Meroite civilization (c. 800 BCE – c. 350 CE), before the rise of Islam, to increase confidence in paternity. According to historian Mary Knight, Spell 1117 (c. 1991–1786 BCE) of the Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts may refer in hieroglyphs to an uncircumcised girl ('m't): The spell was found on the sarcophagus of Sit-hedjhotep, now in the Egyptian Museum, and dates to Egypt's Middle Kingdom. (Paul F. O'Rourke argues that 'm't probably refers instead to a menstruating woman.) The proposed circumcision of an Egyptian girl, Tathemis, is also mentioned on a Greek papyrus, from 163 BCE, in the British Museum: "Sometime after this, Nephoris [Tathemis's mother] defrauded me, being anxious that it was time for Tathemis to be circumcised, as is the custom among the Egyptians." The examination of mummies has shown no evidence of FGM. Citing the Australian pathologist Grafton Elliot Smith, who examined hundreds of mummies in the early 20th century, Knight writes that the genital area may resemble Type III because during mummification the skin of the outer labia was pulled toward the anus to cover the pudendal cleft, possibly to prevent a sexual violation. It was similarly not possible to determine whether Types I or II had been performed, because soft tissues had deteriorated or been removed by the embalmers. The Greek geographer Strabo (c. 64 BCE – c. 23 CE) wrote about FGM after visiting Egypt around 25 BCE: "This is one of the customs most zealously pursued by them [the Egyptians]: to raise every child that is born and to circumcise [peritemnein] the males and excise [ektemnein] the females ..." Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – 50 CE) also made reference to it: "the Egyptians by the custom of their country circumcise the marriageable youth and maid in the fourteenth (year) of their age when the male begins to get seed, and the female to have a menstrual flow." It is mentioned briefly in a work attributed to the Greek physician Galen (129 – c. 200 CE): "When [the clitoris] sticks out to a great extent in their young women, Egyptians consider it appropriate to cut it out." Another Greek physician, Aëtius of Amida (mid-5th to mid-6th century CE), offered more detail in book 16 of his Sixteen Books on Medicine, citing the physician Philomenes. The procedure was performed in case the clitoris, or nymphê, grew too large or triggered sexual desire when rubbing against clothing. "On this account, it seemed proper to the Egyptians to remove it before it became greatly enlarged," Aëtius wrote, "especially at that time when the girls were about to be married": > The surgery is performed in this way: Have the girl sit on a chair while a muscled young man standing behind her places his arms below the girl's thighs. Have him separate and steady her legs and whole body. Standing in front and taking hold of the clitoris with a broad-mouthed forceps in his left hand, the surgeon stretches it outward, while with the right hand, he cuts it off at the point next to the pincers of the forceps. It is proper to let a length remain from that cut off, about the size of the membrane that's between the nostrils, so as to take away the excess material only; as I have said, the part to be removed is at that point just above the pincers of the forceps. Because the clitoris is a skinlike structure and stretches out excessively, do not cut off too much, as a urinary fistula may result from cutting such large growths too deeply. The genital area was then cleaned with a sponge, frankincense powder and wine or cold water, and wrapped in linen bandages dipped in vinegar, until the seventh day when calamine, rose petals, date pits, or a "genital powder made from baked clay" might be applied. Whatever the practice's origins, infibulation became linked to slavery. Mackie cites the Portuguese missionary João dos Santos, who in 1609 wrote of a group near Mogadishu who had a "custome to sew up their Females, especially their slaves being young to make them unable for conception, which makes these slaves sell dearer, both for their chastitie, and for better confidence which their Masters put in them". Thus, Mackie argues, a "practice associated with shameful female slavery came to stand for honor". ### Europe and the United States Gynaecologists in 19th-century Europe and the United States removed the clitoris to treat insanity and masturbation. A British doctor, Robert Thomas, suggested clitoridectomy as a cure for nymphomania in 1813. In 1825 The Lancet described a clitoridectomy performed in 1822 in Berlin by Karl Ferdinand von Graefe on a 15-year-old girl who was masturbating excessively. Isaac Baker Brown, an English gynaecologist, president of the Medical Society of London and co-founder in 1845 of St. Mary's Hospital, believed that masturbation, or "unnatural irritation" of the clitoris, caused hysteria, spinal irritation, fits, idiocy, mania, and death. He, therefore "set to work to remove the clitoris whenever he had the opportunity of doing so", according to his obituary. Brown performed several clitoridectomies between 1859 and 1866. In the United States, J. Marion Sims followed Brown's work and in 1862 slit the neck of a woman's uterus and amputated her clitoris, "for the relief of the nervous or hysterical condition as recommended by Baker Brown". When Brown published his views in On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females (1866), doctors in London accused him of quackery and expelled him from the Obstetrical Society. Later in the 19th century, A. J. Bloch, a surgeon in New Orleans, removed the clitoris of a two-year-old girl who was reportedly masturbating. According to a 1985 paper in the Obstetrical & Gynecological Survey, clitoridectomy was performed in the United States into the 1960s to treat hysteria, erotomania and lesbianism. From the mid-1950s, James C. Burt, a gynaecologist in Dayton, Ohio, performed non-standard repairs of episiotomies after childbirth, adding more stitches to make the vaginal opening smaller. From 1966 until 1989, he performed "love surgery" by cutting women's pubococcygeus muscle, repositioning the vagina and urethra, and removing the clitoral hood, thereby making their genital area more appropriate, in his view, for intercourse in the missionary position. "Women are structurally inadequate for intercourse," he wrote; he said he would turn them into "horny little mice". In the 1960s and 1970s he performed these procedures without consent while repairing episiotomies and performing hysterectomies and other surgery; he said he had performed a variation of them on 4,000 women by 1975. Following complaints, he was required in 1989 to stop practicing medicine in the United States. ## Opposition and legal status ### Colonial opposition in Kenya Protestant missionaries in British East Africa (present-day Kenya) began campaigning against FGM in the early 20th century, when Dr. John Arthur joined the Church of Scotland Mission (CSM) in Kikuyu. An important ethnic marker, the practice was known by the Kikuyu, the country's main ethnic group, as irua for both girls and boys. It involved excision (Type II) for girls and removal of the foreskin for boys. Unexcised Kikuyu women (irugu) were outcasts. Jomo Kenyatta, general secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association and later Kenya's first prime minister, wrote in 1938 that, for the Kikuyu, the institution of FGM was the "conditio sine qua non of the whole teaching of tribal law, religion and morality". No proper Kikuyu man or woman would marry or have sexual relations with someone who was not circumcised, he wrote. A woman's responsibilities toward the tribe began with her initiation. Her age and place within tribal history were traced to that day, and the group of girls with whom she was cut was named according to current events, an oral tradition that allowed the Kikuyu to track people and events going back hundreds of years. Beginning with the CSM in 1925, several missionary churches declared that FGM was prohibited for African Christians; the CSM announced that Africans practising it would be excommunicated, which resulted in hundreds leaving or being expelled. In 1929 the Kenya Missionary Council began referring to FGM as the "sexual mutilation of women", and a person's stance toward the practice became a test of loyalty, either to the Christian churches or to the Kikuyu Central Association. The stand-off turned FGM into a focal point of the Kenyan independence movement; the 1929–1931 period is known in the country's historiography as the female circumcision controversy. When Hulda Stumpf, an American missionary who opposed FGM in the girls' school she helped to run, was murdered in 1930, Edward Grigg, the governor of Kenya, told the British Colonial Office that the killer had tried to circumcise her. There was some opposition from Kenyan women themselves. At the mission in Tumutumu, Karatina, where Marion Scott Stevenson worked, a group calling themselves Ngo ya Tuiritu ("Shield of Young Girls"), the membership of which included Raheli Warigia (mother of Gakaara wa Wanjaũ), wrote to the Local Native Council of South Nyeri on 25 December 1931: "[W]e of the Ngo ya Tuiritu heard that there are men who talk of female circumcision, and we get astonished because they (men) do not give birth and feel the pain and even some die and even others become infertile, and the main cause is circumcision. Because of that, the issue of circumcision should not be forced. People are caught like sheep; one should be allowed to cut her own way of either agreeing to be circumcised or not without being dictated on one's own body." Elsewhere, support for the practice from women was strong. In 1956 in Meru, eastern Kenya, when the council of male elders (the Njuri Nchecke) announced a ban on FGM in 1956, thousands of girls cut each other's genitals with razor blades over the next three years as a symbol of defiance. The movement came to be known as Ngaitana ("I will circumcise myself"), because to avoid naming their friends the girls said they had cut themselves. Historian Lynn Thomas described the episode as significant in the history of FGM because it made clear that its victims were also its perpetrators. FGM was eventually outlawed in Kenya in 2001, although the practice continued, reportedly driven by older women. ### Growth of opposition One of the earliest campaigns against FGM began in Egypt in the 1920s, when the Egyptian Doctors' Society called for a ban. There was a parallel campaign in Sudan, run by religious leaders and British women. Infibulation was banned there in 1946, but the law was unpopular and barely enforced. The Egyptian government banned infibulation in state-run hospitals in 1959, but allowed partial clitoridectomy if parents requested it. (Egypt banned FGM entirely in 2007.) In 1959, the UN asked the WHO to investigate FGM, but the latter responded that it was not a medical matter. Feminists took up the issue throughout the 1970s. The Egyptian physician and feminist Nawal El Saadawi criticized FGM in her book Women and Sex (1972); the book was banned in Egypt and El Saadawi lost her job as director-general of public health. She followed up with a chapter, "The Circumcision of Girls", in her book The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (1980), which described her own clitoridectomy when she was six years old: > I did not know what they had cut off from my body, and I did not try to find out. I just wept, and called out to my mother for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her standing by my side. Yes, it was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them, as though they had not participated in slaughtering her daughter just a few moments ago. In 1975, Rose Oldfield Hayes, an American social scientist, became the first female academic to publish a detailed account of FGM, aided by her ability to discuss it directly with women in Sudan. Her article in American Ethnologist called it "female genital mutilation", rather than female circumcision, and brought it to wider academic attention. Edna Adan Ismail, who worked at the time for the Somalia Ministry of Health, discussed the health consequences of FGM in 1977 with the Somali Women's Democratic Organization. Two years later Fran Hosken, an Austrian-American feminist, published The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females (1979), the first to offer global figures. She estimated that 110,529,000 women in 20 African countries had experienced FGM. The figures were speculative but consistent with later surveys. Describing FGM as a "training ground for male violence", Hosken accused female practitioners of "participating in the destruction of their own kind". The language caused a rift between Western and African feminists; African women boycotted a session featuring Hosken during the UN's Mid-Decade Conference on Women in Copenhagen in July 1980. In 1979, the WHO held a seminar, "Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children", in Khartoum, Sudan, and in 1981, also in Khartoum, 150 academics and activists signed a pledge to fight FGM after a workshop held by the Babiker Badri Scientific Association for Women's Studies (BBSAWS), "Female Circumcision Mutilates and Endangers Women – Combat it!" Another BBSAWS workshop in 1984 invited the international community to write a joint statement for the United Nations. It recommended that the "goal of all African women" should be the eradication of FGM and that, to sever the link between FGM and religion, clitoridectomy should no longer be referred to as sunna. The Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children, founded in 1984 in Dakar, Senegal, called for an end to the practice, as did the UN's World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993. The conference listed FGM as a form of violence against women, marking it as a human-rights violation, rather than a medical issue. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s governments in Africa and the Middle East passed legislation banning or restricting FGM. In 2003 the African Union ratified the Maputo Protocol on the rights of women, which supported the elimination of FGM. By 2015 laws restricting FGM had been passed in at least 23 of the 27 African countries in which it is concentrated, although several fell short of a ban. As of 2023, UNICEF reported that "in most countries in Africa and the Middle East with representative data on attitudes (23 out of 30), the majority of girls and women think the practice should end", and that "even among communities that practice FGM, there is substantial opposition to its continuation". ### United Nations In December 1993, the United Nations General Assembly included FGM in resolution 48/104, the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and from 2003 sponsored International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, held every 6 February. UNICEF began in 2003 to promote an evidence-based social norms approach, using ideas from game theory about how communities reach decisions about FGM, and building on the work of Gerry Mackie on the demise of footbinding in China. In 2005 the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre in Florence published its first report on FGM. UNFPA and UNICEF launched a joint program in Africa in 2007 to reduce FGM by 40 percent within the 0–15 age group and eliminate it from at least one country by 2012, goals that were not met and which they later described as unrealistic. In 2008 several UN bodies recognized FGM as a human-rights violation, and in 2010 the UN called upon healthcare providers to stop carrying out the procedures, including reinfibulation after childbirth and symbolic nicking. In 2012 the General Assembly passed resolution 67/146, "Intensifying global efforts for the elimination of female genital mutilations". ### Non-practising countries #### Overview Immigration spread the practice to Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America, all of which outlawed it entirely or restricted it to consenting adults. Sweden outlawed FGM in 1982 with the Act Prohibiting the Genital Mutilation of Women, the first Western country to do so. Several former colonial powers, including Belgium, Britain, France, and the Netherlands, introduced new laws or made clear that it was covered by existing legislation. As of 2013, legislation banning FGM had been passed in 33 countries outside Africa and the Middle East. #### North America In the United States, an estimated 513,000 women and girls had experienced FGM or were at risk as of 2012. A Nigerian woman successfully contested deportation in March 1994, asking for "cultural asylum" on the grounds that her young daughters (who were American citizens) might be cut if she took them to Nigeria, and in 1996 Fauziya Kasinga from Togo became the first to be officially granted asylum to escape FGM. In 1996 the Federal Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act made it illegal to perform FGM on minors for non-medical reasons, and in 2013 the Transport for Female Genital Mutilation Act prohibited transporting a minor out of the country for the purpose of FGM. The first FGM conviction in the US was in 2006, when Khalid Adem, who had emigrated from Ethiopia, was sentenced to ten years for aggravated battery and cruelty to children after severing his two-year-old daughter's clitoris with a pair of scissors. A federal judge ruled in 2018 that the 1996 Act was unconstitutional, arguing that FGM is a "local criminal activity" that should be regulated by states. Twenty-four states had legislation banning FGM as of 2016, and in 2021 the STOP FGM Act of 2020 was signed into federal law. The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes all forms of the practice, including pricking the clitoral skin. Canada recognized FGM as a form of persecution in July 1994, when it granted refugee status to Khadra Hassan Farah, who had fled Somalia to avoid her daughter being cut. In 1997 section 268 of its Criminal Code was amended to ban FGM, except where "the person is at least eighteen years of age and there is no resulting bodily harm". As of February 2019, there had been no prosecutions. Officials have expressed concern that thousands of Canadian girls are at risk of being taken overseas to undergo the procedure, so-called "vacation cutting". #### Europe According to the European Parliament, 500,000 women in Europe had undergone FGM as of March 2009. In France up to 30,000 women were thought to have experienced it as of 1995. According to Colette Gallard, a family-planning counsellor, when FGM was first encountered in France, the reaction was that Westerners ought not to intervene. It took the deaths of two girls in 1982, one of them three months old, for that attitude to change. In 1991 a French court ruled that the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees offered protection to FGM victims; the decision followed an asylum application from Aminata Diop, who fled an FGM procedure in Mali. The practice is outlawed by several provisions of France's penal code that address bodily harm causing permanent mutilation or torture. The first civil suit was in 1982, and the first criminal prosecution in 1993. In 1999 a woman was given an eight-year sentence for having performed FGM on 48 girls. By 2014 over 100 parents and two practitioners had been prosecuted in over 40 criminal cases. Around 137,000 women and girls living in England and Wales were born in countries where FGM is practised, as of 2011. Performing FGM on children or adults was outlawed under the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985. This was replaced by the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 and Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation (Scotland) Act 2005, which added a prohibition on arranging FGM outside the country for British citizens or permanent residents. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) asked the government in July 2013 to "ensure the full implementation of its legislation on FGM". The first charges were brought in 2014 against a physician and another man; the physician had stitched an infibulated woman after opening her for childbirth. Both men were acquitted in 2015. ## Criticism of opposition ### Tolerance versus human rights Anthropologists have accused FGM eradicationists of cultural colonialism, and have been criticized in turn for their moral relativism and failure to defend the idea of universal human rights. According to critics of the eradicationist position, the biological reductionism of the opposition to FGM, and the failure to appreciate FGM's cultural context, serves to "other" practitioners and undermine their agency—in particular when parents are referred to as "mutilators". Africans who object to the tone of FGM opposition risk appearing to defend the practice. The feminist theorist Obioma Nnaemeka, herself strongly opposed to FGM, argued in 2005 that renaming the practice female genital mutilation had introduced "a subtext of barbaric African and Muslim cultures and the West's relevance (even indispensability) in purging [it]". According to Ugandan law professor Sylvia Tamale, the early Western opposition to FGM stemmed from a Judeo-Christian judgment that African sexual and family practices, including not only FGM but also dry sex, polygyny, bride price and levirate marriage, required correction. African feminists "take strong exception to the imperialist, racist and dehumanising infantilization of African women", she wrote in 2011. Commentators highlight the voyeurism in the treatment of women's bodies as exhibits. Examples include images of women's vulvas after FGM or girls undergoing the procedure. The 1996 Pulitzer-prize-winning photographs of a 16-year-old Kenyan girl experiencing FGM were published by 12 American newspapers, without her consent either to be photographed or to have the images published. The debate has highlighted a tension between anthropology and feminism, with the former's focus on tolerance and the latter's on equal rights for women. According to the anthropologist Christine Walley, a common position in anti-FGM literature has been to present African women as victims of false consciousness participating in their own oppression, a position promoted by feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, including Fran Hosken, Mary Daly and Hanny Lightfoot-Klein. It prompted the French Association of Anthropologists to issue a statement in 1981, at the height of the early debates, that "a certain feminism resuscitates (today) the moralistic arrogance of yesterday's colonialism". ### Comparison with other procedures #### Cosmetic procedures Nnaemeka argues that the crucial question, broader than FGM, is why the female body is subjected to so much "abuse and indignity", including in the West. Several authors have drawn a parallel between FGM and cosmetic procedures. Ronán Conroy of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland wrote in 2006 that cosmetic genital procedures were "driving the advance" of FGM by encouraging women to see natural variations as defects. Anthropologist Fadwa El Guindi compared FGM to breast enhancement, in which the maternal function of the breast becomes secondary to men's sexual pleasure. Benoîte Groult, the French feminist, made a similar point in 1975, citing FGM and cosmetic surgery as sexist and patriarchal. Against this, the medical anthropologist Carla Obermeyer argued in 1999 that FGM may be conducive to a subject's social well-being in the same way that rhinoplasty and male circumcision are. Despite the 2007 ban in Egypt, Egyptian women wanting FGM for their daughters seek amalyet tajmeel (cosmetic surgery) to remove what they see as excess genital tissue. Cosmetic procedures such as labiaplasty and clitoral hood reduction do fall within the WHO's definition of FGM, which aims to avoid loopholes, but the WHO notes that these elective practices are generally not regarded as FGM. Some legislation banning FGM, such as in Canada and the United States, covers minors only, but several countries, including Sweden and the United Kingdom, have banned it regardless of consent. Sweden, for example, has banned operations "on the outer female sexual organs with a view to mutilating them or bringing about some other permanent change in them, regardless of whether or not consent has been given for the operation". Gynaecologist Birgitta Essén and anthropologist Sara Johnsdotter argue that the law seems to distinguish between Western and African genitals, and deems only African women (such as those seeking reinfibulation after childbirth) unfit to make their own decisions. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that a key concern with FGM is that it is mostly conducted on children using physical force. The distinction between social pressure and physical force is morally and legally salient, comparable to the distinction between seduction and rape. She argues further that the literacy of women in practising countries is generally poorer than in developed nations, which reduces their ability to make informed choices. #### Analogy to other genital-altering procedures FGM has been compared to other procedures that modify the human genitalia. Conservatives in the United States during the late 2010s and early 2020s have argued that FGM is similar to sexual reassignment surgery for transgender individuals. Some commentators have argued that children's rights are violated by the genital alteration of intersex children, who are born with anomalies that physicians choose to “fix”. Some have argued that circumcision of infants and boys also violates children's rights. Religious male circumcision is practised by Muslims, Jews, and some Christian groups. Globally, about 30 percent of males over 15 are circumcised; of these, about two-thirds are Muslim. The positions of the world's major medical organizations range from the view that elective circumcision of male babies and children carries significant risks and offers no medical benefits, to a belief that the procedure has a modest health benefit that outweighs small risks. ## See also - International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation - No FGM Australia
71,574	Viking metal	1,172,462,403	Subgenre of heavy metal	[ "Extreme metal", "Heavy metal genres", "Norse mythology in popular culture", "Norwegian styles of music", "Viking metal" ]	Viking metal is a subgenre of heavy metal music characterized by a lyrical and thematic focus on Norse mythology, Norse paganism, and the Viking Age. Viking metal is quite diverse as a musical style, to the point where some consider it more a cross-genre term than a genre, but it is typically seen as black metal with influences from Nordic folk music. Common traits include a slow-paced and heavy riffing style, anthemic choruses, use of both sung and harsh vocals, a reliance on folk instrumentation, and often the use of keyboards for atmospheric effect. Viking metal emerged from black metal during the late 1980s and early 1990s, sharing with black metal an opposition to Christianity, but rejecting Satanism and occult themes in favor of the Vikings and paganism. It is similar, in lyrics, sound, and thematic imagery, to pagan metal, but pagan metal has a broader mythological focus and uses folk instrumentation more extensively. Most Viking metal bands originate from the Nordic countries, and nearly all bands claim that their members descend, directly or indirectly, from Vikings. Many scholars view Viking metal and the related black, pagan, and folk metal genres as part of the broader modern Pagan movements, as well as part of a global movement of renewed interest in, and celebration of, local and regional ethnicities. Though artists such as Led Zeppelin, Yngwie Malmsteen, Heavy Load, and Manowar had previously dealt with Viking themes, Bathory from Sweden is generally credited with pioneering the style with its albums Blood Fire Death (1988) and Hammerheart (1990), which launched a renewed interest in the Viking Age among heavy metal musicians. Enslaved, from Norway, followed up on this burgeoning Viking trend with Hordanes Land (1993) and Vikingligr Veldi (1994). Burzum, Emperor, Einherjer, and Helheim, among others, helped further develop the genre in the early and mid-1990s. As early as 1989 with the founding of the German band Falkenbach, Viking metal began spreading from the Nordic countries to other nations with Viking history or an even broader Germanic heritage, and has since influenced musicians across the globe. The death metal bands Unleashed, Amon Amarth, and Ensiferum, which emerged in the early 1990s, also adopted Viking themes, broadening the style from its primarily black metal origin. ## Background ### Vikings Viking metal features the Vikings as its subject matter and for evocative imagery. The Vikings were Northern European seafarers and adventurers who, during the Middle Ages, relied on sailing vessels such as longships, knerrir, and karvi to explore, raid, pirate, trade, and settle along the North Atlantic, Baltic, Mediterranean, Black Sea, and Caspian coasts and Eastern European river systems. The Viking Age is generally cited as beginning in 793, when a Viking raid struck Lindisfarne, and concluding in 1066, with the death of Harald Hardrada and the Norman conquest of England. During this two-hundred-year period, the Vikings ventured west as far as Ireland and Iceland in the North Atlantic and Greenland and what is now Newfoundland in North America, south as far as the Kingdom of Nekor (Morocco), Italy, Sicily, and Constantinople in the Mediterranean, and southeast as far as what are now Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine in Eastern Europe, Georgia in the Caucasus, and Baghdad in the Middle East. The Vikings originated from the Nordic countries and the Baltic states, and consisted mostly of Scandinavians, though Finns, Estonians, Curonians, and Sámi people went on voyages as well. While otherwise disparate peoples, they shared some commonalities in that they were not considered "civilized" and were not, at first, adherents to Christianity, instead following their indigenous Nordic and Finnic religions. They often adopted Christianity upon settling in an area, intermixing the faith with their own pagan traditions, and by the end of the Viking Age, all Scandinavian kingdoms were Christianized and what remained of Viking cultures were absorbed into Christian Europe. ### Nordic folk music Nordic folk music encompasses traditions from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and the dependent countries Åland, Faroe Islands, and Greenland, and nearby regions. Specific instruments vary between countries and regions, but some common instruments include the lur, säckpipa, Hardanger fiddle, keyed fiddle, willow flute, harp, mouth harp, and animal horns. Common genres in Nordic folk include ballads, herding music, and dance music, genres which trace back to the medieval era. Often, Nordic melodies will contain the phrase C<sup>2</sup>-B-G. In Swedish folk music, songs are monophonic, unemotional, and solemn in character, though working and festive songs might be more lively and rhythmic. Danish songs melodies tend to lean toward the major. In Icelandic folk music, the rímur, a form of epic poem dating back to the medieval era and Viking Age, is prominent. Faroese music contains dances directly descended from medieval ballad and epic poems, particularly from literature in the Icelandic tradition, and often follows unusual time signatures. Many Norwegian folk ballads follow a four-stanza structure known as stev. Stev alternate a trochaic tetrameter with a trimeter, and lines typically rhyme following an ABCB scheme, though stev are not standardized. Finnish folk music tends to be based on Karelian traditions and the meter and thematic material found in the Kalevala. These themes include magic, mysticism, shamanism, Viking sea voyages, Christian legends, and ballads and dance songs. The older runo song tradition follows meters such as , , or . Under Swedish and German influence, a newer, round-dance tradition based on the runo emerged – the rekilaulu – and these usually follow a or time. Sámi music traditions (music from the Sámi people throughout Fennoscandia) historically were rather insular, exerting little influence on the music surrounding cultures. Sámi music is known for joiking, improvised singing particular to the performer. These songs are often sung accompanied by a drum. ### Black metal Black metal is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal music that, mostly in Europe, emerged from speed metal and thrash metal in the 1980s. A "first wave" began in the early to mid-1980s, through the work of bands such as Venom, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Mercyful Fate, and Bathory. The name black metal is taken from the 1982 album of the same name by Venom, while Bathory's 1984 self-titled release is generally regarded as the first true black metal record. A "second wave" developed in part as a reaction to the burgeoning death metal genre, and in part inspired by the Teutonic thrash metal scene. It was headed by the early Norwegian black metal scene, through artists such as Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, Immortal, Emperor, Satyricon, Thorns, Ulver, and Gorgoroth. The early Norwegian scene became infamous for murders, assaults, and numerous church arsons committed by members of the scene. Black metal lyrical themes are focused on Satan and Satanism, which many first-wave bands used with a tongue-in-cheek approach, contrary to the more serious beliefs and vehement anti-Christian sentiment of many second-wave bands. Musically, the first wave of bands were just considered to be playing heavier forms of metal – Venom was part of the new wave of British heavy metal, Celtic Frost was variously described as thrash metal or death metal, and Quorthon of Bathory simply labeled his music "heavy metal". It was not until the second wave that black metal was more clearly defined. A key development during that period was a guitar playing style featuring fast, un-muted tremolo picking or "buzz picking", introduced by Euronymous of Mayhem and Snorre Ruch ("Blackthorn") of Thorns. Other common traits for guitar playing include a high-pitched or treble guitar tone and heavy distortion. Solos and dropped tunings are rare. Overall, the guitar sound tends to be "thin and brittle" compared to other heavy metal genres, with the idea of "heaviness" conveyed through harshness and timbral density rather than low frequency. The bass guitar tends to be buried under the guitar tones, even non-existent. Drums and even vocals are likewise often mixed low, with these production techniques resulting in a blurred "wash" of sound. Vocals are usually high-pitched and raspy shrieks, screams, and snarls, and rarely gutturals and death growls are also employed. The use of keyboards is also frequent. The influence of Scandinavian folk music within Norwegian black metal is apparent in the use by some guitarists belonging to that scene of drones and modal melodies reminiscent of the folk tradition. Terje Bakken of Windir explained that ancient Nordic folk is easily integrated into metal idiom due to the "sad atmosphere" the two genres have in common. Production values within black metal are often raw and lo-fidelity. Originally, this was merely because many early second-wave bands lacked the resources to record properly, but the practice was continued by successful bands in order to identify with their genre's underground origins. Though featuring these common traits, black metal spawned diverse musical approaches and subgenres, with some bands taking more experimental and avant-garde directions. Other bands, such as Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir, embraced a more commercial sound and production aesthetic instead. ### Precursors The use of Viking themes and imagery in hard rock and heavy metal music predates the advent of Viking metal. For instance, the lyrics to Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" (1970) and "No Quarter" (1973) feature allusions to Viking voyages, violence, and exploration, the former being inspired by the band's visit to Iceland while on tour. The Swedish band Heavy Load often wrote Viking-themed songs, such as the 1978 song "Son of the Northern Light", and Eduardo Rivadavia of AllMusic claims that the 1983 song "Stronger than Evil" establishes a case for Heavy Load as the first Viking metal group. Swedish neoclassical metal guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen sometimes featured themes of hyper-masculinity, heroic warriors, and Vikings; for example, on his 1985 album Marching Out. The German band Grave Digger and American band Manowar, both of which formed in 1980, drew upon Norse myth as envisioned in Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Faithful Breath – which wore fur and horned helmet costumes – and TNT also experimented with Viking themes. Manowar adopted Viking imagery much more heavily than other bands, and became known as the "champions of the furry loincloth"; they met with ridicule even within the metal community, but attracted a cult following. Unlike the later Viking metal bands, Manowar did not bother with the historicity of popular Viking image, and did not in any way identify with the Vikings, religiously or racially. Trafford and Pluskowski explain that "the Manowar version of the Vikings owes as much to Conan the Barbarian as it does to history, saga, or Edda: What matters to Manowar is untamed masculinity, and the Vikings are for them merely the archetypal barbarian males." ## Characteristics ### Musical traits The term "Viking metal" has sometimes been used as a nickname for the 1990s Norwegian black metal scene, which was "noisy, chaotic, and often augmented by sorrowful keyboard melodies". It has also been variously described as a subgenre of black metal, albeit one that abandoned black metal's Satanic imagery, "slow black metal" with influences from Nordic folk music, straddling black metal and folk metal almost equally, or running the gamut from "folk to black to death metal". Typically, Viking metal artists rely extensively on keyboards, which are often played at a "swift, galloping pace". These artists often add "local cultural flourishes" such as traditional instruments and ethnic melodies. It is similar to folk metal, and is sometimes categorized as such, but it uses folk instruments less extensively. For vocals, Viking metal incorporates both singing and the typical black metal screams and growls. Overall, Viking metal is hard to define since, apart from certain elements like anthem-like choruses, it is not based entirely on musical features and overlaps with other metal genres, with origins in black and death metal. Some bands, such as Unleashed and Amon Amarth, play death metal, but incorporate Viking themes and thus are labeled as part of the genre. Generally, Viking metal is defined more by its thematic material and imagery than musical qualities. Rather than being a mock-up of medieval music, "it is in the band names, album titles, artwork of album covers and, especially, in the song lyrics that Viking themes are so evident." Viking metal, and the closely related style pagan metal, is more of a term or "etiquette" than a musical style. Since they are defined chiefly by lyrical focus, any musical categorizations of these two styles is controversial. Thus, Viking metal is more of a cross-genre term than a descriptor of a certain sound. Ashby and Schofield write that "The term 'Viking metal' is one of many that falls within a complex web of genres and subgenres, the precise form of which is constantly shifting, as trends and fads emerge and fade." From its origins in black metal, Viking metal "has diversified (at least in aural terms), and now covers a range of styles that run the gamut between black metal and what one might justifiably term classic rock". Starting with the album Blood Fire Death, one of the first definitive Viking metal releases, Bathory incorporated a diverse range of musical elements. While retaining the noise and chaos of previous recordings, the band took a more sorrowful and melodic approach, working in ballads based on Germanic and Norse folklore, shanty-like melodies and folk music elements such as bourdon sounds, Jew's harps, and fifes. Bathory added natural found sounds, such as ocean waves, thunder, and wild animal noises, in a style similar to that of musique concrète. Instruments were sometimes used to create onomatopoeic effects such as drum sounds imitating thunder or a sledgehammer. The songs typically featured multi-sectional formal structures, following a pattern of three instrumental sections – introduction, bridge, and finale – and two vocal sections – stanza and refrain. Enslaved, a formative band in Viking metal, performs primarily a black metal style, but has over time become more progressive. Eduardo Rivadavia described the hallmarks of Enslaved as "Viking themes, razor sharp guitars, blastbeat drums, and an ear for orchestration resulting in complex structures, bountiful harmonies and time changes." The band evolved significantly with every album since Mardraum – Beyond the Within (2000). The Faroese band Týr has a standard rock band lineup with electric instruments, but makes extensive use of traditional Faroese music in its songs. Faroese ballads typically involve unusual time signatures, most commonly or the alternative rhythms or . In an attempt to replicate these uneven signatures, Týr often places the accent on the weak beat of the bar. In songs based on old Faroese ballads, Týr usually play in harmonic or melodic minor scale or else in mixolydian mode. #### Influence from sea shanties and popular media Mulvany states that "Viking metal ... is much less concerned with traditional aural materials like instruments and melodies. Instead, Viking bands limit themselves mainly to the use of Norse mythology as a textual source, which they often augment with stylized shanty-like melodies that are meant to evoke apropos images". He elaborates: > Although the majority of Viking metal bands ... limit themselves primarily to textual borrowings, many others can be additionally classified as musically evocative of the Vikings. Unlike folk metal bands drawing from other mythologies, bands using Norse mythology as text have no musical-historical examples to augment their illusion. This has led to the creation of an ahistorical 'Viking music' that is used in tandem with the metal style to conjure up appropriate images. According to Mulvany, Viking metal draws heavily on sea shanties and media images of pirates and Vikings, an influence evident in two basic forms of the genre. The first type "is largely stepwise in motion with many repeated note figures", is frequently in minor key, and is primarily sung in unison. The second type uses an "arching ascent-descent structure" and is less dependent on lyrics, making it "more evocative of rolling waves on the open sea". As examples of the first type, Mulvany examined the structures of sea shanties such as "Drunken Sailor", the 1934 and 1996 film soundtrack versions of "Dead Man's Chest", Mario Nascimbene's "Viking" song for the 1958 film The Vikings, and the chant from Monty Python's "Spam" sketch, and found similar structures in compositions by Viking and black metal bands such as Einherjer, Mithotyn, Naglfar, and Vargevinter. The second type, that of arching ascent and descent, Mulvany noticed in compositions by Einherjer and Borknagar. The shanty influence results from stereotyping in which certain aural associations are equated with "images of sailors, sea-borne marauders, and Vikings", and "though rooted in traditional sea shanties, these aural images have been perpetuated through the media of pirate movies and television shows, and they have been extended – by association – to Vikings". Ashby and Schofield agree with Mulvany that musically, Viking metal bands generally are unconnected with a real Viking past, but instead connote a broader sense of the maritime, presuming that "this conflation of maritime contexts is a knowing one, but one nonetheless felt to be somehow evocative." Keith Fay of the folk metal band Cruachan has also noted the influence of sea shanties on Viking metal, although disparagingly. In an interview with British magazine Terrorizer, he said that there is "no real defined 'Viking music', so all these Nordic bands use 'sea shanty' type tunes to match their music. A lot of these bands, especially the bigger ones, are called folk metal but they don't really understand what real folk music is; though I know this is not true for all of them." ### Thematic and lyrical focus Thematically, Viking metal draws extensively on elements of black metal, but the lyrics and imagery are pagan and Norse rather than anti-Christian or Satanic. It combines the exaltation of violence and virility through weapons and battlefields, which is common to many death and black metal bands, with an interest in ancestral roots, particularly a pre-Christian heritage, which is expressed through Viking mythology and imagery of northern landscapes. Some bands such as Sorhin keep the Satanic elements of black metal but musically are influenced by more recent folk tunes. Visuals such as album art, band photos, website design, and merchandise all highlight the dark and violent outlook of Viking metal lyrics and themes. Seascapes and Viking ships are commonly invoked by Viking metal artists. For example, the cover to Blodhemn (1998) by Enslaved, which features the band as Viking warriors with their boat anchored behind them, or the cover to Dödsfärd (2003) by Månegarm, which features a stereotypical Viking funeral. The art on albums by Viking metal artists frequently depicts Viking Age archeological finds: Thor's hammers are especially common, but other artifacts such as Oseberg posts, runestones, and even the Sutton Hoo helmet have appeared (though this last artifact is neither Viking nor from the Viking age). Some bands incorporate far more ancient, pre-medieval imagery, such as the Finnish band Moonsorrow's use of prehistoric rock carvings and megaliths. Other Finnish bands, such as Ensiferum, Turisas, and Korpiklaani, focus on Sámi traditions and shamanism, further stretching the definition of Viking metal. Not all bands rely on Viking-related visuals or other ancestral images to aid their musical character: for instance, the members of Týr do not wear Viking costumes on stage, and only their folk-influenced music and lyrical themes distinguish them from other heavy metal bands. While heavy metal throughout its history has referenced the occult, Viking metal bands use a very specific mythology, which informs their textual choices, album imagery, and, frequently, musical compositions. Despite a whole pantheon of Norse gods to choose from, Viking metal bands typically focus on Odin, the god of war, and on Thor and his hammer. Alcohol, particularly mead, is also a common lyrical focus. Viking metal bands tend to follow one of two approaches. The first is one of romanticism and escapist ideas, where bands cultivate an image of strength and barbarism and quote passages from various poems and sagas. The second approach emphasizes historical accuracy, typically relying on Norse mythology as the sole focus of lyricism and identity. Many Viking metal bands identify first with local roots – for instance, Moonsorrow with Finland or Einherjer with Norway – with a wider northern European identity coming second. Many songs are composed in English, but Viking metal bands often write lyrics in other languages, usually of the North Germanic family – Norwegian, Old Norse, Swedish, Danish and, less commonly, Icelandic and Faroese – and also in Finnish, which is non-Germanic. Other European languages, such as German, Old High German, Latin, Dutch, Sámi languages, or Gaulish are sometimes used. Heavy metal fans around the world sometimes learn languages such as Norwegian or Finnish in order to understand the lyrics of their favorite bands and improve their appreciation of the music. Irina-Maria Manea considers this preference to sing in a native language, along with the imagery of album covers, and stage performances which often involve warrior costumes, weapons, and sometimes reenactments, a demonstration of a völkisch aspect to Viking metal. Specifically, the thematic focus of Viking metal bands conceptualizes ethnicity as uniform, unchanged history from "time immemorial," which is, state Manea, "precisely in the völkisch framework." #### Paganism and opposition to Christianity The imagery in Viking metal draws upon the material culture created during the Viking Age, but — according to Trafford and Pluskowski — it also "encompasses the broad semiotic system favored by many black and death metal bands, not least of all the exultation of violence and hyper-masculinity expressed through weapons and battlefields". In Viking metal this semiotic system is melded with an interest in ancestral roots, specifically a pre-Christian heritage, "expressed visually through Viking mythology and the aesthetics of northern landscapes". Extreme and obsessive loathing of Christianity had long been the norm for black and death metal bands, but in the 1990s Bathory and many other bands began turning away from Satanism as the primary opposition to Christianity, instead placing their faith in the Vikings and Odin. Many artists claim affiliation to the modern Pagan religion of Heathenry, treating Christianity as a foreign influence that was forcibly imposed, and therefore as a wrong to be righted. Some members of the Norwegian black metal scene were motivated to take violent action against this influence – for instance, the church burnings by black metal musicians Varg Vikernes, Samoth, Faust, and Jørn Inge Tunsberg, among others. While most bands or individuals did not go that far, an undercurrent of racism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism continues to permeate parts of the black metal scene. Many Viking metal artists, including bands such as Enslaved and Einherjer, simply express interest in Vikings and Norse mythology and entirely reject the Satanic inclination of black metal, writing almost exclusively on Norse themes, without any racist or anti-Semitic undertones. Whereas black metal during the 1990s took a militant and destructive stance toward the status quo, Viking metal looked to the past and took a populist, anti-system approach which eschewed violence. Viking metal is both pre-Christian and post-apocalyptic – it looks to a pre-Christian past and imagines a post-Christian future. While opposition to Christianity drove the formation of Viking metal, some bands that play, or have played, Viking metal, such as Slechtvalk, Drottnar, Vardøger, and Holy Blood, subscribe to Christian beliefs. David Keevill argues that the explicitly anti-Christian attitude of most Viking metal artists is an anachronistic view of the Viking Age. Keevill explains that "while bands have used [Viking mythology] as the basis for their musical existence ... the historical reality of the Viking Age (late 8th century to the 11th century) is a chequered backdrop of a multitude of belief systems and disparate political mechanisms". As an historical example, he cites the raid on Lindisfarne in 793, an event considered the beginning of the Viking Age and celebrated by Enslaved in its song "793 (Slaget Om Lindisfarne)". He contends that this attack was merely an opportunistic raid, not a concerted attack on the growing power of Christianity, and that the terms "heathen" and "pagan" historically did not necessarily mean "anti-Christian", but that the people in question did not fit under a denominational label. Furthermore, Norse religion and Christianity intermingled and influenced each other throughout the era, and Christianity was often imposed through monarchical regimes such as Harald Klak and Harald Bluetooth or conversion movements such as those initiated by Ansgar. Keevill concludes that, "It's not that bands like Amon Amarth shouldn't flout their Norse heritage, the bellicose nature of the ancestors or the kind of practices that would have taken place in far flung tribal societies, it's just that ruling out the presence of an overbearing Christian influence on the Viking Age is incredibly close-minded." #### Relationship to pagan metal Viking metal has been considered the progenitor of the pagan metal genre, with Bathory's Hammerheart as the first pagan metal recording. Weinstein writes that "it is fitting that pagan metal began with Viking metal, given that the Vikings were Europe's last Pagans, converted slowly and with reluctance to Christianity". Imke von Helden explains some key differences: "[Pagan metal] deals mainly with Pagan religions and lies in a broader context where not only Old Norse mythology is dealt with, but also Celtic myths and history, fairy tales and other elements of folklore. Traditional instruments like the violin or flute are used more often in pagan than in Viking metal music." The idea of incorporating and revering exclusively national or regional myths, stories, and tales first took root in the work of artists such as Adorned Brood, Falkenbach, Black Messiah, Enslaved or Einherjer, but, as a musical phenomenon, has grown far beyond Europe into a global trend in which artists express their affinity with an ethnic heritage. Viking metal, along with pagan and folk metal, forms part of a trend within cultural heritage movements toward wider acceptance of the heritage of ordinary and the everyday life, not just nationally significant and the iconic imagery, and also a trend to explore the outer reaches of heritage, where the definitions of heritage and heritage communities are stretched and contested. #### Masculinity The Viking image in popular understanding is that of hypermasculinity, and thus Viking metal is inherently patriarchal. While some bands, such as Kivimetsän Druidi, Storm, and Irminsul, have included female members, and female fans comprise a substantial part of Viking metal's audience, it is argued that women are subordinated within the Viking metal scene, and are rarely present in the production of Viking metal music, which can be seen as a form of "nation-building": while women may participate in the nation building process, it is still controlled by men. Within Viking metal, themes of war and masculinity predominate. Some artists, such as Burzum, link manliness with Norse tradition and gender ideals, and thus see the Viking male as representing traditional masculinity. Most of the Norse references in black metal are heroic, masculine, and militaristic in theme – Mjölnir, Odin, the Iron Cross, and berserkers and einherjar. Conversely, Jesus, though a male figure, is seen in songs such as "Jesu død" by Burzum as cold, dark, and life-extinguishing. Christianity is viewed as stigmatizing and suppressing the natural "dark" sides of men, and so, from the perspective of black metal, true masculinity is achieved through exploring the dark sides of man's nature – warfare and killing. Cultural historian Nina Witoszec found that within Norway, images of nature are often symbolic with cultural affiliation to Norway. Witoszec traces the roots of this ideal to Tacitus's German-heathen identity narrative which romanticized the Germanic people as superior through their connection with nature, and whose brutality and belligerence opposed the apathetic and decadent Roman elite. Within black metal, Norse imagery is used to build a view of natural and authentic masculinity to counter the oppressive force of the Judeo-Christian tradition. ## History ### Bathory The roots of Viking metal are generally found in Scandinavian metal, particularly the death and black metal scenes of the late 1980s. Inspired by the Viking themes used by Manowar, some bands identified with the Vikings far more completely than Manowar. At the forefront of this movement stood the Swedish band Bathory. The band's fourth album Blood Fire Death, released in 1988, includes two early examples of Viking metal – the songs "A Fine Day to Die" and "Blood Fire Death". The cover to Blood Fire Death even features The Wild Hunt of Odin, a painting by Norwegian artist Peter Nicolai Arbo which depicts the Norse god Odin on a Wild Hunt. Bathory followed up on this Viking theme in 1990 with the release of Hammerheart, a concept album fully devoted to Vikings. Like its predecessor, this album features a Viking-themed painting, this time The Funeral of a Viking by Sir Frank Dicksee. Following up this release were 1991's Twilight of the Gods, titled after Wagner's opera of the same name, and Blood on Ice, recorded in 1988–1989 but released in 1996. Hammerheart is considered a landmark that introduced the metal world to the Viking metal archetype. With this album, Quorthon, the band's founder, inspired a generation of Nordic teens, and seeded a deep anti-Christian sentiment which culminated in the violence and hate crimes committed by members of the Norwegian black metal community in the early 1990s. The artistic choices by Quorthon contain völkisch elements which emphasize a return to heathen Europe rather than a "destructive" Christianity. Quorthon later explained, in the liner notes to Blood on Ice, that his shift to Viking themes was an intentional move away from Satanism: > I came to the personal conclusion that this whole Satanic bit was a fake: a hoax created by another hoax – the Christian church, the very institution they were attempting to attack using Satanic lyrics in the first place. Since I am an avid fan of history, the natural step would be to find something in history that could replace a thing like the dark side of life. And what could be more simple and natural than to pick up on the Viking era? Being Swedish and all, having a personal relation to, and linked by blood to, that era at the same time as it was an internationally infamous moment in history, I sensed that here I might just have something. Especially well suited was it since it was an era that reached its peak just before the Christian circus came around northern Europe and Sweden in the tenth century, establishing itself as the dictatorial way of life and death. And so that Satan and hell type of soup was changed for proud and strong nordsmen, shiny blades of broadswords, dragon ships and party-'til-you-puke type of living up there in the great halls. Bathory's Viking metal features Wagnerian-style epics, ostentatious arrangements, choruses, and ambient keyboards. Mulvany notes that Bathory's 1990s work marks the beginning of a Viking-themed trend initially slow, even confusing, in formation. For example, the Austrian black metal band Abigor incorporated Viking themes and Germanic paganism in "Unleashed Axe-Age", the first track on its 1994 album Nachthymnen, but said it "should not be seen as a part of the upcoming Viking trend". According to Mulvany, "The Viking trend presaged by Abigor was actually taking place around them, and it remains more 'true' to how black metal is often defined than the folk influenced metal that followed. Its folk elements are predominantly textual or musically evocative rather than musically-historically accurate." ### Enslaved Enslaved, formed in Norway in 1991, has also been cited as the first truly Viking metal band, with the 1993 EP by the band, Hordanes Land, named as the first true Viking metal release. A review of Eld (1997) noted that "Among the countless bands who were inspired by Bathory's seminal Viking metal, arguably none were as true to its gospel as Norway's Enslaved, whose utmost commitment even extended to donning vintage Norse armor and outfits on-stage". The band's 1994 debut album Vikingligr Veldi had "many melodies being borrowed from ethnic Scandinavian folk music to lend additional authenticity to the vicious, fast-paced black metal". Inspired by Bathory, Enslaved set out to "create Viking metal devoted to retelling Norway's legends and traditions of old – not attacking Christianity by means of its own creation: Satan." Its second album Frost, also released in 1994, served as "an important release for the extreme music subgenre of Viking metal". Though the previous recordings by Enslaved all featured the same thematic material, Frost was the first album that Enslaved described as Viking metal. This album also defined the band's lyrical approach. Decibel explains that on Frost, bassist and vocalist Grutle Kjellson "knew it was time to reclaim the gods and goddesses of his ancestors, especially if it meant his version of things would inevitably clash with the Christianized fairytales so often associated with Nordic myth." ### Burzum Ideologically, Varg Vikernes's one-man project Burzum helped inspire the Viking metal scene through his strongly held racist, nationalistic, and anti-Judeo-Christian beliefs, and his longing for a return to paganism. In Trafford and Pluskowski's opinion, Vikernes' beliefs, which had culminated in the burning of several churches, including the twelfth-century Fantoft Stave Church in Bergen, reveal the confused nature of ideas about Vikings in the Norwegian black metal scene. They note, "His tastes seem originally not for the unmediated medieval itself as for J. R. R. Tolkien: he adopted the name 'Count Grishnackh', based upon an orc in The Lord of the Rings, and named Burzum after a Tolkienian word for 'darkness'." They postulate that only in retrospect did Vikernes "cloak his actions in an Oðinic garb and claim the motivation of an attempt to restore Norse paganism for his church burning". While in prison, Vikernes released the book Vargsmål, which Trafford and Pluskowski call an echoing of the Hávamál, though with "an eye on Mein Kampf". According to Trafford and Pluskowski, "proving both that it is not just the early medieval past to which he looks for inspiration, and that he will use any historical weapon at his disposal to offend Norwegian liberal opinion, it is notable that he has recently added the name Quisling to his own, and is even attempting to claim some sort of kinship to the wartime collaborator". Vikernes himself has connected the church burnings to an idea of resurgent Viking paganism. The first such burning, that of Fantoft Church on June 6, 1992, was thought by many to be related to Satanism, since the burning occurred on the sixth day of the week, on day six of the sixth month and was thus a reference to the Number of the Beast. Vikernes contends that the date June 6 was really picked because the first recorded Viking raid (upon Lindisfarne) occurred, according to Vikernes, on June 6, 793. Quorthon acknowledged that nationalist elements had always been present in the Viking metal scene, and, in the early 1990s, these elements hardened into explicit racism and anti-Semitism, particularly among Heathen adherents. By the late 1990s, Viking metal pulled back from the neo-Nazi direction toward which it was headed, once many musicians from the Oslo scene died or were jailed. ### Other pioneers Besides Bathory, Enslaved, and Burzum, several other artists are credited as pioneers of the style. The original bassist for Emperor, Håvard Ellefsen, also known as Mortiis, was "an indispensable force in the genesis of Norway's epic Viking metal sound." Despite Ellefsen's short tenure in the band, it was his musical interests that catalyzed the band to mix chaotic black metal with synthesizer melodies based on Norwegian folk music. Helheim was another major pioneer in the early scene. Helheim emerged on the scene before other bands such as Einherjer and Thyrfing, when even Enslaved was in its infancy. Not only was Helheim one of the first bands to meld black metal with Viking themed-music, but one of the first to include stylistically unconventional instruments such as horns and violins. Robert Müller of Metal Hammer Germany argues that Viking metal never solidified as a genre, and attributes this to Jormundgand, Helheim's 1995 debut album. Jormundgand included an ambitious track – "Galder" – but that song was considered incompatible with metal, and audiences, looking for a specific musical style, merged with the pagan metal scene, which had no particular "Viking" identity. Other highly influential Viking metal bands are Borknagar, Darkwoods My Betrothed, Einherjer, Ensiferum, Moonsorrow, Thyrfing, and Windir. Trafford and Pluskowski regard Einherjer, Moonsorrow, Thyrfing, and Windir as the "most influential" Viking metal bands, with Einherjer's album covers, which include many images of Viking artifacts, giving Einherjer the most Viking feel of all bands except Enslaved. Einherjer's artwork spans the full chronology of Viking art: 8th- and 9th-century Oseberg to 11th- and 12th-century Urnes. ### Amon Amarth and Unleashed Amon Amarth and Unleashed's music could be described as death metal, but it incorporates Viking lyrical themes and thus the bands are considered to have broadened the scope of Viking metal. While Norse myths were mostly important for black metal, especially the early 1990s Norwegian scene, as well as for the younger pagan metal genre, bands as the Swedish Unleashed started fitting these myths into death metal even before Amon Amarth appeared. Unleashed set a precedent for many of the coming black metal bands by shying away from the common death metal theme of gore and instead focusing on pre-Christian Swedish heathenism, particularly the Viking Age and old Norse religion. Amon Amarth and Unleashed resist the Viking metal label. Johan Hegg of Amon Amarth stated, "It's weird to label a band after the lyrical content because, in that case, Iron Maiden is a Viking metal band, Black Sabbath is a Viking metal band, Led Zeppelin is a Viking metal band." Johnny Hedlund of Unleashed maintains that the band has always played and always will play death metal, commenting, "The Viking lyrics you will find on about three to five songs on every Unleashed album from 1991 and on. I don't think that fact alone re-defines our style in some way." ### Spread outside the Nordic countries Some members of the Viking metal scene believe that it is impossible for someone to be a Viking unless they themselves are of northern European descent. According to Trafford and Pluskowski, the members of practically all Viking metal bands claim Viking ancestry, and after its inception in Scandinavia, Viking metal spread to areas historically settled by Vikings, including England, Russia, and Normandy. Viking metal bands have even formed in the United States and Canada, with their members claiming Viking descent either directly from Scandinavia or through England. The scene also spread to other parts of Northern Europe in areas united by a common Germanic heritage, such as Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. For instance, the Austrian band Valhalla makes extensive use of Viking iconography, including horned helmets. Another Austrian example is Amestigon, which on the cover of its promotional album Remembering Ancient Origins depicts a wood carved scene of Sigurd killing Regin, an image taken from a panel held in Hylestad Stave Church. One of the first non-Nordic Viking metal bands was the German project Falkenbach. Formed in 1989 and primarily the work of front-man Vratyas Vakyas, Falkenbach performs a mixture of black metal and folk music, with lyrics drawing from Western and Northern European mythologies, religions, and folk traditions. The Dutch bands Heidevolk, Slechtvalk, and Fenris have also been labeled as Viking metal, though Heidevolk's former vocalist Joris Boghtdrincker claims that Heidevolk has never tried to "play the Viking card or the Pan-Germanic card", instead choosing to write about local Dutch history. The Swiss band Eluveitie jokingly calls its music "the new wave of folk metal", which vocalist Chrigel Glanzmann explains was because the "whole folk metal thing was still quite new back then, and the scene and the music press was looking for new labels for that kind of music, so they came up with Forest Metal, Viking Metal, Heathen Metal, Pagan Metal, blah blah blah, and we just felt like it was really really ridiculous." Catherine Hoad finds the issue of national and racial identity central to Viking metal. For instance, she writes that when Trafford and Pluskowski claim that Manowar could not claim religious or racial identity with the Vikings when the band had a bandleader with the "'less than wholly Scandinavian name of Joey di Maio', [Trafford and Pluskowski] are approaching a more complex and racially-charged issue than their offhandedness would suggest." While Viking imagery may be readily appropriated, according to Hoad the definition of a "true" Viking is quite rigid, a rigidity which non-Nordic, and especially non-White, musicians must contend with. As an example, she cites the Brazilian band Viking Throne, which claims legitimacy through European ancestry and historical references to explorations of South America by Nordic countries, and quotes their front-man, Count Nidhogg: "Some people understand perfectly that it doesn't matter where you live, what's really important is your heritage and ancestry. Even living in a South American country as Brazil we all have European blood." Hoad argues that Viking Throne illustrates the cultural importance of claiming Viking ancestry, a culture that operates on largely geographic lines. In contrast to Viking Throne, she cites the band Slechtvalk, which is well known for its brand of Christian Viking metal, but is rarely criticized as inauthentic by the scene. Hoad speculates that the European ethnicity of the band is enough to compensate for its otherwise counter-intuitive music. There is also Cygnus, a Viking folk Rock / metal band from Colombia. ### Influence on pagan metal According to Weinstein, "Viking metal has travelled further than any Viking ship. Self-defined pagan metal bands who describe their music as Viking metal can be found in the United States, Brazil and Uruguay, among other places." The sensationalism of the early Norwegian black metal scene might be responsible for some of this popularity, but Weinstein considers the genre's greatest influence to be "the inspiration it has given to others to explore their own roots". This impact was particularly strong in the Baltic states, where Viking metal influenced the development of a distinct pagan metal scene known as "Baltic war metal". The Lithuanian band Obtest, formed as a black metal band in 1993 with Lithuanian lyrics, birthed the war metal scene with the 1997 album Tūkstantmetis. Michael F. Strmiska comments that despite the claim that Scandinavia was home to the last pagans in Europe, within the scene: "A point of particular pride is the knowledge that Lithuania was the last country in all of Europe to officially abandon its native Pagan traditions and convert to Christianity in 1387." Another Baltic band influenced by Viking metal is the Latvian project Skyforger, which composes its lyrics in the Latvian language. A third example of the influence of Viking metal on pagan metal is the national socialist black metal band Graveland from Poland, which on its second album, Thousand Swords, released in 1995, featured a variety of folk styles mixed in with the band's black metal sound, and introduced lyrics about Polish history and Slavic gods. Viking metal has also influenced the Russian Rodnoverie movement, particularly the texts of Varg Vikernes, many of which have been translated into Russian. Though some of his readers within Rodnoverie distance themselves from the racism and political statements within Vikernes' work, other followers have embraced racist and National Socialist ideas. Contemporaneous to the rise of Viking metal has been the emergence of Celtic metal in Ireland, France, and even Germany, a style which sounds essentially like Viking metal, apart from the addition of harps, but with lyrics celebrating Celtic gods and myths. ## See also - List of Viking metal bands - Viking rock - Medieval metal - Neo-Medieval music - Norse mythology in popular culture - Neo-medievalism
9,577,500	Exosome complex	1,172,583,017	Protein complex that degrades RNA	[ "Nucleic acids", "Protein complexes", "RNA", "Ribonucleases" ]	The exosome complex (or PM/Scl complex, often just called the exosome) is a multi-protein intracellular complex capable of degrading various types of RNA (ribonucleic acid) molecules. Exosome complexes are found in both eukaryotic cells and archaea, while in bacteria a simpler complex called the degradosome carries out similar functions. The core of the exosome contains a six-membered ring structure to which other proteins are attached. In eukaryotic cells, the exosome complex is present in the cytoplasm, nucleus, and especially the nucleolus, although different proteins interact with the exosome complex in these compartments regulating the RNA degradation activity of the complex to substrates specific to these cell compartments. Substrates of the exosome include messenger RNA, ribosomal RNA, and many species of small RNAs. The exosome has an exoribonucleolytic function, meaning it degrades RNA starting at one end (the 3′ end in this case), and in eukaryotes also an endoribonucleolytic function, meaning it cleaves RNA at sites within the molecule. Several proteins in the exosome are the target of autoantibodies in patients with specific autoimmune diseases (especially the PM/Scl overlap syndrome) and some antimetabolic chemotherapies for cancer function by blocking the activity of the exosome. In addition, mutations in exosome component 3 cause pontocerebellar hypoplasia and spinal motor neuron disease. ## Discovery The exosome was first discovered as an RNase in 1997 in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, an often-used model organism. Not long after, in 1999, it was realized that the exosome was in fact the yeast equivalent of an already described complex in human cells called the PM/Scl complex, which had been identified as an autoantigen in patients with certain autoimmune diseases years earlier (see below). Purification of this "PM/Scl complex" allowed the identification of more human exosome proteins and eventually the characterization of all components in the complex. In 2001, the increasing amount of genome data that had become available allowed the prediction of exosome proteins in archaea, although it would take another 2 years before the first exosome complex from an archaeal organism was purified. ## Structure ### Core proteins The core of the complex has a ring structure consisting of six proteins that all belong to the same class of RNases, the RNase PH-like proteins. In archaea there are two different PH-like proteins (called Rrp41 and Rrp42), each present three times in an alternating order. Eukaryotic exosome complexes have six different proteins that form the ring structure. Of these six eukaryotic proteins, three resemble the archaeal Rrp41 protein and the other three proteins are more similar to the archaeal Rrp42 protein. Located on top of this ring are three proteins that have an S1 RNA binding domain (RBD). Two proteins in addition have a K-homology (KH) domain. In eukaryotes, three different "S1" proteins are bound to the ring, whereas in archaea either one or two different "S1" proteins can be part of the exosome (although there are always three S1 subunits attached to the complex). This ring structure is very similar to that of the proteins RNase PH and PNPase. In bacteria, the protein RNase PH, which is involved in tRNA processing, forms a hexameric ring consisting of six identical RNase PH proteins. In the case of PNPase, which is a phosphorolytic RNA-degrading protein found in bacteria and the chloroplasts and mitochondria of some eukaryotic organisms, two RNase PH domains, and both an S1 and KH RNA binding domain are part of a single protein, which forms a trimeric complex that adopts a structure almost identical to that of the exosome. Because of this high similarity in both protein domains and structure, these complexes are thought to be evolutionarily related and have a common ancestor. The RNase PH-like exosome proteins, PNPase and RNase PH all belong to the RNase PH family of RNases and are phosphorolytic exoribonucleases, meaning that they use inorganic phosphate to remove nucleotides from the 3' end of RNA molecules. ### Associated proteins Besides these nine core exosome proteins, two other proteins often associate with the complex in eukaryotic organisms. One of these is Rrp44, a hydrolytic RNase, which belongs to the RNase R family of hydrolytic exoribonucleases (nucleases that use water to cleave the nucleotide bonds). In addition to being an exoribonucleolytic enzyme, Rrp44 also has endoribonucleolytic activity, which resides in a separate domain of the protein. In yeast, Rrp44 is associated with all exosome complexes and has a crucial role in the activity of the yeast exosome complex. While a human homologue of the protein exists, no evidence was found for a long time that its human homologue was associated with the human exosome complex. In 2010, however, it was discovered that humans have three Rrp44 homologues and two of these can be associated with the exosome complex. These two proteins most likely degrade different RNA substrates due to their different cellular localization, with one being localized in the cytoplasm (DIS3L1) and the other in the nucleus (DIS3). `The second common associated protein is called Rrp6 (in yeast) or PM/Scl-100 (in human). Like Rrp44, this protein is a hydrolytic exoribonuclease, but in this case of the RNase D protein family. The protein PM/Scl-100 is most commonly part of exosome complexes in the nucleus of cells, but can form part of the cytoplasmic exosome complex as well.` ### Regulatory proteins Apart from these two tightly bound protein subunits, many proteins interact with the exosome complex in both the cytoplasm and nucleus of cells. These loosely associated proteins may regulate the activity and specificity of the exosome complex. In the cytoplasm, the exosome interacts with AU-rich element (ARE) binding proteins (e.g. KRSP and TTP), which can promote or prevent degradation of mRNAs. The nuclear exosome associates with RNA binding proteins (e.g. MPP6/Mpp6 and C1D/Rrp47 in humans/yeast) that are required for processing certain substrates. In addition to single proteins, other protein complexes interact with the exosome. One of those is the cytoplasmic Ski complex, which includes an RNA helicase (Ski2) and is involved in mRNA degradation. In the nucleus, the processing of rRNA and snoRNA by the exosome is mediated by the TRAMP complex, which contains both RNA helicase (Mtr4) and polyadenylation (Trf4) activity. ## Function ### Enzymatic function As stated above, the exosome complex contains many proteins with ribonuclease domains. The exact nature of these ribonuclease domains has changed across evolution from bacterial to archaeal to eukaryotic complexes as various activities have been gained and lost. The exosome is primarily a 3'-5' exoribonuclease, meaning that it degrades RNA molecules from their 3' end. Exoribonucleases contained in exosome complexes are either phosphorolytic (the RNase PH-like proteins) or, in eukaryotes, hydrolytic (the RNase R and RNase D domain proteins). The phosphorolytic enzymes use inorganic phosphate to cleave the phosphodiester bonds – releasing nucleotide diphosphates. The hydrolytic enzymes use water to hydrolyse these bonds – releasing nucleotide monophosphates. In archaea, the Rrp41 subunit of the complex is a phosphorolytic exoribonuclease. Three copies of this protein are present in the ring and are responsible for the activity of the complex. In eukaryotes, none of the RNase PH subunits have retained this catalytic activity, meaning the core ring structure of the human exosome has no enzymatically active protein. Despite this loss of catalytic activity, the structure of the core exosome is highly conserved from archaea to humans, suggesting that the complex performs a vital cellular function. In eukaryotes, the absence of the phosphorolytic activity is compensated by the presence of the hydrolytic enzymes, which are responsible for the ribonuclease activity of the exosome in such organisms. As stated above, the hydrolytic proteins Rrp6 and Rrp44 are associated with the exosome in yeast and in humans, besides Rrp6, two different proteins, Dis3 and Dis3L1 can be associated at the position of the yeast Rrp44 protein. Although originally the S1 domain proteins were thought to have 3'-5' hydrolytic exoribonuclease activity as well, the existence of this activity has recently been questioned and these proteins might have just a role in binding substrates prior to their degradation by the complex. ### Substrates The exosome is involved in the degradation and processing of a wide variety of RNA species. In the cytoplasm of cells, it is involved in the turn-over of messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules. The complex can degrade mRNA molecules that have been tagged for degradation because they contain errors, through interactions with proteins from the nonsense mediated decay or non-stop decay pathways. In alternative fashion, mRNAs are degraded as part of their normal turnover. Several proteins that stabilize or destabilize mRNA molecules through binding to AU-rich elements in the 3' untranslated region of mRNAs interact with the exosome complex. In the nucleus, the exosome is required for the correct processing of several small nuclear RNA molecules. Finally, the nucleolus is the compartment where the majority of the exosome complexes are found. There it plays a role in the processing of the 5.8S ribosomal RNA (the first identified function of the exosome) and of several small nucleolar RNAs. Although most cells have other enzymes that can degrade RNA, either from the 3' or from the 5' end of the RNA, the exosome complex is essential for cell survival. When the expression of exosome proteins is artificially reduced or stopped, for example by RNA interference, growth stops and the cells eventually die. Both the core proteins of the exosome complex, as well as the two main associated proteins, are essential proteins. Bacteria do not have an exosome complex; however, similar functions are performed by a simpler complex that includes the protein PNPase, called the degradosome. The exosome is a key complex in cellular RNA quality control. Unlike prokaryotes, eukaryotes possess highly active RNA surveillance systems that recognise unprocessed and mis-processed RNA-protein complexes (such as ribosomes) prior to their exit from the nucleus. It is presumed that this system prevents aberrant complexes from interfering with important cellular processes such as protein synthesis. In addition to RNA processing, turnover and surveillance activities, the exosome is important for the degradation of so-called cryptic unstable transcripts (CUTs) that are produced from thousands of loci within the yeast genome. The importance of these unstable RNAs and their degradation are still unclear, but similar RNA species have also been detected in human cells. ## Disease ### Autoimmunity The exosome complex is the target of autoantibodies in patients with various autoimmune diseases. These autoantibodies are mainly found in people with the PM/Scl overlap syndrome, an autoimmune disease in which patients have symptoms from both scleroderma and either polymyositis or dermatomyositis. Autoantibodies can be detected in the serum of patients by a variety of assays. In the past, the most commonly used methods were double immunodiffusion using calf thymus extracts, immunofluorescence on HEp-2 cells or immunoprecipitation from human cell extracts. In immunoprecipitation assays with sera from anti-exosome positive sera, a distinctive set of proteins is precipitated. Already years before the exosome complex was identified, this pattern was termed the PM/Scl complex. Immunofluorescence using sera from these patients usually shows a typical staining of the nucleolus of cells, which sparked the suggestion that the antigen recognized by autoantibodies might be important in ribosome synthesis. More recently, recombinant exosome proteins have become available and these have been used to develop line immunoassays (LIAs) and enzyme linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) for detecting these antibodies. In these diseases, antibodies are mainly directed against two of the proteins of the complex, called PM/Scl-100 (the RNase D like protein) and PM/Scl-75 (one of the RNase PH like proteins from the ring) and antibodies recognizing these proteins are found in approximately 30% of patients with the PM/Scl overlap syndrome. Although these two proteins are the main target of the autoantibodies, other exosome subunits and associated proteins (like C1D) can be targeted in these patients. At the current time, the most sensitive way to detect these antibodies is by using a peptide, derived from the PM/Scl-100 protein, as the antigen in an ELISA, instead of complete proteins. By this method, autoantibodies are found in up to 55% of patients with the PM/Scl overlap syndrome, but they can also be detected in patients with either scleroderma, polymyositis, or dermatomyositis alone. As the autobodies are found mainly in patients that have characteristics of several different autoimmune diseases, the clinical symptoms of these patients can vary widely. The symptoms that are seen most often are the typical symptoms of the individual autoimmune diseases and include Raynaud's phenomenon, arthritis, myositis and scleroderma. Treatment of these patients is symptomatic and is similar to treatment for the individual autoimmune disease, often involving either immunosuppressive or immunomodulating drugs. ### Cancer treatment The exosome has been shown to be inhibited by the antimetabolite fluorouracil, a drug used in the chemotherapy of cancer. It is one of the most successful drugs for treating solid tumors. In yeast cells treated with fluorouracil, defects were found in the processing of ribosomal RNA identical to those seen when the activity of the exosome was blocked by molecular biological strategies. Lack of correct ribosomal RNA processing is lethal to cells, explaining the antimetabolic effect of the drug. ### Neurological disorders Mutations in exosome component 3 cause infantile spinal motor neuron disease, cerebellar atrophy, progressive microcephaly and profound global developmental delay, consistent with pontocerebellar hypoplasia type 1B (PCH1B; MIM 614678). ## List of subunits - In archaea several exosome proteins are present in multiple copies, to form the full core of the exosome complex. - In humans, two different proteins can be associated in this position. In the cytoplasm of cells, Dis3L1 is associated with the exosome, whereas in the nucleus, Dis3 can bind to the core complex. - Contributes to the ribonucleolytic activity of the complex. ## See also - The proteasome, the main protein degrading machinery of cells - The spliceosome, a complex involved in RNA splicing, that also contains an RNA binding ring structure
13,483,595	Authentic Science Fiction	1,150,284,868	British science fiction magazine (1951–1957)	[ "1951 establishments in the United Kingdom", "1957 disestablishments in the United Kingdom", "Biweekly magazines published in the United Kingdom", "Defunct science fiction magazines published in the United Kingdom", "Magazines disestablished in 1957", "Magazines established in 1951", "Magazines published in London", "Monthly magazines published in the United Kingdom", "Science fiction magazines established in the 1950s" ]	Authentic Science Fiction was a British science fiction magazine published in the 1950s that ran for 85 issues under three editors: Gordon Landsborough, H.J. Campbell, and E.C. Tubb. The magazine was published by Hamilton and Co. in London and began in 1951 as a series of novels appearing every two weeks; by the summer it became a monthly magazine, with readers' letters and an editorial page, though fiction content was still restricted to a single novel. In 1952 short fiction began to appear alongside the novels, and within two more years it completed the transformation into a science fiction magazine. Authentic published little in the way of important or ground-breaking fiction, though it did print Charles L. Harness's "The Rose", which later became well-regarded. The poor rates of pay—£1 per 1,000 words—prevented the magazine from attracting the best writers. During much of its life it competed against three other moderately successful British science fiction magazines, as well as the American science fiction magazine market. Hamilton folded the magazine in October 1957, because they needed cash to finance an investment in the UK rights to an American best-selling novel. ## Publishing history In 1950, science fiction (sf) magazines had been published successfully in North America for over twenty years, but little progress had been made in establishing British equivalents. The bulk of British sf was published as paperback books, rather than magazines; a situation opposite of that in the US. Several short-lived magazines had come and gone, both before and after the war. John Spencer launched four very poor quality juvenile magazines in 1950, which continued into the mid-1950s, while one magazine, New Worlds, had survived since 1946. Since 1939, Atlas, a British publisher, had been producing a reprint edition of Astounding Science Fiction, one of the most well-regarded American sf magazines. During the war the contents had often been cut severely, and the schedule had not been regular, but it was reputed to sell 40,000 copies a month. This was enough to attract the attention of Hamilton & Co., a British publisher looking for new markets. In 1949, Hamilton hired Gordon Landsborough as an editor. Landsborough did his best to improve the quality of the science fiction he was publishing, and was allowed to offer £1 per 1,000 words for selected material. He also was joined at Hamilton by H.J. Campbell, who was hired as a technical editor. Campbell was a London science fiction fan; he had been brought on by Hulton Press (publisher of the very successful comic the Eagle) to create a science fiction magazine, but the project had been abandoned before seeing print. By the start of 1951, Hamilton's science fiction titles were being published every two weeks. On 1 January 1951, Hamilton published Mushroom Men from Mars, by Lee Stanton, which was a pseudonym for Richard Conroy. A banner was added to the base of the cover reading "Authentic Science Fiction Series"; the same banner appeared on the 15 January novel, Reconnoitre Krellig II, by Jon J. Deegan, also a pseudonym, this time for Robert G. Sharp. With the next book, Roy Sheldon's Gold Men of Aureus, Landsborough changed the banner to read "Science Fiction Fortnightly No. 3", thinking that the caption might help sales. In addition to the banner, a contents page (including a date and issue number), a letter column, an editorial, and an advertisement for subscriptions were inserted. According to Landsborough, the banner was only intended to indicate the publishing schedule to readers, but combined with the other changes the appearance became much more magazine-like. These changes established the sequence in the minds of readers and collectors, and retroactively determined that Mushroom Men from Mars had been the first in the series: the first two issues had carried no issue number. Issue 3 was also the first issue to carry the editors' names: Landsborough used the pseudonym L.G. Holmes ("Holmes" was his middle name) for his editing role on the magazine. The caption did apparently help sales: Landsborough subsequently commented that while Hamilton's other titles were selling perhaps 15,000 copies, Authentic managed to sell 30,000. After the banners were in place, Hamilton proposed launching a monthly sf magazine. Landsborough was concerned about the workload, and also felt it would be difficult to find enough good material; Hamilton refused to increase the pay rate, which was not high enough to attract the best stories. A compromise was reached, and Authentic was born as a monthly magazine in paperback format, with a single novel and a short editorial feature in each issue, plus an occasional short story. The eighth issue was the last on the fortnightly schedule. Issues 9–12 were titled "Science Fiction Monthly" in the footer of the cover. In mid-1951, Landsborough left Hamilton, and Campbell replaced him as editor of Authentic with the thirteenth issue, which was also the first one on which the title changed to "Authentic Science Fiction". Under Campbell Authentic improved somewhat, and continued its metamorphosis into a magazine, with additional non-fiction writing, and short fiction in addition to the main novel in each issue. Hamilton also ran a science fiction paperback imprint, Panther Books, which would go on to become one of the leading British sf houses. By 1953 the British sf market was going through a metamorphosis similar to the one going in the US at the same time: poor quality sf markets were failing, and the result was a reduced but active market, with four magazines: Authentic, New Worlds, Science Fantasy, and Nebula Science Fiction. At the end of 1955 Campbell decided to give up editing in favour of his scientific career as a research chemist. He was replaced from the February 1956 issue by E.C. Tubb, who remained editor to the end of the magazine's life. Tubb had contributed a great deal of material to the magazine under various pseudonyms, often amounting to more than half of an issue's fiction, and he later recalled that Campbell's way of hiring him as editor was to say to him, "As you're practically writing it, you may as well edit it." The quality of material submitted to Tubb was "dreadful", in the words of sf historian Michael Ashley, and included many stories that had previously been rejected by Campbell: he was able to recognize these because Campbell had kept a log of all submissions. One story was rejected that had been plagiarized from one that had appeared twelve years earlier in Astounding Science Fiction. Tubb's overall acceptance rate was about one in twenty-five submissions. As a result, he found it difficult to keep standards up, often finding himself forced to write material under pseudonyms to fill an issue. In early 1957, Tubb persuaded Hamilton to switch the magazine from pocket-book to digest size format, in the hope that this would improve the magazine's visibility on bookstalls. The circulation did indeed rise, to about 14,000 copies per month—a surprisingly low figure given Landsborough's assertion that Authentic had been selling 30,000 copies in the early days. However, later that year, Hamilton made the decision to invest a substantial sum in the UK paperback rights of an American best-seller: it is not known for certain which book this was, but it is thought to have been Evan Hunter's The Blackboard Jungle. Hamilton could no longer afford to have cash tied up in Authentic, and in the summer of 1957 Tubb was given two months to close down the magazine, printing stories that had already been paid for. The last issue was dated October 1957. ## Contents and reception For the first twenty-five issues, Authentic ran a full novel in every issue, but no other fiction, though there were various non-fiction departments such as "Projectiles" (readers' letters), an editorial, book reviews, fanzine reviews, and science related articles, quizzes, and news columns. In issue 26, dated October 1952, the first installment of Frontier Legion, a serial by Sydney J. Bounds, appeared. With issue 29, the full-length novel, Immortal's Playthings by William F. Temple, was accompanied by a short story, Ray Bradbury's "Welcome, Brothers!" as well as part four of Frontier Legion. The serial was stretched out over six issues by printing scarcely more than a dozen pages in each installment; it finally completed in issue 31. With issue 36 (August 1953), the cover text changed from advertising a "Full-length Novel" to "Full-length Story"; the "featured story", as it was called in the contents page, was still the longest piece of fiction in the issue, but was no longer necessarily even close to novel length. Issue 41, for example, ran Richard deMille's "The Phoenix Nest" as the lead story, with fewer than forty pages of text. Finally, in issue 60 (August 1955), the word "feature" was removed from the contents page, and with it the last vestige of the origin of the magazine as a series of novels. The early novels published by Hamilton were of generally poor quality. Michael Ashley, a historian of sf, described the first issue, Lee Stanton's Mushroom Men of Mars as "of abysmal quality", and the third, Roy Sheldon's Gold Men of Aureus as "atrocious". However, Campbell contributed some better work, beginning with Phantom Moon, under the house name Roy Sheldon, which appeared in issue 6, dated 15 March 1951; his first novel under his own name was World in a Test Tube, which appeared in issue 8, dated 15 April 1951. He continued to write for the magazine after he became editor—his work has been described as "enjoyable", though "not especially sophisticated". Tubb was also a regular contributor, often under house names, which according to Landsborough were used by Hamilton to prevent authors gaining name recognition under a pseudonym and then taking that name to another publisher. Regulars in the magazine included Sydney J. Bounds, William F. Temple, Bryan Berry, and Ken Bulmer. At the start of 1953, Authentic began to include material that had been previously published in the US; this practice ceased later that year, but began again in 1956, and led to the reprinting of material by well-known names such as Isaac Asimov, whose 1951 story "Ideals Die Hard" was reprinted in issue 78, dated March 1957. Other well-known names that appeared in Authentic included Brian Aldiss and John Brunner. Campbell had encouraged science articles during his tenure, but under Tubb's editorship these were gradually eliminated. Perhaps the most notable story Authentic published was Charles L. Harness's "The Rose", which appeared in the March 1953 issue. Other than this, Authentic published little of note: the Nicholls/Clute Encyclopedia of SF commented that it "seldom published stories of the first rank", specifically excepting Harness's "The Rose". David Kyle, in his Pictorial History of Science Fiction, states that Campbell improved the magazine, making it "remarkably good", and sf expert Donald Tuck's opinion was that it eventually achieved "a good standard", but in Michael Ashley's opinion, the magazine "sadly lacked originality", and ran fiction that was "stereotyped and forced, frequently because Campbell had to rely on the same small band of regulars to supply the bulk of the fiction". The cover artwork was initially poor. The very first issue has been described as "British pulp at its most infantile", but the covers began to improve from mid-1953, with a series of covers on the conquest of space and on astronomical themes by John Richards (the art editor) which Ashley describes as "among the most pleasing on any British SF magazine". Josh Kirby, now well known for his Discworld art, contributed seven covers, beginning with issue 61 in September 1955. There were also many covers on astronomical themes: these were clearly influenced by the US artist Chesley Bonestell, and were fairly successful. ## Bibliographic details Authentic was pocket book size (7.25 × 4.75 inches) for most of its life, changing to digest size (7.5 × 5.5 inches) for the last eight issues. The issue numbering was consecutive from 1 to 85, with no volume numbers. The first issue had a publication date of 1 January 1951, and the first eight issues had publication dates of the 1st and 15th of each month. From the ninth issue to the end Authentic maintained a completely regular monthly schedule except for the omission of the October 1956 issue. The publication date was given in the magazine as the 15th of each month from issue 9 through issue 73; thereafter the date was just given as the month and year. The price began as 1/6 (one shilling and six pence); the price was raised to two shillings with issue 60, August 1955, and stayed at that price until the end of the run. Interior artwork was not used for the first issues, which contained no fiction other than a single novel; illustrations began to appear with issue 29. Tubb announced in issue 85, which turned out to be the last issue, that he had dropped all interior artwork. The title of the magazine changed several times: The first six issues were 132 pages, with the page count dropped to 116 for issues 7 through 25. Issue 26 saw the page count return to 132. The cover layout for all these issues remained essentially the same, despite title changes. With issue 29 a layout using a yellow inverted "L" to frame the cover picture was introduced, and the page count was increased to 148. Another cover redesign with issue 39 saw the yellow "L" removed, and the page count went up again to 164 with issue 41, then back to 148 with issue 47. The cover design varied further, with different title fonts; the page count went back to 132 with issue 57, then returned to 164 from issue 60 through issue 77, the last in pocket-book format. The eight issues in digest format all had 132 pages. The editors were: - L.G. Holmes (pseudonym for Gordon Landsborough), issues 1–27 (27 issues) - H.J. Campbell, issues 28–65 (38 issues) - E.C. Tubb, issues 66–85 (20 issues)
8,652,034	Fountain of Time	1,162,892,314	Sculpture by Lorado Taft in Chicago	[ "1920 sculptures", "Buildings and structures completed in 1922", "Concrete sculptures in Illinois", "Fountains in Illinois", "Landmarks of the War of 1812", "Monuments and memorials in Chicago", "Outdoor sculptures in Chicago", "Sculptures by Lorado Taft", "Sculptures of children in Illinois", "South Side, Chicago", "Stone sculptures in Illinois", "United Kingdom–United States relations" ]	Fountain of Time, or simply Time, is a sculpture by Lorado Taft, measuring 126 feet 10 inches (38.66 m) in length, situated at the western edge of the Midway Plaisance within Washington Park in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. The sculpture is inspired by Henry Austin Dobson's poem "Paradox of Time". Its 100 figures passing before Father Time were created as a monument to the 100 years of peace between the United States and the United Kingdom following the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. Father Time faces the 100 from across a water basin. The fountain's water was turned on in 1920, and the sculpture was dedicated in 1922. It is a contributing structure to the Washington Park United States Registered Historic District, which is a National Register of Historic Places listing. Part of a larger beautification plan for the Midway Plaisance, Time was constructed from a new type of molded, steel-reinforced concrete that was claimed to be more durable and cheaper than alternatives. It was said to be the first of any kind of finished work of art made of concrete. Before the completion of Millennium Park in 2004, it was considered the most important art installation in the Chicago Park District. Time is one of several Chicago works of art funded by Benjamin Ferguson's trust fund. Time has undergone several restorations because of deterioration and decline caused by natural and urban elements. During the late 1990s and the first few years of the 21st century it underwent repairs that corrected many of the problems caused by these earlier restorations. Although extensive renovation of the sculpture was completed as recently as 2005, the supporters of Time continue to seek resources for additional lighting, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation has nominated it for further funding. ## Planning Time, along with many other public works in Chicago, was funded by Benjamin Ferguson's 1905 gift of \$1 million (\$ million today), to a charitable trust formed to "memorialize events in American History". Lorado Taft initially conceived a sculpture carved from granite; an alternative plan was to have it chiseled out of Georgia marble, which it is estimated would have cost \$30,000 (\$) a year for five years. The planned work was intended as part of a Midway beautification which was to include a stream, lagoons, and a series of bridges: a Bridge of Arts at Woodlawn Avenue, a Bridge of Religion at the intersection of Ellis Avenue, and a Bridge of Science at Dorchester Avenue (formerly Madison Avenue). As part of the plan, the two ends of the Midway were to be connected by a canal in the deep depressions linking lagoons in Jackson and Washington Parks. In 1907, Taft had won the first commission from the Ferguson Fund to create the Fountain of the Great Lakes at the Art Institute of Chicago. Immediately afterwards, inspired by Daniel Burnham's "Make no little plans" quote, he begin lobbying for a grand Midway beautification plan. In 1912, Art Institute Trustee Frank G. Logan formally presented Taft's plans to the fund's administrators at the Art Institute of Chicago. Taft's proposed Midway Plaisance beautification plan included two possible commemoration themes. His first choice was to honor the memory of the World's Columbian Exposition that had been held in Jackson Park in 1893. His alternative was to commemorate the centennial of the 1814 Treaty of Ghent "marking a century of perfect understanding between England and America". Since other plans to commemorate the Exposition were under way, the second theme choice was adopted as the justification for a second Taft commission from the Ferguson Fund. Contemporary newspaper accounts anticipated that Taft's entire Midway beautification plan would be approved easily. Taft's initial commission from the trust was limited to the creation of a full-sized plaster model of Fountain of Time, under a five-year \$10,000 (\$) annual installment contract signed on February 6, 1913. This would enable the model to be evaluated in 1918. Taft first created a 20-foot (6.1 m) quarter-scale model which received the Trustees' approval in May 1915. He eventually produced his full-scale plaster model, 100 feet (30.5 m) in width peaking in the center, with an equestrian warrior and a robed model of Father Time with a height of 20 feet (6.1 m). The installation of this model near its intended location was delayed by Taft's World War I service with the Y.M.C.A. in France as part of a corps of entertainers and lecturers, but was completed in 1920. However, Taft's wider vision of a Chicago school of sculpture, analogous to other philosophical Chicago schools such as the contemporaneous Chicago school of architecture style, had lost momentum after the 1913 dedication of his Fountain of the Great Lakes. The Beaux Arts style had become dated; instead of funding Taft's large-scale Midway Plaisance beautification plan, and providing the originally planned granite, bronze or Georgia marble materials, the trust only allocated sufficient funds and support for a concrete sculpture. ## Location and installation Time is in the Chicago Park District, in the Washington Park community area on Chicago's South Side, near the Midway Plaisance. This location, adjoining the University of Chicago campus directly to the East, makes the sculpture a contributing structure to the Washington Park federal Registered Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Time is considered to be the most important piece of monumental art in the Park District, which hosts over 100 art works. Its importance stems from its sculptor, its message, the era in which it was created, and the design of its reflecting pool by Howard Van Doren Shaw. Robert Jones, director of design and construction for the Art Institute of Chicago at the time, stated in 1999 that Time was the first finished art piece to be made of any type of concrete. The sculpture is located a few blocks from Taft's studio, the Lorado Taft Midway Studios, now a Chicago Landmark and National Historic Landmark, located at 60th Street and Ingleside Avenue. Other notable sculptures nearby include Henry Moore's National Historic Landmark Nuclear Energy, which is on the site of the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago. Jackson Park, connected to Washington Park and Time by the Midway Plaisance, hosts the Chicago Landmark Statue of The Republic; at one time the Midway Plaisance, Jackson Park and Washington Park were jointly known as "South Park". There is little agreement on the dimensions of Time, with various sources describing it as between 102 and 127 feet (31.1 and 38.7 m) long. One of the few precise estimates describes it as 126 feet 10 inches (38.7 m) long, 23 feet 6 inches (7.2 m) wide and 24 feet (7.3 m) tall. The sources are often unclear about whether they are describing the width of the reflecting pool from exterior wall to exterior wall, the width of the water within the reflecting pool's interior walls, the width of the base of the sculpted mass of humanity, the width of the sculpted masses themselves, or the width of the parcel of land upon which Time is built. Water began running in the completed sculpture on September 1, 1920, although it was not dedicated to the city until November 15, 1922. University of Chicago President Harry Pratt Judson delivered an address at the dedication ceremony at the Midway Plaisance, before contributions from Taft. President of the B.F. Ferguson Trust Charles Hutchinson, and John Barton Payne, President of the South Park Board. ## Design and realization The sculpture is made of a form of hollow-cast concrete, reinforced with steel. It was cast in a 4,500-piece mold, using 250 short tons (230 t) of a material described as "concrete-like", which incorporated pebbles from the Potomac River. This composite material was an innovation at the time. For years, John Joseph Earley of Washington, DC, had used pebbles that seemed durable in the face of elements such as the weather and urban soot and grime. He had determined that by adding crushed pebbles he could create a new concrete mixture more durable than limestone but cheaper than marble or bronze. The reflection from the silica of the crushed stones complemented the durability with artistic beauty; the same material was used at Chicago's Fine Arts Building. The sculpture depicts a hooded Father Time carrying a scythe, and watching over a parade of 100 figures arranged in an ellipse, with an overall pyramidal geometry. The allegorical procession depicts the entire spectrum of humanity at various stages of life. The contemporary 1920s Chicago Daily Tribune described the figures as "heroic", and that choice of adjective has stayed with the piece. The figures are said to be passing in review as they rush through the stages of life, and include soldiers, frolicking children and kissing couples. Father Time is described in various newspaper articles as "huge", "weird", and "dominant". Other Tribune critics described Time as a "pet atrocity" of Taft in large part due to its ugliness. One critic described the white figures as reminiscent of false teeth smiling across the end of the Midway. Time commemorates the first 100 years of peace between the United States and Great Britain after the Treaty of Ghent concluded the War of 1812 on December 24, 1814. The design was inspired by the poem "Paradox of Time" by Henry Austin Dobson: "Time goes, you say? Ah no, Alas, time stays, we go". Time'''s theme has been compared to Shakespeare's All the world's a stage monologue in As You Like It, which describes the seven ages of man: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, old age, and dementia. Taft's figures represent birth, the struggle for existence, love, family life, religion, poetry, and war. Although most of the figures are generic representations of human forms in various walks and stages of life, Taft included himself, with one of his assistants following him, along the west side of the sculpture. He is portrayed wearing a smock, with his head bowed and hands clasped behind his back. His daughters served as models for some of the figures. Taft is remembered for his books, such as The History of American Sculpture (1903), regarded as the first comprehensive work on the subject, and was well known for portraits and allegorical public sculpture, of which Fountain of Time is a prime example. It was produced in the period following his assignment to design sculptures for William Le Baron Jenney's 1893 Horticultural Building for the World's Columbian Exposition. During this period he designed several large-scale public works, including Fountain of the Great Lakes. Taft resided in Illinois for most of his life and worked in the Midway Studios starting in 1906. ## Restoration Designed without expansion joints, Time is one of a small number of outdoor sculptures made of reinforced pebble/concrete aggregate, few of which have been created since the 1930s. In 1936, Time's weather-related cracks were repaired; further work occurred in 1955. The sculpture's subsequent repairs were followed by a rededication celebration in 1966. Although the sculpture received regular maintenance, early repair crews often did more harm than good, by using techniques such as sandblasting and patching cracks with rigid materials. By the 1980s the sculpture was crumbling; cracks had developed, details of the figures had worn away, and moisture had eroded the internal structure. In wintertime the fountain had to be protected by a tarp. Weather, air pollution, and vandalism meant that hundreds of thousands of dollars were now needed for restoration. The Chicago Park District, University of Chicago, and Art Institute of Chicago conservators all sponsored restoration work, including drying out the cavity of the hollow sculpture, removal of the deteriorated substructure, a newly designed ventilation system within the piece, a protective exterior coating, and repairs to the reflecting pool. In 1989 Chicago Park District allocated \$150,000 to the repair project, which amount was matched by the Ferguson fund. By the end of 1991, the Park District had collected \$320,000 of the \$520,000 estimated repair costs from public and private funds, although in 1994 the sculpture still awaited repair. By early 1997, after almost two decades of activity, the only repairs completed were phase one of the air ventilation system to dehumidify the hollow base, the drainage pipes and a new inner roof. Plans now included the erection of a temporary two-story metal building to protect all but the giant Father Time from the harsh winters and to facilitate year-round repair; the reinforcement of corroded steel interior portions; the replacement of inconsistent patches; the substitution of engineered spacing for natural cracks, and finally, hand-brushed concrete recoating. The temporary building was budgeted at \$270,000; the city spent a total of \$450,000 on repairs approved by the Park District that year. On April 19, 1999, the \$1.6 million, two-year phase two restoration began, scheduled for completion by May 2001. Five workers began repairing the cracks, killing biological growth, removing calcium deposits and pollution-blackened gypsum, and coating the 10,000-square-foot (930 m<sup>2</sup>) surface with a combination of lime putty, adobe cement and sand. The inoperable reflecting pool was not repaired in this phase. Although this phase was completed in 2001, its effects were not visible until the following year, when the temporary protective structure was unveiled. The repairs were expected to sustain the sculpture for about 30 to 50 years before any further repairs would be necessary. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Arts committed \$250,000 to the Park District for the conservation and restoration of the reflecting pool. In 2004, the University of Chicago contributed \$100,000 and the Park District Board \$845,000 to repair the pool and its water circulation system. This work was carried out in the summer of 2005 at a slightly reduced budget, and the fountain was filled with water for the first time in over fifty years. In 2007, efforts began to add lighting. That same year the sculpture was nominated by Partners in Preservation, a fund for the preservation of historic sites, backed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and American Express. In a widely publicized contest that included open house events where the public could tour and learn about the competing historic sites, \$1 million was available for preservation efforts in the Chicago metropolitan area, but the fountain was not one of the 15 winning candidates. ## Gallery ## Fountain of Creation Time was intended to be matched by a sister fountain, Fountain of Creation, on the opposite end of the Midway. Work began but was never completed. The finished portions of Fountain of Creation, depicting figures from the Greek legend of the repopulation of Earth after the great flood, are considered Taft's final work, and were given to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, his alma mater. The four surviving elements are figures ranging in height from 5 to 7 feet (1.5 to 2.1 m), and are collectively named Sons and Daughters of Deucalion and Pyrrha''. Two of these elements stand outside the entrance to the university's Main Library, and two others are located at the south side of Foellinger Auditorium. ## See also - List of public art in Chicago
32,113,606	St Nicholas, Blakeney	1,117,221,831	13th century Church in North Norfolk, England	[ "Archaeological sites in Norfolk", "Blakeney, Norfolk", "Church of England church buildings in Norfolk", "Grade I listed churches in Norfolk", "Graffiti in England", "Medieval sites in England" ]	St Nicholas is the Anglican parish church of Blakeney, Norfolk, in the deanery of Holt and the Diocese of Norwich. The church was founded in the 13th century, but the greater part of the church dates from the 15th century when Blakeney was a seaport of some importance. Of the original structure only the chancel has survived rebuilding, perhaps owing to its link to a nearby Carmelite friary. An unusual architectural feature is a second tower, used as a beacon, at the east end (the church stands just inland from, and about 30 metres (98 ft) above, the small port). Other significant features are the vaulted chancel with a stepped seven-light lancet window, and the hammerbeam roof of the nave. St Nicholas is a nationally important building, with a Grade I listing for its exceptional architectural interest. Much of the original church furniture was lost in the Reformation, but a late-Victorian restoration recreated something of the original appearance, as well as repairing and refacing the building. The Victorian woodwork was created to match the few older pieces that remained, or to follow a similar style; thus, the new wooden pulpit follows the themes of the medieval font. Of the stained glass smashed in the Reformation only fragments have been recovered, and these have been incorporated in a window in the north aisle of the church. Nine Arts and Crafts windows by James Powell and Sons are featured on the east and south sides of the church, and the north porch has two modern windows of predominantly blue colour. St Nicholas contains some notable memorials, including several plaques for the Blakeney lifeboats and their crews, and much pre-Reformation graffiti, particularly depictions of ships. The location of the latter suggests that they were votive in nature, although the saint concerned is now unknown. ## History ### Foundation to 1547 St Nicholas is the parish church of Blakeney, Norfolk, a small English town with a history dating back to at least early Neolithic times. It was one of a number of small ports opening onto the sheltered inlet of Blakeney Haven, and exported a range of products including fish, grain, and timber. In the Domesday Book of 1086 the town is recorded under the name "Esnuterle" (Snitterley); the present-day name first appears in 1340. Domesday recorded an early church at Snitterley, but its location is unknown, and it may not have been the present site of St Nicholas. There are scheduled monument and Grade II listed ruins of a medieval building in the salt marshes north of the present town described as "Blakeney Chapel", but, despite the name, it now seems likely that this was a domestic dwelling rather than a religious edifice. Another possible chapel site east of the Glaven was shown on an 1835 map, but there is no documentation to support that identification. The nearby Carmelite friary had its own church by 1321, built on land donated by tenants of William de Roos, "that the Carmelite friars, by the King's licence, and that of Sir William Roos, might inhabit therein for ever, and might build a chapel". The friars were also given 100 marks to build their church, in return for which they undertook "to pray for the good estate of the said Sir William Roos and his Lady Maud ... and to have and to hold that lord and lady, and their heirs, for their principal founders". The original building on the present site was constructed in the late 13th or early 14th century, at around the same time as the friary, which was founded in about 1296. Its hilltop location is unusual for the area; most nearby churches are built on mounds near water. The new church was dedicated to Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, and the living was first recorded as being in the gift of Sir John de Cockfield, passing to his Bacon descendants before its acquisition by the Abbot and Convent of Langley in 1375. The abbey controlled more than 60 Norfolk parishes, and the living of Blakeney was within its gift for the next sixty years, ending with the dissolution of the abbey in 1435. The patronage seems then to have passed to the Earl of Sussex, but quickly transferred to John Calthorpe, a descendant of the original founder, John Cockfield, and it remained with his family until 1922. Sir Alfred Jodrell then acquired the patronage, bequeathing it to Keble College, Oxford on his death in 1956. Since 1989, the benefice has been in the gift of Keble College, and the Bishop of Norwich. Blakeney gained its market charter in 1222, and by the early 15th century it was one of the few ports permitted to trade in horses, gold and silver, through "merchants sworn by oath to the king", which contributed to the town's growing wealth. Few Early English churches survive in Norfolk owing to extensive rebuilding amid the prosperity of the 15th century, and the thriving port of Blakeney was no exception. Only the chancel avoided major reconstruction in 1434, probably because of its association with the Carmelite friary; John Calthorpe specified in his will of 1530 that he was to buried "in the White ffryes of Sniterlie [Blakeney] in the myddys of the chancel". The Perpendicular nave and the 31 m (104 ft) west tower were part of the 1434 rebuilding, but the unusual second, slender, tower at the north-east corner of the church was of a later date. ### Reformation and after The English Reformation inevitably affected St Nicholas. Edward VI's 1547 injunction decreed that all images in churches were to be dismantled or destroyed, including stained glass, shrines, roods, statues and bells, and altars were to be dismantled and replaced by wooden tables. Blakeney did not escape these changes; an Inventory of Church Goods of 1552 and official visitations later in the century revealed that the chancel was falling into decay and "the church porche defiled with cattel". The reports continue "the pavement is much broken ... the walls are in decaie ... east window is much broken ... the chancel needs paving" – it was even alleged that graves were left uncovered. The rector from 1590 to 1621, Jacob Poynter, and his curate, Mr Aldriche, were keen Puritan reformers who refused to wear the surplice or use the Book of Common Prayer, and seemed to have had little concern for the fabric of the church. One positive outcome of the Reformation was that registers were to be kept in every church to record baptisms, marriages and burials; the Blakeney registers are very largely complete from 1538. By 1717, the local population seems to have been very homogeneous in terms of belief: "Persons, servants included, above the age of sixteen, the men chiefly sea-faring are supposed to be rather above three hundred. Papist none. Protestant dissenter none". Nevertheless, in 1854 there were Non-conformist chapels of three denominations, of which only the Methodist remains. The church was originally constructed of flint with stone dressings, but was substantially refaced with knapped flint in the 1880s; the tower was restored at the same time. A wall was built behind the altar in 1886 to create a separate sacristy for storing vestments and other items. The west tower was restored again in 1989, and the current doors to the sacristy were added in the same year. Electric lighting was installed in 1938 and an outer door for the north porch added in 1962. Major renovations were carried out from 1981 to 1983; these comprised repairs to the north aisle roof and the east tower, plastering and limewashing of the chancel, replacement of the old electrical and heating systems, and minor work on the organ. The most recent round of restoration was the 2000 reflooring of the nave, installation of a vestry, toilet and kitchen, a new heating system with a detached boiler house, and reglazing of the north porch. Because of the remoteness of the altar from the congregation, a second altar was erected between the parclose screens (extensions forward from the ends of the rood screen) to enable a more intimate celebration of the Eucharist. St Nicholas was designated as a Grade I listed building in 1959, which recognizes it as a building of exceptional interest. The benefice has expanded during the long history of its church. Cockthorpe and Little Langham parish was added in 1606, Glandford in 1743, Wiveton in 1922, and Cley in 1935. The parish is in the deanery of Holt, the Diocese of Norwich and the Province of Canterbury. The rector originally received tithes to support himself and the church, but this was later replaced by rent from the glebe (church lands). Rector Pointer, for example, received tithes and also had the income from the sales of his corn and saffron crops. The state had supported poorer clergy since the introduction of Queen Anne's Bounty in 1704, but since 1947 the Church Commissioners have been responsible for arranging the stipends and pensions of Anglican priests. ## Description St Nicholas, Blakeney, is a large Gothic parish church with an aisled nave, a deep chancel of two bays, a large tower at the western end, and a smaller tower at the eastern end, to the north of the chancel. The north porch was rebuilt in 1896. The west tower is surmounted with crenellations and pinnacles and is supported by stepped buttresses at each corner. The buttresses are constructed from flint and stone, and have arched insets on the faces. They rest on stone plinths, each bearing carved shields, that on the north buttress with an inaccurate rendering of the arms of the see, and the other with a cross and a dolphin. The tower has three Perpendicular windows in the belfry and a large Perpendicular window in its western face, giving light to the west end of the nave. The nave is 30 m (100 ft) long and 14 m (47 ft), and is separated from the aisles on north and south sides by arcades of six bays. It is lit by Perpendicular windows, each aisle bay window having four lights apiece, with three-light windows in the clerestory above. The nave's oak and chestnut hammerbeam roof dates from the 15th century, and features carved angels on the hammers. These rest on arched braces, except above each window, where the hammers rest on corbels instead. The only trace of the earlier 13th-century nave is the reuse of some older stone, mainly in the north aisle, and the raised chancel walls, and some Purbeck Marble fragments beneath the west tower. The Lady Chapel in the south aisle and St Thomas' Chapel in the north aisle were dedicated to St Mary and St Thomas of Canterbury respectively. They fell into disuse in the Reformation, but were restored in the 1880s. The 13th-century chancel has two rib vaulted bays, making it one of only six extant Early English vaulted chancels. Its walls were raised in the 15th century by constructing a chamber above the vaulting using stone from the demolished 13th-century nave, but, from the outside, this end of the church is still lower than the western section. Internally, the chancel vault is much lower than the adjacent nave because of the room above. It has three 15th-century Perpendicular windows down each side, and is notable for the unusual east window with seven stepped lights, a feature found in only two other Early English churches, Lincoln Cathedral and St Martins in Ockham. The chancel contains three simple sedilia, or priest's seats, with trefoil arches and round columns. The sacristry behind the altar has a small lancet window, and the chamber above the chancel, which is floored only by the curved upper surface of the vault below, is lit by a single two-light window. The polygonal eastern tower has stepped buttresses at its corners and louvred belfry windows just below the parapet. Its origins are not entirely clear, but it was possibly originally a turret for stairs leading to a room over the chancel, later extended upwards as an aesthetic enhancement and to act as a beacon for mariners. Its date is uncertain, but it is much later than the chancel. Although its lack of height compared to the west tower has led to some questioning of its suitability as a beacon, it has been suggested that lining up the two towers guided ships into the navigable channel between the inlet's sandbanks; this is the "leading light" practice later achieved using pairs of lighthouses at different levels. ## Furnishings and fixtures The octagonal font dates from the 15th century; its carved panels alternate images of the symbols of the Four Evangelists with seated figures of the Doctors of the Church (Saint Ambrose, Saint Augustine, Saint Jerome, and Pope Gregory I). The central column carries shields depicting the Instruments of the Passion and the Holy Wounds. The eastern shield is unusual in that a sword is shown with an ear stuck to it. This refers to the story of Saint Peter striking off the ear of Malchus, the High Priest's servant, in the garden of Gethsemane. Most East Anglian churches lost their medieval furnishings in the upheavals of the Reformation, and Blakeney is no exception. Apart from the hammerbeam roof, there is little original wood work in the nave; a few benches in the aisles, the fleur-de-lis-decorated beam supporting the rood, and two panels of the rood screen. The chancel retains four of its original choir stalls with their misericords, which are decorated with head and leaf motifs on the arms. St Nicholas benefited from sympathetic restoration in the late 19th and early 20th century. The new stalls and misericords match the style of the old, and the 1886 pulpit echoes the font, with the Instruments of the Passion on the stone stand, and the twelve Apostles carved on the woodwork. The pulpit has been described as "Victorian craftsmanship of matchless quality". The north porch was restored in 1896, and in the following year the west tower was repaired, and pews of a 15th-century pattern placed in the nave. 1910 saw the restoration of the rood screen in a style consistent with that of the two ancient panels, the reconstruction of the rood loft, and the installation of a Norman and Beard two-manual organ with more than a thousand pipes. The organ pipes are above the parclose screens; the bellows, wind chest and electric blower are concealed in the chamber above the chancel. The stalls with their misericords were restored in 1913. The rood crucifix, flanked by St Mary and St John, came from Germany in 1913. Much church plate, such as the chalice and pyx had been confiscated, sold or stolen in the heat of the Reformation. In the more tolerant climate of Elizabethan England, the excesses of extreme Protestantism were curbed by centralised control of the Church of England, the Act of Uniformity and the Book of Common Prayer. Most churches then had to buy a new chalice; Blakeney's was purchased in 1567, and exchanged for another in 1716. One lost treasure is a "Map of the World" (Mappa Mundi et Chroniculum Mundi), which was recorded as present in the church in 1368. This is thought more likely to be a version of Ranulf Higdon's Polychronicon, a geographical text, than a true map like the Hereford Mappa Mundi. The stained glass is mostly late-19th-century Arts and Crafts by James Powell and Sons. Powell, coincidentally based at Whitefriars, a former Carmelite friary in London, used leading members of the movement such as Edward Burne-Jones as designers, and his nine windows at Blakeney are regarded as fine examples of his work. The east window dating from 1895 represents the Te Deum, and the south windows, glazed in 1900, tell the story of the early British church. Some 15th-century fragments of the original Norwich School glass that had been buried in the churchyard during the Reformation were incorporated into one of the otherwise plain windows in the north aisle in 1938, showing "Christ rising from the tomb", with six figures above. Five of the figures are angels; there would have been nine originally, one for each order. The sixth image depicts a female saint wearing a crown. The angel's legs are clothed in "feather tights", believed to have been derived from costumes worn in medieval religious plays. The north porch is flanked by two blue-themed modern stained glass windows by Jane Gray from 2002, one dedicated to the RAF, the other to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). The stained glass, taken as a whole, has been described as showing a "phenomenal standard of composition and artistry ... Few churches contain such a treasury." The current reredos and altar were erected in 1923, as was a wooden war memorial in the north aisle. Most churches prior to the Reformation had painted walls, often with murals; these were whitewashed by the reformers, and often religious texts or the Ten Commandments replaced the images. These inscriptions were in turn obliterated under the Catholic Queen Mary. At Blakeney, as elsewhere, the formerly coloured walls are now the plain white typical of English churches. ## Memorials John Calthorpe's "synfull body" lies at the eastern end of the nave under a marble gravestone and a brass plaque that carries his arms and a Latin inscription describing him as uni fundatorum fratum convent, "a founder [benefactor] of the convent of friars". It is possible that he was originally buried in the chancel of the Carmelite friary, as he requested, but was re-interred in the nave of St Nicholas at the Dissolution. A number of other stones carry standard tags in Latin or English requesting prayers or simply stating the identity of the internee, but Sir John Smyth's 1460 memorial enjoined "As I am that shall you be, Pray for the sowle of me". Blakeney was a lifeboat station from around 1825 to 1924. Various wall plaques commemorate the boats' rescues and crew losses from 1862, when the RNLI took over the running of the service, up to the station's closure. There are two blue wooden boards from the RNLI listing the earlier lifeboats and their achievements; the Brightwell (1862), another Brightwell (1863), the Zaccheus Burroughs (1891), and the Hettie (1873). Next to these is a stone plaque listing the rescues from 1877 to 1924, including those of the last lifeboat, the Caroline (1908), and further along the north aisle a painting of George Long, coxswain of the Caroline, is placed above the record of its most famous rescues on consecutive days on 7 and 8 January 1918, when 30 people were saved from two steamers in a storm. A large wooden board acts as a war memorial, listing those locals who died in various military engagements. The clock in the west tower was donated by a Mrs Cooke in 1945 in memory of her late husband and sons. ## Medieval graffiti The interiors of most Norfolk churches contain much pre-Reformation graffiti, unless they have been heavily limewashed or resurfaced. The churches of the Glaven ports in general, and Blakeney in particular, conform to this pattern. St Nicholas has an extensive array of prayers, merchant's marks and other symbols, but is notable for the large number of depictions of ships, at least 30, heavily concentrated in the nave towards the eastern end of the south aisle. There is a side altar there of unknown dedication, and an empty niche that would have once held the image of a saint. The pillars were painted red in the Middle Ages, and ship images scratched into the soft, chalky stone would have been much more conspicuous than they are now. It is likely that the images, mostly of smaller ships, were created as votive offerings by the seafaring inhabitants of the port. The carving of ship graffiti in religious buildings is a tradition in ports going back to the Bronze Age, and has been found across Europe. Mason's marks were used by the stonemason to identify his work, and in the days of the medieval craft guilds may also have had mystical or religious significance. In England, the use of these marks became widespread after the Norman Conquest. Similarly, merchants had their own marks to identify their products, and these frequently appeared on houses, gravestones and church walls. ## People The long patronage of the Calthorpes under their various incarnations as the Lords Calthorpe, Gough-Calthorpes and Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpes has already been noted. A Henry Calthorpe was rector from 1743 to 1781, and was followed by Richard Thomas Gough, who held the living for 43 years. Gough and Richard Henry Tillard, incumbent from 1858 to 1906, are commemorated by plaques in the chancel. Of the other rectors, Mowbray O'Rorke had been Bishop of Accra from 1913, but accepted the Blakeney living in 1924, remaining until he retired in 1939, and Clifford Leofric Purdy (Jim) Bishop, rector from 1949 to 1953, rose to become Bishop of Malmesbury from 1962. The graveyard, as in many coastal parish churches, contains mainly local people and seafarers. Several stones bear the surname "Long", a name carried by five of the crew of the Caroline on its epic rescues in January 1918. A notable outsider buried here is Sir Henry "Tim" Birkin a leading British racing driver and one of the "Bentley Boys" of the 1920s. Three war graves commemorate one British Army soldier of World War I and two from World War II. ## Services and congregation The rector of this Church of England parish as of 2019 is the Rev Richard Lawry. The benefice rotates its services among its five constituent churches, with typically five services in total on Sundays, and two mid-week Holy Communions. As with most Anglican churches in England, the congregation is mainly elderly, although there are monthly family services focussed on children. There is also a monthly laying on of hands for healing, and sometimes other variants from the standard format involving music or Taizé-influenced worship. The parish accepts the diocese's guidance on permitting baptism and marriage in church after a divorce, and claims to work closely with its Catholic and Methodist neighbours. St Nicholas is also used for non-religious events such as flower festivals, craft workshops and musical performances, and it has won diocesan tourism awards for its in-church information facilities. The church appeared in Simon Jenkins’ book, 1000 Best Churches, where it was described as having "a sense of vigorous activity" and as "a rare example of what every large parish church should aspire to being, also a community centre, market place and museum". It was also featured in the Daily Telegraph's list of 100 favourite churches, and a Norfolk tourism website rated it one of the top ten churches in the county. ## Cited texts
17,614,533	Columbia Slough	1,151,998,026	Narrow waterway in the floodplain of the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Oregon	[ "Columbia River", "Geography of Portland, Oregon", "Rivers of Multnomah County, Oregon", "Rivers of Oregon", "Tributaries of the Willamette River" ]	The Columbia Slough is a narrow waterway, about 19 miles (31 km) long, in the floodplain of the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Oregon. From its source in the Portland suburb of Fairview, the Columbia Slough meanders west through Gresham and Portland to the Willamette River, about 1 mile (1.6 km) from the Willamette's confluence with the Columbia. It is a remnant of the historic wetlands between the mouths of the Sandy River to the east and the Willamette River to the west. Levees surround much of the main slough as well as many side sloughs, detached sloughs, and nearby lakes. Drainage district employees control water flows with pumps and floodgates. Tidal fluctuations cause reverse flow on the lower slough. The Columbia floodplain, formed by geologic processes including lava flows, volcanic eruptions, and the Missoula Floods, is part of the Portland Basin, which extends across the Columbia River from Multnomah County, Oregon, into Clark County, Washington. Five percent of Oregon's population, about 158,000 people, live in the slough watershed of about 51 square miles (130 km<sup>2</sup>). Municipal wells near the upper slough provide supplemental drinking water to Portland and nearby cities. The cities, the drainage districts, the county, and a regional government, Metro, have overlapping jurisdictions in the watershed. A regional agency operates Portland International Airport along the middle slough and marine terminals near the lower slough. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and the city's Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) deal with environmental issues. Long before non-indigenous people explored the region, tribes of Native Americans fished and hunted along the slough. In the early 19th century fur trappers and explorers including Lewis and Clark visited the area before large migrations of settlers began arriving from the east. The newcomers farmed, cut timber, built houses, and by the early 20th century established cities, shipping ports, roads, rail lines and industries near the slough. Increased investment in the floodplain led to larger losses during floods, and these losses prompted levee building that greatly altered the area. A flood pouring through a levee break in 1948 destroyed the city of Vanport, which was never rebuilt. Used as a waste repository during the first half of the 20th century and cut off from the Columbia River by levees, the slough became one of Oregon's most polluted waterways. Early attempts to mitigate the pollution, which included raw sewage and industrial waste, were unsuccessful. However, in 1952 Portland began sewage treatment, and over the next six decades the federal Clean Water Act and similar legislation mandated further cleanup. State and local governments, often assisted by community volunteers, undertook projects related to public health, natural resources, and recreation in a region with many homes, industries, businesses, and roads. The businesses and industries in the watershed employ about 57,000 people, which is also frequented by more than 150 bird species and 26 fish species and animals including otters, beaver, and coyotes. One of the nation's largest freshwater urban wetlands, Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area, shares the lower slough watershed with a sewage treatment plant, marine terminals, a golf course, and a car racetrack. Watercraft able to portage over culverts and levees can travel the entire length of the slough. The 40-Mile Loop and other hiking and biking trails follow the waterways and connect the parks. ## Name Slough usually rhymes with shoe in the U.S. except in New England, where it usually rhymes with now, the preferred British pronunciation. Slough may mean a place of deep mud or mire, a swamp, a river inlet or backwater, or a creek in a marsh or tide flat. The Columbia Slough is classified as a "stream" in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) of the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The slough takes its name from the Columbia River, of which it was historically a side channel or anabranch. Robert Gray, a Boston fur trader and whaler who sailed partway up the Columbia River in 1792, named the river after his ship, Columbia Rediviva. The Columbia part of the ship's name belonged to the tradition of naming things after explorer Christopher Columbus. ## Course The Columbia Slough flows roughly parallel to and about 0.4 to 1.7 miles (0.6 to 2.7 km) south of the Columbia River in Multnomah County. It begins at Fairview Lake in the city of Fairview and immediately enters the city of Gresham. Less than 1 mile (1.6 km) later, it enters the city of Portland and continues generally westward for about another 18 miles (29 km) to its confluence with the Willamette River. Throughout its course, the slough is nearly level, 10 feet (3.0 m) above sea level at the source and 9 feet (2.7 m) at the mouth. Semidiurnal tides cause reverse currents on the lower 8.5 miles (13.7 km) of the slough. Running slightly north of and parallel to U.S. Route 30 (Sandy Boulevard), the slough flows by Zimmerman Heritage Farm on the left bank (south) about 17.5 miles (28.2 km) from the mouth, Big Four Corners Wetlands on the right bank shortly thereafter, and receives Wilkes Creek on the left shortly after that. At about river mile (RM) 15.5 or river kilometer (RK) 24.9, it passes through a gated levee that separates the upper slough from the middle slough. Soon it passes Prison Pond Wetlands near Inverness Jail and connects to Johnson Lake Slough, all on the left. Shortly thereafter, it flows under Interstate 205. From here and for most of the rest of its course, the slough runs parallel to and slightly north of Columbia Boulevard. Passing Johnson Lake on the left, it crosses the Colwood National Golf Course and flows by Portland International Airport and an Oregon Air National Guard base on the right. On the left is Whitaker Ponds Natural Area. Shortly thereafter, it receives Whitaker Slough on the left and crosses the Broadmoor Golf Course. Between 9 and 8 miles (14 and 13 km) from the mouth, it receives Buffalo Slough from the left and passes by the defunct Peninsula Drainage Canal (City Canal), which lies to the slough's right. At this point, it passes through a second gated levee that separates the middle slough from the lower slough and its tidal flow reversals. In the next stretch, the Columbia Slough flows by Portland Meadows horse racing track on the right and crosses under Interstate 5 at about RM 7 (RK 11). Beyond the interstate, to the slough's north lies Delta Park, Portland International Raceway, and the Heron Lakes Golf Course. Until flooding destroyed it in 1948, the city of Vanport occupied this site. To the south is the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant. The slough flows through the Wapato Wetland and by the Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area, including the former St. Johns Landfill, on the right at about RM 3 (RK 4.8) from the Willamette River, and by Pier Park on the left. Shortly thereafter, it turns sharply north for the rest of its course. It receives North Slough, connected to Bybee Lake, on the right, and passes through the Ramsey Lake Wetlands and Kelley Point Park before entering the Willamette River about 1 mile (1.6 km) from its confluence with the Columbia River. The mouth of the Columbia River is about 101 miles (163 km) further downstream at Astoria on the Pacific Ocean. ### Discharge Since 1989, the USGS has monitored the flow of the Columbia Slough at a stream gauge 0.6 miles (1.0 km) from the mouth. The average flow recorded at this gauge is 93.8 cubic feet per second (3 m<sup>3</sup>/s) from a drainage area of undetermined size. The maximum flow was 2,400 cubic feet per second (68 m<sup>3</sup>/s) on December 5, 1995, and the minimum flow (biggest reverse flow) was −6,700 cubic feet per second (−190 m<sup>3</sup>/s) on February 7, 1996, which coincided with a flood on the Columbia and Willamette rivers. ## Watershed Draining about 51 square miles (130 km<sup>2</sup>), the Columbia Slough watershed lies in the floodplain of the Columbia River between the mouths of the Sandy River to the east and the Willamette River. Parts of Portland, Fairview, Gresham, Maywood Park, Wood Village, and unincorporated Multnomah County lie within the drainage basin (watershed). As of 2005, about 158,000 people, 5 percent of Oregon's population, lived in the basin. The watershed includes residential neighborhoods, agriculture, the airport, open spaces, 54 schools, interstate highways, railways, commercial businesses, and heavy and light industry. In general, the northern part is industrial and commercial; the southern part is residential, and agricultural areas lie to the east. As of 2001, single-family residential zones covered 33 percent of the watershed, and mixed-use zones accounted for another 33 percent. The other zones were 12 percent industrial, 12 percent parks or open space; 6 percent multi-family residential, 3 percent commercial, and 2 percent were for farming or forests. As of 2005, about 3,900 businesses operated in the watershed and employed about 57,000 people. Adjacent to the Columbia Slough basin are the watersheds of the Sandy River to the east, Johnson Creek to the south, the Willamette to the south and west, and the Columbia to the north. Lying slightly north of the watershed, large islands in the Columbia River include, from east to west, McGuire Island, Government Island, Lemon Island, and Tomahawk Island, which is connected to Hayden Island. Bordered by the Columbia and two arms of the Willamette, Sauvie Island lies just west of the mouth of the slough. ### Jurisdiction Many governmental entities share responsibility for the slough and its drainage basin. Decisions by the municipal governments of Portland, Fairview, Gresham, Maywood Park, and Wood Village, and the government of Multnomah County affect the slough. Metro, the regional governmental agency for the Oregon portion of the Portland metropolitan area, is involved in acquiring and protecting wildlife habitat in places like Big Four Corners Wetlands and Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area, acquiring property to close gaps in the 40-Mile Loop and other trails, and creating additional water access along the slough. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has designated the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to regulate the slough under provisions of the federal Clean Water Act. The Port of Portland, a regional agency run by commissioners appointed by the Oregon governor, owns and manages about 11 percent of the land in the slough watershed. Three drainage districts that manage water flows in the slough floodplain overlap parts of these other jurisdictions. ### Annual report card In 2015, Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) began issuing annual "report cards" for watersheds or fractions thereof that lie within the city. BES assigns grades for each of four categories: hydrology, water quality, habitat, and fish and wildlife. Hydrology grades depend on the amount of pavement and other impervious surfaces in the watershed and to what degree its streams flow freely, not dammed or diverted. Water-quality grades are based on measurements of dissolved oxygen, E-coli bacteria, temperature, suspended solids, and substances such as mercury and phosphorus. Habitat ranking depends on the condition of stream banks and floodplains, riparian zones, tree canopies, and other variables. The fish and wildlife assessment includes birds, fish, and macroinvertebrates. In 2015, the BES grades for the Columbia Slough are hydrology, B− ; water quality, B− ; habitat, D− , and fish and wildlife, F. ## Geology The Columbia Slough is part of the roughly 770-square-mile (2,000 km<sup>2</sup>) Portland Basin, which lies at the northern end of the Willamette Valley of Oregon and extends north into Clark County in the state of Washington. The region is underlain by solidified lavas of the Columbia River Basalt Group that are up to 16 million years old. Covered by later alluvial deposits, the basalts lie more than 1,000 feet (300 m) below the surface within the basin. About 10 million years ago, eruptions of Cascade Range volcanoes to the east sent flows of mud, ash, and eroded volcanic debris into the Columbia, which was powerful enough to carry the material downstream. Deposited above the basalt during the Miocene and early Pliocene, these loose sands and gravels formed part of what is known as the Troutdale Formation. Extending to the Tualatin River Valley to the south and into Clark County on the north, the formation is an aquifer that is the primary source of drinking water for Vancouver in Washington and an auxiliary source for Portland. The Portland Basin is being pulled slowly apart between faults in the Tualatin Mountains (West Hills) on the west side of Portland, the East Bank fault along the east side of the Willamette River, and other fault systems near Gresham further east. About 3 million years ago, many small volcanoes and cinder cones erupted through the thin, stretched crust of the basin and in the Cascade foothills to the southeast. Ash, cinders, and debris from these Boring Lava Field volcanoes added another layer of sediment to the Troutdale formation. About 15,000 years ago, cataclysmic ice age events known as the Missoula Floods or Bretz Floods originating in the Clark Fork region of northern Idaho inundated the Columbia River basin many times. These floods deposited huge amounts of debris and sediment. Water filled the entire Columbia Gorge to overflowing and turned the Willamette Valley into a lake 100 miles (160 km) long, 60 miles (100 km) wide and 300 feet (90 m) deep. The floodwaters ripped the face off Rocky Butte in Portland and deposited a 5-mile (8 km) gravel bar, Alameda Ridge, that runs parallel to and slightly south of the Columbia Slough. Faults associated with the expanding Portland Basin are capable of producing significant earthquakes. More than a thousand earthquakes, many too small to be felt, have been recorded in the basin since 1841. The stronger ones reached about magnitude 5 on the Richter scale. In 1892, one estimated at magnitude 5 shook downtown Portland for about 30 seconds. In 1962, one centered about 7 miles (11 km) north of Portland was estimated at between magnitude 4.9 and 5.2. ## Hydrology ### Rainfall and runoff Based on records from 1961 to 1990, the watershed's average annual precipitation, as measured at Portland International Airport, is about 36 inches (910 mm). About 21 inches (530 mm) falls from November through February and only about 4 inches (100 mm) from June through September. Since temperatures are normally below freezing fewer than 30 days a year, most of this precipitation reaches the ground as rain. Historically, most rain falling on the watershed was taken up by vegetation, flowed into wetlands, soaked into the ground, or evaporated. Heavy rain in the winter months recharged the groundwater and provided baseflows to the slough during dry summers. Urban development, which replaced vegetation and water-absorbing soils with airport runways, house roofs, highways, warehouses, parking lots, and other hard surfaces, interrupted this cycle. In 1999, a study estimated that impervious surfaces covered 54 percent of the watershed. Storm runoff that might have taken days to reach the historic slough reaches the developed slough in hours. ### Main channel Until the 20th century, the slough and its side channels and associated ponds and lakes were part of the active Columbia River floodplain. When the historic river was high, the slough received water from it near Big Four Corners, about 17 miles (27 km) from the slough's mouth. In 1917, landowners formed three drainage districts—Peninsula Drainage District No. 1 (Pen 1), Peninsula Drainage District No. 2 (Pen 2), and Multnomah County Drainage District No. 1 (MCDD)—to control flooding. A fourth district, the Sandy Drainage Improvement Company (SDIC), manages water flow at the upper end of the slough's basin in Fairview and Troutdale. By 2008, the districts maintained 30 miles (48 km) of levees as well as water pumps, floodgates and other water control devices. The upper slough extends from the slough's source at Fairview Lake, roughly 18.5 miles (30 km) from the mouth, to a gated levee known as the mid-dike levee about 3 miles (5 km) downstream. This sector, managed by MCDD, covers 2,650 acres (1,070 ha) completely surrounded by levees. A northern side channel extends from the mid-dike levee to MCDD Pump Station No. 4 on the Columbia River (Marine Drive) levee near Big Four Corners. Water usually exits this sector through the open gates of the mid-dike levee, but to control threatening flows the MCDD can close the gate and pump water from the northern side channel directly into the Columbia. The pump's maximum capacity is 275,000 U.S. gallons per minute (17,300 L/s). The middle slough, also managed by MCDD, lies between the mid-dike levee and the Pen 2 levee, 8.5 miles (13.7 km) from the mouth. This sector covers 6,848 acres (2,771 ha), is completely surrounded by levees, and contains many side sloughs, ponds, small lakes, and springs. Pump Station No. 1 rests on the Pen 2 levee, which is gated across the course of the slough. To control flows, MCDD can open or close the gates, and it can pump water from the middle slough to the lower slough when its flow is reversed by the tide or when gravity flow is insufficient. The pump's capacity is 250,000 US gallons per minute (16 m<sup>3</sup>/s). Water levels in the lower slough, managed by Pen 2 and Pen 1, depend more on Willamette River conditions than on pumping by MCDD. Incoming tides cause a variation in water surface elevation of between 12 inches (30 cm) and 24 inches (61 cm) roughly twice per day along the entire lower slough. Flow direction varies with the tide. Pen 2 and Pen 1, separated by Interstate 5, border the north side of the lower slough. Pen 2 manages 1,475 acres (597 ha) east of the highway, and Pen 1 manages 901 acres (365 ha) to the west (downstream). Multiple pump stations move water from lesser sloughs in both districts into the main slough. Parts of this subwatershed are unprotected by levees and are vulnerable to 100-year floods. ### Creeks and lakes `Historically Fairview Creek flowed north into the Columbia River through a wetlands slightly upstream of Big Four Corners. In the early 20th century, water managers dug an artificial channel connecting the Fairview Creek wetlands to the slough. In 1960, they built a dam on the west side of the wetlands to create Fairview Lake for water storage and recreation. It covers about 100 acres (40 ha) and is 5 to 6 feet (1.5 to 1.8 m) deep. Fairview Creek forms in a wetland near Grant Butte and flows north for 5 miles (8 km) through the cities of Gresham and Fairview to reach the lake. Fairview Creek has two named tributaries, No Name Creek, and Clear Creek. A smaller stream, Osborn Creek, also flows into the lake, which empties through a weir and culvert system into the upper slough.` With one exception, the streams feeding Fairview Lake are the watershed's only remaining creeks, although springs also reach the surface. Wilkes Creek, the slough's only free flowing tributary, is about 2 miles (3 km) long and enters the upper slough from the south. Dozens of similar streams that once flowed into the slough from the south have all been piped or filled. Many bodies of water in addition to the main slough channel lie within the drainage basin. The area around the middle slough contains several slough arms and small lakes, including Buffalo Slough, Whitaker Slough, Johnson Lake, Whitaker Ponds, and Prison Pond. In the lower slough, Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area at 2,000 acres (810 ha) is one of the largest urban freshwater wetlands in the United States. A 1-mile (1.6 km) side slough called North Slough connects Bybee Lake and the main slough channel. A water control structure at the outlet from Bybee Lake to the North Slough regulates the lakes' levels. ### Aquifers and wells Groundwater discharges from an aquifer near the surface supply an estimated flow between 50 and 100 cubic feet per second (1.4 and 2.8 m<sup>3</sup>/s) to the middle and upper sloughs. Rain infiltration and artificial sumps recharge this shallow aquifer. Geologists have identified four other major aquifers separated by relatively impermeable clays or other strata at various levels below the surface aquifer. The City of Portland's water bureau manages the Columbia South Shore Well Field that taps the deeper aquifers. As of 2004, 25 active wells drawing from depths ranging from 60 to 600 feet (18 to 183 m) could produce up to 100 million US gallons (380,000 m<sup>3</sup>) a day from the field. These were drilled between 1976 and 2003 to supplement the city's main water supply from the Bull Run Watershed during droughts or emergencies. The Rockwood Water People's Utility District (PUD) and the City of Fairview have also drilled three wells near the upper slough. ## History ### Early inhabitants `Archeological evidence suggests that Native Americans lived along the lower Columbia River as early as 10,000 years ago, including near what later became The Dalles, on the Columbia River about 70 miles (110 km) east of the Columbia Slough. By 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, the Clackamas Indians had settled along the Clackamas River, which empties into the Willamette River about 25 miles (40 km) south of the slough. The Clackamas tribe was a subgroup of the Chinookan speakers who lived in the Columbia River Valley from Celilo Falls to the Pacific Ocean. Clackamas lands included the lower Willamette River from Willamette Falls, at what later became Oregon City, to the Willamette's confluence with the Columbia River. The Columbia River floodplain near the mouth of the Willamette contained many stream channels, lakes, and wetlands that flooded annually. Chinookan tribes hunted and fished there and traveled between the two big rivers via the protected waters of the slough. Their main food sources were salmon, sturgeon, and camas.` In 1792, Lieutenant William Broughton, a British explorer, led the first trip by non-natives as far up the Columbia River as the mouth of the Sandy River. He and his men camped on Sauvie Island, which lies between the Willamette and Columbia rivers directly opposite the mouth of the slough. Broughton encountered many Chinookans while exploring and mapping geographic features including Hayden Island and other islands in the Columbia just north of the slough. When Lewis and Clark visited the area in 1806, the Clackamas tribe consisted of about 1,800 people living in 11 villages. The explorers estimated that 800 people of the Multnomah tribe of Chinookans lived in five villages on Sauvie Island. In 1825, the Hudson's Bay Company established its western administrative headquarters at Fort Vancouver, across the Columbia River from the slough. The British fort became the center for fur trading and other commerce throughout the Pacific Northwest, including what would later become the state of Oregon. By the 1830s, smallpox, malaria, measles and other diseases carried by non-indigenous explorers and traders had reduced the native population by up to 90 percent throughout the lower Columbia basin. The United States gained control over the Oregon Territory—including Fort Vancouver, the Portland Basin, and the slough—by treaty with Great Britain in 1846. By 1851, the Clackamas tribe's population had fallen to 88, and in 1855 the tribe signed a treaty surrendering its lands to the U.S. ### Farming, commerce, and industry `By 1850, White settlers established donation land claims in the Columbia Slough watershed. One settler, Lewis Love, became wealthy by cutting timber in the watershed and using the slough as part of a shipping route to downtown Portland. Other settlers logged the forests near the slough and built sawmills, fished, and farmed. In 1852, James John operated a ferry based on the peninsula of land between the Columbia and the Willamette River. The community of St. Johns, platted in the same year on the peninsula, is named after him. Legislation creating the Port of Portland in 1891 improved St. Johns' prospects as a Willamette River port. In 1902, the U.S. Congress passed a Reclamation Act that encouraged irrigation, flood control, and wetland development in places like the peninsula. In 1907, the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway began work on a rail line across the peninsula. The railway and the port improvements led to high expectations. "St. Johns, the City of Destiny", a 1909 editorial appearing in a booster publication called The Peninsula, said:` > Nature has been more than lavish in her gifts to St. Johns. Travel as many miles as you like and go where you will, it is highly improbable that you will find a spot with so many magnificent nature advantages as has St. Johns. The fine stretch of level land on which the city is located, the deep water of the two rivers, the navigable sloughs and the superb scenery which nature has painted with a master hand, makes the location an ideal one in every respect either for industries or residences. ### Open sewer As Portland grew, it annexed St. Johns and expanded into the peninsula and other parts of the watershed. East of St. Johns, the Swift Meatpacking Company bought 3,400 acres (1,400 ha) in 1906 and established the community of Kenton. Other companies built packing plants and slaughterhouses along the slough, and by 1911 Portland had become the main livestock market for the Pacific Northwest. These and other early 20th century businesses, including stockyards, a dairy farm, a shingle company, and a lumber mill, flushed waste products into the slough. Starting in 1910, north Portland's residential sewage also poured into the slough through pipes laid for the purpose. In 1917, landowners along the slough had formed three drainage districts to control floods. They dug ditches, deepened existing water channels, and built levees to keep the rivers and the slough from flooding agricultural, industrial, and commercial property. Hoping to flush the slough with clean water from the river, city engineers created the crosscutting Peninsula Canal. The project largely failed because daily tides reversed the slough's flow and because both ends of the canal were at nearly the same elevation. Over the next 30 years, more lumber and wood products companies opened along the slough, and tugboats moved log rafts up and down the waterway. Truck freight and other transportation companies built in the watershed. The city created the St. Johns Landfill on wetlands and small channels off the lower slough and built a new Portland Airport on land along the middle slough. Activists and civic leaders, concerned about pollution on the Willamette River, led cleanup campaigns, but voters declined to pay for sewage treatment. Pollution eventually grew so bad on the slough that mill workers refused to handle logs that had been stored in its water. ### World War II and after After the start of the war with Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an order for internment of all the people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the West Coast. About 1,700 of them lived in Portland, and some had farms or businesses near the slough. When the government removed them from their homes in 1942, it housed them temporarily in the Livestock Exposition Center (Expo Center) in Kenton before sending them to internment camps further inland. They were not allowed to return until 1945. `In 1942, Kaiser Shipbuilding Company began making ships for the war at three huge installations near the lower slough, one in St. Johns, one on Swan Island in Portland's Overlook neighborhood, and one in Vancouver, Washington. St. Johns and Vancouver made Liberty ships, while Swan Island made tankers. The St. Johns shipyard became the nation's leading producer of Liberty ships. To house shipyard workers and their families, Henry J. Kaiser bought 650 acres (260 ha) of former marsh, pasture, and farmland in the lower slough watershed surrounded on all sides by dikes between 15 and 25 feet (5 and 8 m) high. Here he built a new city, at first called Kaiserville and later Vanport. By 1943, Vanport's population of 39,000 made it the second largest city in Oregon and the largest wartime housing project in the U.S. After the war, the population fell to about 18,500. This was roughly the number of people living there on May 30, 1948, when a flood broke through Vanport's western levee. The break occurred during the afternoon of a day with mild weather. The first rush of water soon became a "creeping inundation", slowed in its advance for 35 to 40 minutes by water-absorbing sloughs. The water's gradual rise within the city allowed most of the residents to escape drowning. The county coroner's official list of bodies recovered was set at fifteen, and seven people on a list of missing people were never found. The flood destroyed the city, which was never rebuilt.` The Vanport flood induced changes to the slough's system of levees, which were rebuilt and in some cases fortified to withstand a 100-year flood. Instead of repairing the levee along the Peninsula Canal, the city plugged it at both ends. The disaster also affected Oregon's system of higher education. After floodwaters destroyed the Vanport Extension Center, set up in 1946, the Oregon Board of Higher Education reestablished the school in downtown Portland, where it eventually became Portland State University. Debate about how to use the slough and its watershed continued through the rest of the century. In 1964, the Port of Portland, interested in industrial development, began to fill Smith, Bybee, and Ramsey lakes with dredge sands from the Columbia. In the 1970s, the Oregon Legislature passed a law against filling Smith or Bybee lakes below a contour line 11 feet (3.4 m) above mean sea level except to enhance fish and wildlife habitat. Plans for a Willamette River Greenway project proposed by Oregon Governor Tom McCall in the late 1960s called for park and recreation areas along the Willamette and many of its tributaries but ignored the slough. Some planners argued that the slough was so filthy that more industry was all it was good for. They portrayed cleanup as a lofty but impractical goal. At Oregon's request, the U.S. Congress stripped the slough of its navigable status in 1978. This ended channel dredging on the slough, which could then be used for recreation. Other laws affecting the slough in the 1970s and beyond were the federal Clean Water Act and the Oregon Comprehensive Land Use Planning Act. In 1986, a business association began promoting commercial development along the upper slough, and the city later used urban renewal funds to support industrial projects near the airport. In 1996 the city acquired the Whitaker Ponds Natural Area, where it began a slough watershed education program for children. ## Pollution After years of piping raw sewage directly into the waterway, Portland built its first sewage treatment plant next to the lower slough in 1952. The Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant handled a combination of raw sewage and storm runoff that flowed into the sanitary sewer system from all over the city and piped the treated water into the Columbia River. When runoff exceeded the plant's capacity during heavy rains, sewage still entered the slough from combined sewer overflows (CSO)s at 13 outfalls. The city closed the St. Johns Landfill, adjacent to the lower slough, in 1991. Pressed by citizen action groups, it agreed in 1993 to establish a 50-foot (15 m) environmental conservation zone along the slough. In response to a threatened lawsuit, the city began a comprehensive cleanup of the slough in 1994, and a year later it received a \$10 million grant from the EPA for the purpose. Of the streams monitored in the lower Willamette basin by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) between 1986 and 1995, the Columbia Slough had the worst pollution scores. DEQ's measurements came from the slough at Landfill Road, 2.6 miles (4.2 km) from the mouth. On the Oregon Water Quality Index (OWQI) used by DEQ, water quality scores can vary from 10 (worst) to 100 (ideal). The average for the Columbia Slough was 22, or "very poor". By comparison, the average in the Willamette River at the Hawthorne Bridge in downtown Portland was 74 during the same years. Measurements of water quality at the Landfill Road site during the years covered by the DEQ report showed high concentrations of phosphates, ammonia and nitrates, fecal coliform bacteria, and suspended solids, and a high biochemical oxygen demand. High temperatures enhanced extreme eutrophication in the summer. The Port of Portland began efforts in 1997 to reduce the flow of aircraft deicing chemicals from the airport into the waterway, though it still diverted concentrated chemicals (mostly glycol) directly into the slough during rare times of reservoir overflow. By 2012, the Port had completed work on an enhanced system that collects, stores, and treats the chemicals, and is more likely to direct runoff to the Columbia River than the slough. By 2000 the City of Portland had spent about \$200 million to nearly eliminate CSOs from entering the slough. It also replaced septic tank and cesspool systems near the middle and upper slough with sanitary sewers. BES analysis of water samples taken between 1995 and 2002 showed that by the end of this period DEQ water quality standards for Escherichia coli, the indicator organism for fecal contamination, were nearly always being met in the upper and middle sloughs and generally being met in the lower slough. Despite these and other improvements in water quality, the slough is not a safe source of edible fish. The Multnomah County Health Department and other agencies have advised people to avoid or greatly reduce consumption of fish and crayfish from the slough because they contain polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) and pesticides. ## Biology ### Habitat Development since 1850 has greatly altered the places in the watershed where plants and animals can thrive. In a report published in 2005, the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services (BES), using data from an early General Land Office survey, compared the watershed of 1851 with that of 2003. The study showed that all of the watershed provided plant and wildlife habitat in 1851, but by 2003 only 33 percent provided habitat. In 1851, water covered 10 percent of the watershed but that had been cut in half by 2003. Marshes and other wetlands that had comprised 22 percent of the earlier watershed dwindled to 1 percent by 2003, while the percentage of land devoted to industry, commerce, and homes rose from 0 to 34. In addition, habitat remaining in 2003 was greatly disturbed, dominated by Himalayan blackberry and other invasive species and fragmented by roads. The riparian zone along the slough was generally narrow or nonexistent and devoid of trees and shrubs in places, including along the levees. In 2002 the city, the MCDD, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began a project to improve habitat by creating 7 miles (11 km) of stream meanders and wetland terraces along the slough. Through its Watershed Revegetation Program, begun in 1996, the city worked with property owners to plant native vegetation and to remove invasive weeds. Through 2005, participants had replanted more than 500 acres (200 ha) along nearly 40 miles (64 km) of riparian corridors in the slough watershed. Other strategies pursued by the city, Metro, and other interest groups include connecting separated habitats with a continuous riparian corridor, removing wildlife corridor barriers, restoring hydrological connections to the slough, and restoring the floodplain where feasible. ### Fish and wildlife `Although reduced and altered, habitats in the watershed support a wide range of wildlife, some of which is found nowhere else in Portland. Many species that used the slough in 1850 still use it. This includes more than 150 species of birds, 26 species of fish of which 12 species are native several kinds of amphibians, western pond turtles, beaver, muskrat, river otter, and black-tailed deer. Juvenile salmon enter the lower slough as well as Smith and Bybee Lakes. Coastal cutthroat trout inhabit Fairview Creek and Osborn Creek. Three species of native freshwater mussel live in the slough and in Smith and Bybee Lakes. Crayfish have been found throughout the slough. Bald eagles are among the resident birds, and great blue herons have established rookeries in the watershed. Migrants that visit the slough include more than a dozen species of ducks, geese, swans, and raptors, as well as Neotropical shorebirds and songbirds. Invasive species adapted to the slough include the nutria, common carp, bullfrog, and European starling.` ### Vegetation The slough watershed lies in the Portland/Vancouver Basin ecoregion, part of the Willamette Valley ecoregion designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Black cottonwood, red osier dogwood, willow, Oregon white oak, and Oregon ash grow in scattered locations throughout the watershed, while wapato and Columbia sedge thrive in a few places. In the slough itself, macrophytes and algae sometimes restrict water flow and reduce water quality. Golf courses and athletic fields near the slough consist mainly of non-native grasses. Developed plots with houses or businesses often have deciduous street trees, grasses, occasional conifers, and a variety of native and non-native shrubs. Invasive plants include Himalayan blackberry, English ivy, reed canarygrass, purple loosestrife, and Japanese knotweed. ## Recreation ### Public parks and wetlands At the upper end of the slough, the City of Fairview manages Lakeshore Park, 5.2 acres (2.1 ha) on the south edge of Fairview Lake. Slightly further north is Blue Lake Regional Park, a 101-acre (41 ha) recreational park with a 64-acre (26 ha) lake, both managed by Metro. To the northeast is Chinook Landing Marine Park, also managed by Metro. At about 67 acres (27 ha), it is Oregon's largest public boating park on the Columbia River. Big Four Corners Wetlands, managed by the Portland Parks & Recreation Department (PPR), includes about 165 acres (67 ha) of wetlands and forests about 17 miles (27 km) from the slough's confluence with the Willamette River. Providing habitat for deer, coyotes, and river otter as well as birds and amphibians, it is the fourth largest natural area in the city. Further downstream, a consortium of interest groups is restoring a natural area of about 15 acres (6.1 ha) at Johnson Lake. Whitaker Ponds Nature Park, at about RM 10 (RK 16), is a 25-acre (10 ha) site with a walking trail, canoe launch, garden, and wildflower meadow. West of Whitaker Ponds, the Columbia Children's Arboretum, with every state tree, lies on a 29-acre (12 ha) property managed by PPR. Delta Park is a large municipal park complex that straddles Interstate 5 between the slough and the Columbia River at the former Vanport site. East Delta Park, covering about 85 acres (34 ha), has a sports complex and a street-tree arboretum. Portland International Raceway, for car, motorcycle, and bicycle racing, occupies about 292 acres (118 ha) of West Delta Park. Adjacent to the raceway is the Heron Lakes Golf Course, 340 acres (140 ha). The grounds include wetlands and interpretive signs about Vanport. Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area, a public park and nature reserve managed by Metro, lies just west of Delta Park. At about 2,000 acres (810 ha), it is one of the largest urban freshwater wetlands in the United States. Kelley Point Park covers 104 acres (42 ha) at the tip of the peninsula between the Willamette and Columbia rivers. ### Trails Next to Columbia River, long segments of the 40-Mile Loop skirt the north edge of the slough watershed, while other segments such as the north–south I-205 Bike Path cross it or, as in the case of the largely unfinished Columbia Slough Trail, run through it generally along an east–west axis. The 40 Mile Loop is a partly completed greenway trail around and through Portland and other parts of Multnomah County. Originally proposed by the Olmsted Brothers, architects involved in the planning for Portland's Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905, it has expanded to a projected 140 miles (230 km), encircling the city and connecting parks along the Columbia, Sandy, and Willamette rivers and Johnson Creek. The parks and other public spaces in the watershed have their own pedestrian paths, some of which are also bicycle paths that connect to the 40 Mile Loop. Many gaps lie between completed trail segments. Along the east side of the slough watershed, the City of Gresham has opened a 1.24-mile (2.00 km) segment of the Gresham-Fairview Trail, a planned 5.2-mile (8.4 km), north–south hiking and biking route between the Springwater Corridor along Johnson Creek and the 40 Mile Loop along the Columbia River. On the west side of the watershed, the Peninsula Crossing Trail connects Willamette Cove on the Willamette River in St. Johns with the 40 Mile Loop along the Columbia River. This 3-mile (4.8 km) linear hiking and biking trail crosses the lower slough and passes between Smith Lake and Heron Lakes Golf Course. The trail is level and accessible by wheelchair. Amenities include a picnic area, seats carved from basalt, and art installations. ### Boating Accessible to canoers and kayakers of all skill levels, the slough is essentially flat. A trip from source to mouth is possible via the main channel but requires portages around levees and other obstacles. BES estimates the time required for a canoe trip of roughly 18 miles (29 km) along the main channel to be at least nine hours. Trips along the lower 8.5 miles (13.7 km) must be timed with the tides to allow paddling with the current. Eight launch sites, including one just below Fairview Lake at the headwaters and another at Kelley Point Park near the mouth, have been established along the slough. ## See also - List of rivers of Oregon
232,924	Common chiffchaff	1,170,455,763	Small migratory passerine bird found in Europe, Asia and north Africa	[ "Birds described in 1817", "Birds of Africa", "Birds of Europe", "Birds of North Africa", "Birds of Russia", "Phylloscopus", "Taxa named by Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot" ]	The common chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita), or simply the chiffchaff, is a common and widespread leaf warbler which breeds in open woodlands throughout northern and temperate Europe and the Palearctic. It is a migratory passerine which winters in southern and western Europe, southern Asia and north Africa. Greenish-brown above and off-white below, it is named onomatopoeically for its simple chiff-chaff song. It has a number of subspecies, some of which are now treated as full species. The female builds a domed nest on or near the ground, and assumes most of the responsibility for brooding and feeding the chicks, whilst the male has little involvement in nesting, but defends his territory against rivals, and attacks potential predators. A small insectivorous bird, it is subject to predation by mammals, such as cats and mustelids, and birds, particularly hawks of the genus Accipiter. Its large range and population mean that its status is secure, although one subspecies is probably extinct. ## Taxonomy The British naturalist Gilbert White was one of the first people to separate the similar-looking common chiffchaff, willow warbler and wood warbler by their songs, as detailed in 1789 in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, but the common chiffchaff was first formally described as Sylvia collybita by French ornithologist Louis Vieillot in 1817 in his Nouveau Dictionnaire d'Histoire Naturelle. The type locality is the French region of Normandy. Described by German zoologist Friedrich Boie in 1826, the genus Phylloscopus contains about 80 species of small insectivorous Old World woodland warblers which are either greenish or brown above and yellowish, white or buff below. The genus was formerly part of the Old World warbler family Sylvidae, but has now been split off as a separate family Phylloscopidae. The chiffchaff's closest relatives, other than former subspecies, are a group of leaf warblers which similarly lack crown stripes, a yellow rump or obvious wing bars; they include the willow, Bonelli's, wood and plain leaf warblers. An old synonym, used for the chiffchaff was Phylloscopus rufus (Bechstein). The common chiffchaff has three still commonly accepted subspecies, together with some from the Iberian Peninsula, the Canary Islands, and the Caucasus which are now more often treated as full species. ### Subspecies - P. c. collybita, the nominate form, breeds in Europe east to Poland and Bulgaria, and is described below. It mainly winters in the south of its breeding range around the Mediterranean and in North Africa. It has been expanding its range northwards into Scandinavia since 1970 and close to the southern edge of the range of P. c. abietinus. - P. c. abietinus occurs in Scandinavia and northern Russia, and winters from southeastern Europe and northeastern Africa east to Iraq and western Iran. It is intermediate in appearance between P. c. tristis and P. c. collybita, being grey-washed olive-green above with a pale yellow supercilium, and underparts whiter than in P. c. collybita, but it has very similar vocalisations to the nominate subspecies. Due to individual variation, it can be difficult to reliably separate P. c. abietinus and P. c. collybita outside their main breeding and wintering ranges. Some common chiffchaffs in the Middle East are browner and have a more disyllabic swee-hu call than P. c. abietinus, and may belong to a poorly known taxon "brevirostris"; further research is needed to clarify the affinities of this form. - P. (c.) tristis, the Siberian chiffchaff, breeds in Siberia east of the Pechora River and winters in the lower Himalayas. It is also regularly recorded in western Europe in winter, and it is likely that the numbers involved have been underestimated due to uncertainties over identification criteria, lack of good data and recording policies (Sweden and Finland only accept trapped birds). It is a dull subspecies, grey or brownish above and whitish below, with little yellow in the plumage, and the buff-white supercilium is often longer than in the western subspecies. It has a higher pitched suitsistsuisit song and a short high-pitched cheet call. It is sometimes considered to be a full species due to its distinctive plumage and vocalisations, being similar to P. s. sindianus in these respects. Nominate P. c. collybita and P. c. tristis do not recognize each other's songs. Pending resolution of the status of P. (c.) fulvescens, which is found where the ranges of P. c. abietinus and P. c. tristis connect and may or may not be a hybrid between these, tristis is maintained in P. collybita. ### Former subspecies - P. ibericus, the Iberian chiffchaff is brighter, greener on the rump, and yellower below than P. collybita, and has a tit-tit-tit-tswee-tswee song. It was initially named P. brehmii, but the type specimen of that taxon is not an Iberian chiffchaff. This species is found in Portugal and Spain, west of a line stretching roughly from the western Pyrenees via the mountains of central Spain to the Mediterranean; the Iberian and common chiffchaffs co-occur in a narrow band along this line. Apart from the northernmost section, the precise course of the contact zone is not well documented. A long-distance migrant, this species winters in western Africa. It differs from P. c. collybita in vocalisations, external morphology, and mtDNA sequences. There is hybridization in the contact zone, almost always between male P. ibericus and female P. c. collybita, and hybrids apparently show much decreased fitness; hybrid females appear to be sterile according to Haldane's Rule. Regarding the latter aspect, the Iberian chiffchaff apparently is the oldest lineage of chiffchaffs and quite distinct from the common chiffchaff. - P. canariensis, the Canary Islands chiffchaff is a non-migratory species formerly occurring on the major Canary Islands, which is differentiated from P. collybita by morphology, vocalisations and genetic characteristics, and, of course, is not sympatric with any other chiffchaffs. The nominate western subspecies P. c. canariensis of El Hierro, La Palma, La Gomera, Tenerife, and Gran Canaria is smaller than common chiffchaff, and has shorter, rounder wings. It is olive-brown above and has a buff breast and flanks; it has a rich deep chip-cheep-cheep-chip-chip-cheep song, and a call similar to the nominate race. The eastern P. c. exsul of Lanzarote and possibly Fuerteventura is paler above and less rufous below than its western relative, and had a harsher call; it might have been a distinct species, but it became extinct in 1986 at latest, probably much earlier. The reasons for its extinction are unclear, but it appears always to have been scarce and localised, occurring only in the Haria Valley of Lanzarote. - P. sindianus, the mountain chiffchaff, is found in the Caucasus (P. s. lorenzii) and Himalayas (P. s. sindianus), and is an altitudinal migrant, moving to lower levels in winter. The nominate subspecies is similar to P. c. tristis, but with a finer darker bill, browner upperparts and buff flanks; its song is almost identical to P. collybita, but the call is a weak psew. P. s. lorenzii is warmer and darker brown than the nominate race; it is sympatric with common chiffchaff in a small area in the Western Caucasus, but interbreeding occurs rarely, if ever. The mountain chiffchaff differs from tristis in vocalisations, external morphology, and mtDNA sequences. Its two subspecies appear to be distinct vocally, and also show some difference in mtDNA sequences; they are maintained at subspecies rank pending further research. ### Etymology The common chiffchaff's English name is onomatopoeic, referring to the repetitive chiff-chaff song of the European subspecies. There are similar names in some other European languages, such as the Dutch tjiftjaf, the German Zilpzalp, Welsh siff-saff and Finnish tiltaltti. The binomial name is of Greek origin; Phylloscopus comes from phyllon/φυλλον, "leaf", and skopeo/σκοπεω, "to look at" or "to see", since this genus comprises species that spend much of their time feeding in trees, while collybita is a corruption of kollubistes, "money changer", the song being likened to the jingling of coins. In some languages their tree-dwelling habit is hinted in the vernacular name. For example, in Swedish the common chiffchaff is called gransångare, a compound of gran (i.e. "spruce") and sångare, meaning both "singer" and Old World warbler. ## Description The common chiffchaff is a small, dumpy, 10–12 centimetres (3.9–4.7 inches) long leaf warbler. The male weighs 7–8 grammes (0.28–0.31 oz), and the female 6–7 grammes (0.25–0.28 oz). The spring adult of the western nominate subspecies P. c. collybita has brown-washed dull green upperparts, off-white underparts becoming yellowish on the flanks, and a short whitish supercilium. It has dark legs, a fine dark bill, and short primary projection (extension of the flight feathers beyond the folded wing). As the plumage wears, it gets duller and browner, and the yellow on the flanks tends to be lost, but after the breeding season there is a prolonged complete moult before migration. The newly fledged juvenile is browner above than the adult, with yellow-white underparts, but moults about 10 weeks after acquiring its first plumage. After moulting, both the adult and the juvenile have brighter and greener upperparts and a paler supercilium. This warbler gets its name from its simple distinctive song, a repetitive cheerful chiff-chaff. This song is one of the first avian signs that spring has returned. Its call is a hweet, less disyllabic than the hooeet of the willow warbler or hu-it of the western Bonelli's warbler. The song differs from that of the Iberian chiffchaff, which has a shorter djup djup djup wheep wheep chittichittichiittichitta. However, mixed singers occur in the hybridisation zone and elsewhere, and can be difficult to allocate to species. When not singing, the common chiffchaff can be difficult to distinguish from other leaf warblers with greenish upperparts and whitish underparts, particularly the willow warbler. However, that species has a longer primary projection, a sleeker, brighter appearance and generally pale legs. Bonelli's warbler (P. bonelli) might be confused with the common chiffchaff subspecies tristis, but it has a plain face and green in the wings. The common chiffchaff also has rounded wings in flight, and a diagnostic tail movement consisting of a dip, then sidewards wag, that distinguishes it from other Phylloscopus warblers and gives rise to the name "tailwagger" in India. Perhaps the greatest challenge is distinguishing non-singing birds of the nominate subspecies from Iberian chiffchaff in the field. In Great Britain and the Netherlands, all accepted records of vagrant Iberian chiffchaffs relate to singing males. ## Distribution and habitat The common chiffchaff breeds across Europe and Asia east to eastern Siberia and north to about 70°N, with isolated populations in northwest Africa, northern and western Turkey and northwestern Iran. It is migratory, but it is one of the first passerine birds to return to its breeding areas in the spring and among the last to leave in late autumn. When breeding, it is a bird of open woodlands with some taller trees and ground cover for nesting purposes. These trees are typically at least 5 metres (16 feet) high, with undergrowth that is an open, poor to medium mix of grasses, bracken, nettles or similar plants. Its breeding habitat is quite specific, and even near relatives do not share it; for example, the willow warbler (P. trochilus) prefers younger trees, while the wood warbler (P. sibilatrix) prefers less undergrowth. In winter, the common chiffchaff uses a wider range of habitats including scrub, and is not so dependent on trees. It is often found near water, unlike the willow warbler which tolerates drier habitats. There is an increasing tendency to winter in western Europe well north of the traditional areas, especially in coastal southern England and the mild urban microclimate of London. These overwintering common chiffchaffs include some visitors of the eastern subspecies abietinus and tristis, so they are certainly not all birds which have bred locally, although some undoubtedly are. ## Behaviour ### Territory The male common chiffchaff is highly territorial during the breeding season, with a core territory typically 20 metres (66 feet) across, which is fiercely defended against other males. Other small birds may also be attacked. The male is inquisitive and fearless, attacking even dangerous predators like the stoat if they approach the nest, as well as egg-thieves like the Eurasian jay. His song, given from a favoured prominent vantage point, appears to be used to advertise an established territory and contact the female, rather than as a paternity guard strategy. Beyond the core territory, there is a larger feeding range which is variable in size, but typically ten or more times the area of the breeding territory. It is believed that the female has a larger feeding range than the male. After breeding has finished, this species abandons its territory, and may join small flocks including other warblers prior to migration. ### Breeding The male common chiffchaff returns to its breeding territory two or three weeks before the female and immediately starts singing to establish ownership and attract a female. When a female is located, the male will use a slow butterfly-like flight as part of the courtship ritual, but once a pair-bond has been established, other females will be driven from the territory. The male has little involvement in the nesting process other than defending the territory. The female's nest is built on or near the ground in a concealed site in brambles, nettles or other dense low vegetation. The domed nest has a side entrance, and is constructed from coarse plant material such as dead leaves and grass, with finer material used on the interior before the addition of a lining of feathers. The typical nest is 12.5 centimetres (4.9 inches) high and 11 centimetres (4.3 inches) across. The clutch is two to seven (normally five or six) cream-coloured eggs which have tiny ruddy, purple or blackish spots and are about 1.5 centimetres (0.59 inches) long and 1.2 centimetres (0.47 inches) across. They are incubated by the female for 13–14 days before hatching as naked, blind altricial chicks. The female broods and feeds the chicks for another 14–15 days until they fledge. The male rarely participates in feeding, although this sometimes occurs, especially when bad weather limits insect supplies or if the female disappears. After fledging, the young stay in the vicinity of the nest for three to four weeks, and are fed by and roost with the female, although these interactions reduce after approximately the first 14 days. In the north of the range there is only time to raise one brood, due to the short summer, but a second brood is common in central and southern areas. Although pairs stay together during the breeding season and polygamy is uncommon, even if the male and female return to the same site in the following year there is no apparent recognition or fidelity. Interbreeding with other species, other than those formerly considered as subspecies of P. collybita, is rare, but a few examples are known of hybridisation with the willow warbler. Such hybrids give mixed songs, but the latter alone is not proof of interspecific breeding. ### Feeding Like most Old World warblers, this small species is insectivorous, moving restlessly through foliage or briefly hovering. It has been recorded as taking insects, mainly flies, from more than 50 families, along with other small and medium-sized invertebrates. It will take the eggs and larvae of butterflies and moths, particularly those of the winter moth. The chiffchaff has been estimated to require about one-third of its weight in insects daily, and it feeds almost continuously in the autumn to put on extra fat as fuel for the long migration flight. ## Predators and threats As with most small birds, mortality in the first year of life is high, but adults aged three to four years are regularly recorded, and the record is more than seven years. Eggs, chicks and fledglings of this ground-nesting species are taken by stoats, weasels and crows such as the European magpie, and the adults are hunted by birds of prey, particularly the sparrowhawk. Small birds are also at the mercy of the weather, particularly when migrating, but also on the breeding and wintering grounds. The common chiffchaff is occasionally a host of brood parasitic cuckoos, including the common and Horsfield's cuckoos, but it recognises and rejects non-mimetic eggs and is therefore only rarely successfully brood-parasitised. Like other passerine birds, the common chiffchaff can also acquire intestinal nematode parasites and external ticks. The main effect of humans on this species is indirect, through woodland clearance which affects the habitat, predation by cats, and collisions with windows, buildings and cars. Only the first of these has the potential to seriously affect populations, but given the huge geographical spread of P. c. abietinus and P. c. tristis, and woodland conservation policies in the range of P. c. collybita, the chiffchaff's future seems assured. ## Status The common chiffchaff has an enormous range, with an estimated global extent of 10 million square kilometres (3.8 million square miles) and a population of 60–120 million individuals in Europe alone. Although global population trends have not been quantified, the species is not believed to approach the thresholds for the population decline criterion of the IUCN Red List (that is, declining more than 30 percent in ten years or three generations). For these reasons, the species is evaluated as "least concern". None of the major subspecies is under threat, but exsul, as noted above, is probably extinct. There is a slow population increase of common chiffchaff in the Czech Republic. The range of at least P. c. collybita seems to be expanding, with northward advances in Scotland, Norway and Sweden and a large population increase in Denmark.
37,782	Edward Teller	1,173,782,585	Hungarian-American nuclear physicist (1908–2003)	[ "1908 births", "2003 deaths", "20th-century Hungarian physicists", "Academic staff of the University of Göttingen", "American agnostics", "American amputees", "American nuclear physicists", "American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent", "American scientists with disabilities", "Edward Teller", "Enrico Fermi Award recipients", "Fasori Gimnázium alumni", "Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences", "Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science", "Fellows of the American Physical Society", "Founding members of the World Cultural Council", "George Washington University faculty", "Hungarian Jews", "Hungarian agnostics", "Hungarian amputees", "Hungarian emigrants to the United States", "Israeli nuclear development", "Jewish American scientists", "Jewish agnostics", "Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States", "Jewish physicists", "Karlsruhe Institute of Technology alumni", "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory staff", "Leipzig University alumni", "Manhattan Project people", "Members of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science", "Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences", "National Medal of Science laureates", "Nuclear proliferation", "Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients", "Scientists from Budapest", "Theoretical physicists", "Time Person of the Year", "University of California, Berkeley faculty", "University of Chicago faculty", "Zionists" ]	Edward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" and one of the creators of the Teller–Ulam design. Teller was known for his scientific ability and his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality. Born in Hungary in 1908, Teller emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, one of the many so-called "Martians", a group of prominent Hungarian scientist émigrés. He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (in particular the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermi's theory of beta decay, in the form of Gamow–Teller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the Jahn–Teller effect and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry. Teller made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, with Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, and Augusta Teller, Teller co-authored a paper that is a standard starting point for the applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics and the Markov chain Monte Carlo literature in Bayesian statistics. Teller was an early member of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb. He made a serious push to develop the first fusion-based weapons, but ultimately fusion bombs only appeared after World War II. He co-founded the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was its director or associate director. After his controversial negative testimony in the Oppenheimer security hearing of his former Los Alamos Laboratory superior, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific community ostracized Teller. Teller continued to find support from the U.S. government and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program. In his later years, he advocated controversial technological solutions to military and civilian problems, including a plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using a thermonuclear explosive in what was called Project Chariot, and Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Teller was a recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award and the Albert Einstein Award. He died on September 9, 2003, in Stanford, California, at 95. ## Early life and work Ede Teller was born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish family. His parents were Ilona (née Deutsch), a pianist, and Max Teller, an attorney. He attended the Minta Gymnasium in Budapest. Despite being of Jewish origins, Teller became agnostic. "Religion was not an issue in my family", he later wrote, "indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years." Teller was a late talker, but he became very interested in numbers and for fun calculated large numbers in his head. Teller left Hungary for Germany in 1926, partly due to the discriminatory numerus clausus rule under Miklós Horthy's regime. The political climate and revolutions in Hungary during his youth instilled a lingering animosity toward Communism and Fascism. From 1926 to 1928, Teller studied mathematics and chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering. He once stated that the person who was responsible for his becoming a physicist was Herman Mark, who was a visiting professor, after hearing lectures on molecular spectroscopy where Mark made it clear to him that it was new ideas in physics that were radically changing the frontier of chemistry. Mark was an expert in polymer chemistry, a field which is essential to understanding biochemistry, and Mark taught him about the leading breakthroughs in quantum physics made by Louis de Broglie, among others. It was his exposure to Mark's lectures that initially motivated Teller to switch to physics. After informing his father of his intent to switch, his father was so concerned that he traveled to visit him and speak with his professors at the school. While a degree in chemical engineering was a sure path to a well-paying job at chemical companies, there was not such a clear-cut route for a career with a degree in physics. He was not privy to the discussions his father had with his professors, but the result was that he got his father's permission to become a physicist. Teller then attended the University of Munich, where he studied physics under Arnold Sommerfeld. On July 14, 1928, while still a student in Munich, while riding a streetcar to catch a train for a hike in the nearby Alps, he jumped off the car while it was still moving. He fell, and the wheel nearly severed his right foot. For the rest of his life, he walked with a limp, and on occasion he wore a prosthetic foot. The painkillers he was taking were interfering with his thinking, so he decided to stop taking them, instead using his willpower to deal with the pain, including use of the placebo effect, by which he convinced himself that he had taken painkillers rather than water. Werner Heisenberg said that it was the hardiness of Teller's spirit, rather than stoicism, that allowed him to cope so well with the accident. In 1929, Teller transferred to the University of Leipzig where in 1930, he received his PhD in physics under Heisenberg. Teller's dissertation dealt with one of the first accurate quantum mechanical treatments of the hydrogen molecular ion. That year, he befriended Russian physicists George Gamow and Lev Landau. Teller's lifelong friendship with a Czech physicist, George Placzek, was also very important for his scientific and philosophical development. It was Placzek who arranged a summer stay in Rome with Enrico Fermi in 1932, thus orienting Teller's scientific career in nuclear physics. Also in 1930, Teller moved to the University of Göttingen, then one of the world's great centers of physics due to the presence of Max Born and James Franck, but after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Germany became unsafe for Jewish people, and he left through the aid of the International Rescue Committee. He went briefly to England, and moved for a year to Copenhagen, where he worked under Niels Bohr. In February 1934 he married his long-time girlfriend Augusta Maria "Mici" (pronounced "Mitzi") Harkanyi, who was the sister of a friend. Since Mici was a Calvinist Christian, Edward and she were married in a Calvinist church. He returned to England in September 1934. Mici had been a student in Pittsburgh and wanted to return to the United States. Her chance came in 1935, when, thanks to George Gamow, Teller was invited to the United States to become a professor of physics at George Washington University, where he worked with Gamow until 1941. At George Washington University in 1937, Teller predicted the Jahn–Teller effect, which distorts molecules in certain situations; this affects the chemical reactions of metals, and in particular the coloration of certain metallic dyes. Teller and Hermann Arthur Jahn analyzed it as a piece of purely mathematical physics. In collaboration with Stephen Brunauer and Paul Hugh Emmett, Teller also made an important contribution to surface physics and chemistry: the so-called Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) isotherm. Teller and Mici became naturalized citizens of the United States on March 6, 1941. When World War II began, Teller wanted to contribute to the war effort. On the advice of the well-known Caltech aerodynamicist and fellow Hungarian émigré Theodore von Kármán, Teller collaborated with his friend Hans Bethe in developing a theory of shock-wave propagation. In later years, their explanation of the behavior of the gas behind such a wave proved valuable to scientists who were studying missile re-entry. ## Manhattan Project ### Los Alamos Laboratory In 1942, Teller was invited to be part of Robert Oppenheimer's summer planning seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, on the origins of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. effort to develop the first nuclear weapons. A few weeks earlier, Teller had been meeting with his friend and colleague Enrico Fermi about the prospects of atomic warfare, and Fermi had nonchalantly suggested that perhaps a weapon based on nuclear fission could be used to set off an even larger nuclear fusion reaction. Even though he initially explained to Fermi why he thought the idea would not work, Teller was fascinated by the possibility and was quickly bored with the idea of "just" an atomic bomb even though this was not yet anywhere near completion. At the Berkeley session, Teller diverted discussion from the fission weapon to the possibility of a fusion weapon—what he called the "Super", an early conception of the hydrogen bomb. Arthur Compton, the chairman of the University of Chicago physics department, coordinated the uranium research of Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. To remove disagreement and duplication, Compton transferred the scientists to the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago. Even though Teller and Mici were now American citizens, they had relatives in enemy countries, so Teller did not at first go to Chicago. In early 1943, construction of the Los Alamos Laboratory Los Alamos, New Mexico began. With Oppenheimer as its director, the laboratory's purpose was to design an atomic bomb. Teller moved there in March 1943. In Los Alamos, Teller managed to annoy his neighbors by playing piano late at night. Teller became part of the Theoretical (T) Division. He was given a secret identity of Ed Tilden. He was irked at being passed over as its head; the job was instead given to Hans Bethe. Oppenheimer had him investigate unusual approaches to building fission weapons, such as autocatalysis, in which the efficiency of the bomb would increase as the nuclear chain reaction progressed, but proved to be impractical. He also investigated using uranium hydride instead of uranium metal, but its efficiency turned out to be "negligible or less". He continued to push his ideas for a fusion weapon even though it had been put on a low priority during the war (as the creation of a fission weapon proved to be difficult enough). On a visit to New York, he asked Maria Goeppert-Mayer to carry out calculations on the Super for him. She confirmed Teller's own results: the Super was not going to work. A special group was established under Teller in March 1944 to investigate the mathematics of an implosion-type nuclear weapon. It too ran into difficulties. Because of his interest in the Super, Teller did not work as hard on the implosion calculations as Bethe wanted. These too were originally low-priority tasks, but the discovery of spontaneous fission in plutonium by Emilio Segrè's group gave the implosion bomb increased importance. In June 1944, at Bethe's request, Oppenheimer moved Teller out of T Division, and placed him in charge of a special group responsible for the Super, reporting directly to Oppenheimer. He was replaced by Rudolf Peierls from the British Mission, who in turn brought in Klaus Fuchs, who was later revealed to be a Soviet spy. Teller's Super group became part of Fermi's F Division when he joined the Los Alamos Laboratory in September 1944. It included Stanislaw Ulam, Jane Roberg, Geoffrey Chew, Harold and Mary Argo, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer. Teller made valuable contributions to bomb research, especially in the elucidation of the implosion mechanism. He was the first to propose the solid pit design that was eventually successful. This design became known as a "Christy pit", after the physicist Robert F. Christy who made the pit a reality. Teller was one of the few scientists to actually watch (with eye protection) the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, rather than follow orders to lie on the ground with backs turned. He later said that the atomic flash "was as if I had pulled open the curtain in a dark room and broad daylight streamed in". ### Decision to drop the bombs In the days before and after the first demonstration of a nuclear weapon (the Trinity test in July 1945), Hungarian Leo Szilard circulated the Szilard petition, which argued that a demonstration to the Japanese of the new weapon should occur prior to actual use on Japan, and that the weapons should never be used on people. In response to Szilard's petition, Teller consulted his friend Robert Oppenheimer. Teller believed that Oppenheimer was a natural leader and could help him with such a formidable political problem. Oppenheimer reassured Teller that the nation's fate should be left to the sensible politicians in Washington. Bolstered by Oppenheimer's influence, he decided to not sign the petition. Teller therefore penned a letter in response to Szilard that read: > I am not really convinced of your objections. I do not feel that there is any chance to outlaw any one weapon. If we have a slim chance of survival, it lies in the possibility to get rid of wars. The more decisive a weapon is the more surely it will be used in any real conflict and no agreements will help. > > Our only hope is in getting the facts of our results before the people. This might help to convince everybody that the next war would be fatal. For this purpose actual combat-use might even be the best thing. On reflection on this letter years later when he was writing his memoirs, Teller wrote: > First, Szilard was right. As scientists who worked on producing the bomb, we bore a special responsibility. Second, Oppenheimer was right. We did not know enough about the political situation to have a valid opinion. Third, what we should have done but failed to do was to work out the technical changes required for demonstrating the bomb [very high] over Tokyo and submit that information to President Truman. Unknown to Teller at the time, four of his colleagues were solicited by the then secret May to June 1945 Interim Committee. It is this organization which ultimately decided on how the new weapons should initially be used. The committee's four-member Scientific Panel was led by Oppenheimer, and concluded immediate military use on Japan was the best option: > The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender ... Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use ... We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use. Teller later learned of Oppenheimer's solicitation and his role in the Interim Committee's decision to drop the bombs, having secretly endorsed an immediate military use of the new weapons. This was contrary to the impression that Teller had received when he had personally asked Oppenheimer about the Szilard petition: that the nation's fate should be left to the sensible politicians in Washington. Following Teller's discovery of this, his relationship with his advisor began to deteriorate. In 1990, the historian Barton Bernstein argued that it is an "unconvincing claim" by Teller that he was a "covert dissenter" to the use of the bomb. In his 2001 Memoirs, Teller claims that he did lobby Oppenheimer, but that Oppenheimer had convinced him that he should take no action and that the scientists should leave military questions in the hands of the military; Teller claims he was not aware that Oppenheimer and other scientists were being consulted as to the actual use of the weapon and implies that Oppenheimer was being hypocritical. ## Hydrogen bomb Despite an offer from Norris Bradbury, who had replaced Oppenheimer as the director of Los Alamos in November 1945, to become the head of the Theoretical (T) Division, Teller left Los Alamos on February 1, 1946, to return to the University of Chicago as a professor and close associate of Fermi and Goeppert-Mayer. Mayer's work on the internal structure of the elements would earn her the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. On April 18–20, 1946, Teller participated in a conference at Los Alamos to review the wartime work on the Super. The properties of thermonuclear fuels such as deuterium and the possible design of a hydrogen bomb were discussed. It was concluded that Teller's assessment of a hydrogen bomb had been too favourable, and that both the quantity of deuterium needed, as well as the radiation losses during deuterium burning, would shed doubt on its workability. Addition of expensive tritium to the thermonuclear mixture would likely lower its ignition temperature, but even so, nobody knew at that time how much tritium would be needed, and whether even tritium addition would encourage heat propagation. At the end of the conference, in spite of opposition by some members such as Robert Serber, Teller submitted an optimistic report in which he said that a hydrogen bomb was feasible, and that further work should be encouraged on its development. Fuchs also participated in this conference, and transmitted this information to Moscow. With John von Neumann, he contributed an idea of using implosion to ignite the Super. The model of Teller's "classical Super" was so uncertain that Oppenheimer would later say that he wished the Russians were building their own hydrogen bomb based on that design, so that it would almost certainly delay their progress on it. By 1949, Soviet-backed governments had already begun seizing control throughout Eastern Europe, forming such puppet states as the Hungarian People's Republic in Teller's homeland of Hungary, where much of his family still lived, on August 20, 1949. Following the Soviet Union's first test detonation of an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, President Harry Truman announced a crash development program for a hydrogen bomb. Teller returned to Los Alamos in 1950 to work on the project. He insisted on involving more theorists, but many of Teller's prominent colleagues, like Fermi and Oppenheimer, were sure that the project of the H-bomb was technically infeasible and politically undesirable. None of the available designs were yet workable. However, Soviet scientists who had worked on their own hydrogen bomb have claimed that they developed it independently. In 1950, calculations by the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and his collaborator Cornelius Everett, along with confirmations by Fermi, had shown that not only was Teller's earlier estimate of the quantity of tritium needed for the H-bomb a low one, but that even with higher amounts of tritium, the energy loss in the fusion process would be too great to enable the fusion reaction to propagate. However, in 1951 Teller and Ulam made a breakthrough, and invented a new design, proposed in a classified March 1951 paper, On Heterocatalytic Detonations I: Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors, for a practical megaton-range H-bomb. The exact contribution provided respectively from Ulam and Teller to what became known as the Teller–Ulam design is not definitively known in the public domain, and the exact contributions of each and how the final idea was arrived upon has been a point of dispute in both public and classified discussions since the early 1950s. In an interview with Scientific American from 1999, Teller told the reporter: > I contributed; Ulam did not. I'm sorry I had to answer it in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with an old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out and had difficulty getting people to listen to. He was willing to sign a paper. When it then came to defending that paper and really putting work into it, he refused. He said, "I don't believe in it." The issue is controversial. Bethe considered Teller's contribution to the invention of the H-bomb a true innovation as early as 1952, and referred to his work as a "stroke of genius" in 1954. In both cases, however, Bethe emphasized Teller's role as a way of stressing that the development of the H-bomb could not have been hastened by additional support or funding, and Teller greatly disagreed with Bethe's assessment. Other scientists (antagonistic to Teller, such as J. Carson Mark) have claimed that Teller would have never gotten any closer without the assistance of Ulam and others. Ulam himself claimed that Teller only produced a "more generalized" version of Ulam's original design. The breakthrough—the details of which are still classified—was apparently the separation of the fission and fusion components of the weapons, and to use the X-rays produced by the fission bomb to first compress the fusion fuel (by process known as "radiation implosion") before igniting it. Ulam's idea seems to have been to use mechanical shock from the primary to encourage fusion in the secondary, while Teller quickly realized that X-rays from the primary would do the job much more symmetrically. Some members of the laboratory (J. Carson Mark in particular) later expressed the opinion that the idea to use the X-rays would have eventually occurred to anyone working on the physical processes involved, and that the obvious reason why Teller thought of it right away was because he was already working on the "Greenhouse" tests for the spring of 1951, in which the effect of X-rays from a fission bomb on a mixture of deuterium and tritium was going to be investigated. Priscilla Johnson McMillan in her book The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer: And the Birth of the Modern Arms Race, writes that Teller "concealed the role" of Ulam, and that only "radiation implosion" was Teller's idea. Teller even refused to sign the patent application, because it would need Ulam's signature. Thomas Powers writes that "of course the bomb designers all knew the truth, and many considered Teller the lowest, most contemptible kind of offender in the world of science, a stealer of credit". Whatever the actual components of the so-called Teller–Ulam design and the respective contributions of those who worked on it, after it was proposed it was immediately seen by the scientists working on the project as the answer which had been so long sought. Those who previously had doubted whether a fission-fusion bomb would be feasible at all were converted into believing that it was only a matter of time before both the US and the USSR had developed multi-megaton weapons. Even Oppenheimer, who was originally opposed to the project, called the idea "technically sweet". Though he had helped to come up with the design and had been a long-time proponent of the concept, Teller was not chosen to head the development project (his reputation of a thorny personality likely played a role in this). In 1952 he left Los Alamos and joined the newly established Livermore branch of the University of California Radiation Laboratory, which had been created largely through his urging. After the detonation of Ivy Mike, the first thermonuclear weapon to utilize the Teller–Ulam configuration, on November 1, 1952, Teller became known in the press as the "father of the hydrogen bomb". Teller himself refrained from attending the test—he claimed not to feel welcome at the Pacific Proving Grounds—and instead saw its results on a seismograph at Berkeley. There was an opinion that by analyzing the fallout from this test, the Soviets (led in their H-bomb work by Andrei Sakharov) could have deciphered the new American design. However, this was later denied by the Soviet bomb researchers. Because of official secrecy, little information about the bomb's development was released by the government, and press reports often attributed the entire weapon's design and development to Teller and his new Livermore Laboratory (when it was actually developed by Los Alamos). Many of Teller's colleagues were irritated that he seemed to enjoy taking full credit for something he had only a part in, and in response, with encouragement from Enrico Fermi, Teller authored an article titled "The Work of Many People", which appeared in Science magazine in February 1955, emphasizing that he was not alone in the weapon's development. He would later write in his memoirs that he had told a "white lie" in the 1955 article in order to "soothe ruffled feelings", and claimed full credit for the invention. Teller was known for getting engrossed in projects which were theoretically interesting but practically infeasible (the classic "Super" was one such project.) About his work on the hydrogen bomb, Bethe said: > Nobody will blame Teller because the calculations of 1946 were wrong, especially because adequate computing machines were not available at Los Alamos. But he was blamed at Los Alamos for leading the laboratory, and indeed the whole country, into an adventurous programme on the basis of calculations, which he himself must have known to have been very incomplete. During the Manhattan Project, Teller advocated the development of a bomb using uranium hydride, which many of his fellow theorists said would be unlikely to work. At Livermore, Teller continued work on the hydride bomb, and the result was a dud. Ulam once wrote to a colleague about an idea he had shared with Teller: "Edward is full of enthusiasm about these possibilities; this is perhaps an indication they will not work." Fermi once said that Teller was the only monomaniac he knew who had several manias. Carey Sublette of Nuclear Weapon Archive argues that Ulam came up with the radiation implosion compression design of thermonuclear weapons, but that on the other hand Teller has gotten little credit for being the first to propose fusion boosting in 1945, which is essential for miniaturization and reliability and is used in all of today's nuclear weapons. ## Oppenheimer controversy Teller became controversial in 1954 when he testified against Oppenheimer at Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing. Teller had clashed with Oppenheimer many times at Los Alamos over issues relating both to fission and fusion research, and during Oppenheimer's hearing he was the only member of the scientific community to state that Oppenheimer should not be granted security clearance. Asked at the hearing by Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) attorney Roger Robb whether he was planning "to suggest that Dr. Oppenheimer is disloyal to the United States", Teller replied that: > I do not want to suggest anything of the kind. I know Oppenheimer as an intellectually most alert and a very complicated person, and I think it would be presumptuous and wrong on my part if I would try in any way to analyze his motives. But I have always assumed, and I now assume that he is loyal to the United States. I believe this, and I shall believe it until I see very conclusive proof to the opposite. He was immediately asked whether he believed that Oppenheimer was a "security risk", to which he testified: > In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands. Teller also testified that Oppenheimer's opinion about the thermonuclear program seemed to be based more on the scientific feasibility of the weapon than anything else. He additionally testified that Oppenheimer's direction of Los Alamos was "a very outstanding achievement" both as a scientist and an administrator, lauding his "very quick mind" and that he made "just a most wonderful and excellent director". After this, however, he detailed ways in which he felt that Oppenheimer had hindered his efforts towards an active thermonuclear development program, and at length criticized Oppenheimer's decisions not to invest more work onto the question at different points in his career, saying: "If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance." By recasting a difference of judgment over the merits of the early work on the hydrogen bomb project into a matter of a security risk, Teller effectively damned Oppenheimer in a field where security was necessarily of paramount concern. Teller's testimony thereby rendered Oppenheimer vulnerable to charges by a Congressional aide that he was a Soviet spy, which resulted in the destruction of Oppenheimer's career. Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked after the hearings. Most of Teller's former colleagues disapproved of his testimony and he was ostracized by much of the scientific community. After the fact, Teller consistently denied that he was intending to damn Oppenheimer, and even claimed that he was attempting to exonerate him. However, documentary evidence has suggested that this was likely not the case. Six days before the testimony, Teller met with an AEC liaison officer and suggested "deepening the charges" in his testimony. Teller always insisted that his testimony had not significantly harmed Oppenheimer. In 2002, Teller contended that Oppenheimer was "not destroyed" by the security hearing but "no longer asked to assist in policy matters". He claimed his words were an overreaction, because he had only just learned of Oppenheimer's failure to immediately report an approach by Haakon Chevalier, who had approached Oppenheimer to help the Russians. Teller said that, in hindsight, he would have responded differently. Historian Richard Rhodes said that in his opinion it was already a foregone conclusion that Oppenheimer would have his security clearance revoked by then AEC chairman Lewis Strauss, regardless of Teller's testimony. However, as Teller's testimony was the most damning, he was singled out and blamed for the hearing's ruling, losing friends due to it, such as Robert Christy, who refused to shake his hand in one infamous incident. This was emblematic of his later treatment which resulted in him being forced into the role of an outcast of the physics community, thus leaving him little choice but to align himself with industrialists. ## US government work and political advocacy After the Oppenheimer controversy, Teller became ostracized by much of the scientific community, but was still quite welcome in the government and military science circles. Along with his traditional advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program, he had helped to develop nuclear reactor safety standards as the chair of the Reactor Safeguard Committee of the AEC in the late 1940s, and in the late 1950s headed an effort at General Atomics which designed research reactors in which a nuclear meltdown would be impossible. The TRIGA (Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomic) has been built and used in hundreds of hospitals and universities worldwide for medical isotope production and research. Teller promoted increased defense spending to counter the perceived Soviet missile threat. He was a signatory to the 1958 report by the military sub-panel of the Rockefeller Brothers funded Special Studies Project, which called for a \$3 billion annual increase in America's military budget. In 1956 he attended the Project Nobska anti-submarine warfare conference, where discussion ranged from oceanography to nuclear weapons. In the course of discussing a small nuclear warhead for the Mark 45 torpedo, he started a discussion on the possibility of developing a physically small one-megaton nuclear warhead for the Polaris missile. His counterpart in the discussion, J. Carson Mark from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, at first insisted it could not be done. However, Dr. Mark eventually stated that a half-megaton warhead of small enough size could be developed. This yield, roughly thirty times that of the Hiroshima bomb, was enough for Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke, who was present in person, and Navy strategic missile development shifted from Jupiter to Polaris by the end of the year. He was Director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which he helped to found with Ernest O. Lawrence, from 1958 to 1960, and after that he continued as an associate director. He chaired the committee that founded the Space Sciences Laboratory at Berkeley. He also served concurrently as a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a tireless advocate of a strong nuclear program and argued for continued testing and development—in fact, he stepped down from the directorship of Livermore so that he could better lobby against the proposed test ban. He testified against the test ban both before Congress as well as on television. Teller established the Department of Applied Science at the University of California, Davis and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1963, which holds the Edward Teller endowed professorship in his honor. In 1975 he retired from both the lab and Berkeley, and was named Director Emeritus of the Livermore Laboratory and appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. After the end of communism in Hungary in 1989, he made several visits to his country of origin, and paid careful attention to the political changes there. ## Global climate change Teller was one of the first prominent people to raise the danger of climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels. At an address to the membership of the American Chemical Society in December 1957, Teller warned that the large amount of carbon-based fuel that had been burnt since the mid-19th century was increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which would "act in the same way as a greenhouse and will raise the temperature at the surface", and that he had calculated that if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by 10% "an appreciable part of the polar ice might melt". In 1959, at a symposium organised by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business for the centennial of the American oil industry, Edward Teller warned that: > I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. ... And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. ... Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. ... Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect. ... It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe. ## Non-military uses of nuclear explosions Teller was one of the strongest and best-known advocates for investigating non-military uses of nuclear explosives, which the United States explored under Operation Plowshare. One of the most controversial projects he proposed was a plan to use a multi-megaton hydrogen bomb to dig a deep-water harbor more than a mile long and half a mile wide to use for shipment of resources from coal and oil fields through Point Hope, Alaska. The Atomic Energy Commission accepted Teller's proposal in 1958 and it was designated Project Chariot. While the AEC was scouting out the Alaskan site, and having withdrawn the land from the public domain, Teller publicly advocated the economic benefits of the plan, but was unable to convince local government leaders that the plan was financially viable. Other scientists criticized the project as being potentially unsafe for the local wildlife and the Inupiat people living near the designated area, who were not officially told of the plan until March 1960. Additionally, it turned out that the harbor would be ice-bound for nine months out of the year. In the end, due to the financial infeasibility of the project and the concerns over radiation-related health issues, the project was abandoned in 1962. A related experiment which also had Teller's endorsement was a plan to extract oil from the tar sands in northern Alberta with nuclear explosions, titled Project Oilsands. The plan actually received the endorsement of the Alberta government, but was rejected by the Government of Canada under Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who was opposed to having any nuclear weapons in Canada. After Diefenbaker was out of office, Canada went on to have nuclear weapons, from a US nuclear sharing agreement, from 1963 to 1984. Teller also proposed the use of nuclear bombs to prevent damage from powerful hurricanes. He argued that when conditions in the Atlantic Ocean are right for the formation of hurricanes, the heat generated by well-placed nuclear explosions could trigger several small hurricanes, rather than waiting for nature to build one large one. ## Nuclear technology and Israel For some twenty years, Teller advised Israel on nuclear matters in general, and on the building of a hydrogen bomb in particular. In 1952, Teller and Oppenheimer had a long meeting with David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv, telling him that the best way to accumulate plutonium was to burn natural uranium in a nuclear reactor. Starting in 1964, a connection between Teller and Israel was made by the physicist Yuval Ne'eman, who had similar political views. Between 1964 and 1967, Teller visited Israel six times, lecturing at Tel Aviv University, and advising the chiefs of Israel's scientific-security circle as well as prime ministers and cabinet members. In 1967 when the Israeli nuclear program was nearing completion, Teller informed Neeman that he was going to tell the CIA that Israel had built nuclear weapons, and explain that it was justified by the background of the Six-Day War. After Neeman cleared it with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Teller briefed the head of the CIA's Office of Science and Technology, Carl Duckett. It took a year for Teller to convince the CIA that Israel had obtained nuclear capability; the information then went through CIA Director Richard Helms to the president at that time, Lyndon B. Johnson. Teller also persuaded them to end the American attempts to inspect the Negev Nuclear Research Center in Dimona. In 1976 Duckett testified in Congress before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that after receiving information from an "American scientist", he drafted a National Intelligence Estimate on Israel's nuclear capability. In the 1980s, Teller again visited Israel to advise the Israeli government on building a nuclear reactor. Three decades later, Teller confirmed that it was during his visits that he concluded that Israel was in possession of nuclear weapons. After conveying the matter to the U.S. government, Teller reportedly said: "They [Israel] have it, and they were clever enough to trust their research and not to test, they know that to test would get them into trouble." ## Three Mile Island Teller had a heart attack in 1979, and blamed it on Jane Fonda, who had starred in The China Syndrome, which depicted a fictional reactor accident and was released less than two weeks before the Three Mile Island accident. She spoke out against nuclear power while promoting the film. After the accident, Teller acted quickly to lobby in defence of nuclear energy, testifying to its safety and reliability, and soon after one flurry of activity suffered the attack. He signed a two-page-spread ad in the July 31, 1979, issue of The Washington Post with the headline "I was the only victim of Three-Mile Island". It opened with: > On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous. ## Strategic Defense Initiative In the 1980s, Teller began a strong campaign for what was later called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derided by critics as "Star Wars", the concept of using ground and satellite-based lasers, particle beams and missiles to destroy incoming Soviet ICBMs. Teller lobbied with government agencies—and got the approval of President Ronald Reagan—for a plan to develop a system using elaborate satellites which used atomic weapons to fire X-ray lasers at incoming missiles—as part of a broader scientific research program into defenses against nuclear weapons. Scandal erupted when Teller (and his associate Lowell Wood) were accused of deliberately overselling the program and perhaps encouraging the dismissal of a laboratory director (Roy Woodruff) who had attempted to correct the error. His claims led to a joke which circulated in the scientific community, that a new unit of unfounded optimism was designated as the teller; one teller was so large that most events had to be measured in nanotellers or picotellers. Many prominent scientists argued that the system was futile. Hans Bethe, along with IBM physicist Richard Garwin and Cornell University colleague Kurt Gottfried, wrote an article in Scientific American which analyzed the system and concluded that any putative enemy could disable such a system by the use of suitable decoys that would cost a very small fraction of the SDI program. In 1987 Teller published a book entitled Better a Shield than a Sword, which supported civil defense and active protection systems. His views on the role of lasers in SDI were published, and are available, in two 1986–87 laser conference proceedings. ## Asteroid impact avoidance Following the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impacts with Jupiter, Teller proposed to a collective of U.S. and Russian ex-Cold War weapons designers in a 1995 planetary defense workshop at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, that they collaborate to design a 1 gigaton nuclear explosive device, which would be equivalent to the kinetic energy of a 1 km diameter asteroid. In order to safeguard the earth, the theoretical 1 Gt device would weigh about 25–30 tons—light enough to be lifted on the Russian Energia rocket—and could be used to instantaneously vaporize a 1 km asteroid, or divert the paths of extinction event class asteroids (greater than 10 km in diameter) with a few months' notice; with 1-year notice, at an interception location no closer than Jupiter, it would also be capable of dealing with the even rarer short period comets which can come out of the Kuiper belt and transit past Earth orbit within 2 years. For comets of this class, with a maximum estimated 100 km diameter, Charon served as the hypothetical threat. ## Death and legacy Teller died in Stanford, California, on September 9, 2003, at the age of 95. He had had a stroke two days before and had long been experiencing a number of conditions related to his advanced age. Teller's vigorous advocacy for strength through nuclear weapons, especially when so many of his wartime colleagues later expressed regret about the arms race, made him an easy target for the "mad scientist" stereotype. In 1991 he was awarded one of the first Ig Nobel Prizes for Peace in recognition of his "lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it". He was also rumored to be one of the inspirations for the character of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satirical film of the same name. In the aforementioned Scientific American interview from 1999, he was reported as having bristled at the question: "My name is not Strangelove. I don't know about Strangelove. I'm not interested in Strangelove. What else can I say? ... Look. Say it three times more, and I throw you out of this office." Nobel Prize winning physicist Isidor I. Rabi once suggested that "It would have been a better world without Teller." In 1981, Teller became a founding member of the World Cultural Council. A wish for his 100th birthday, made around the time of his 90th, was for Lawrence Livermore's scientists to give him "excellent predictions—calculations and experiments—about the interiors of the planets". In 1986, he was awarded the United States Military Academy's Sylvanus Thayer Award. He was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1948. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Nuclear Society, and the American Physical Society. Among the honors he received were the Albert Einstein Award in 1958, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1961, the Enrico Fermi Award in 1962, the Herzl Prize in 1978, the Eringen Medal in 1980, the Harvey Prize in 1975, the National Medal of Science in 1983, the Presidential Citizens Medal in 1989, and the Corvin Chain [hu] in 2001. He was also named as part of the group of "U.S. Scientists" who were Time magazine's People of the Year in 1960, and an asteroid, 5006 Teller, is named after him. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2003, less than two months before his death. His final paper, published posthumously, advocated the construction of a prototype liquid fluoride thorium reactor. The genesis and impetus for this last paper was recounted by the co-author Ralph Moir in 2007. He was portrayed by David Suchet in the 1980 TV miniseries Oppenheimer and by Benny Safdie in the 2023 biopic film Oppenheimer.
80,888	Unas	1,159,271,969	Egyptian pharaoh	[ "24th-century BC Pharaohs", "Pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt" ]	Unas /ˈjuːnəs/ or Wenis, also spelled Unis (Ancient Egyptian: wnjs, hellenized form Oenas /ˈiːnəs/ or Onnos), was a pharaoh, the ninth and last ruler of the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt during the Old Kingdom. Unas reigned for 15 to 30 years in the mid-24th century BC (circa 2345–2315 BC), succeeding Djedkare Isesi, who might have been his father. Little is known of Unas' activities during his reign, which was a time of economic decline. Egypt maintained trade relations with the Levantine coast and Nubia, and military action may have taken place in southern Canaan. The growth and decentralization of the administration in conjunction with the lessening of the king's power continued under Unas, ultimately contributing to the collapse of the Old Kingdom some 200 years later. Unas built a pyramid in Saqqara, the smallest of the royal pyramids completed during the Old Kingdom. The accompanying mortuary complex with its high and valley temples linked by a 750-metre-long (2,460 ft) causeway was lavishly decorated with painted reliefs, whose quality and variety surpass the usual royal iconography. Furthermore, Unas was the first pharaoh to have the Pyramid Texts carved and painted on the walls of the chambers of his pyramid, a major innovation that was followed by his successors until the First Intermediate Period (c. 2160 – c. 2050 BC). These texts identify the king with Ra and with Osiris, whose cult was on the rise in Unas' time, and were meant to help the king reach the afterlife. Unas had several daughters and possibly one or two sons who are believed to have predeceased him. Manetho, a third-century BC Egyptian priest of the Ptolemaic Kingdom and author of the first history of Egypt, claims that with Unas' death the Fifth Dynasty came to an end. Unas was succeeded by Teti, the first pharaoh of the Sixth Dynasty, possibly after a short crisis. However, the archaeological evidence suggests that the Egyptians at the time made no conscious break with the preceding dynasty and the distinction between the Fifth and Sixth dynasties might be illusory. The funerary cult of Unas established at his death continued until the end of the Old Kingdom and may have survived during the chaotic First Intermediate Period. The cult was still in existence or revived during the later Middle Kingdom (c. 2050 – c. 1650 BC). This did not prevent Amenemhat I and Senusret I (c. 1990 – c. 1930 BC) from partially dismantling the mortuary complex of Unas for its materials. In parallel to the official cult, Unas may have received popular veneration as a local god of Saqqara until as late as the Late Period (664–332 BC), nearly 2000 years after his death. ## Attestations ### Historical sources Unas is well attested by historical sources with three ancient Egyptian king lists dating to the New Kingdom period mentioning him. He occupies the 33rd entry of the Abydos King List, which was written during the reign of Seti I (1290–1279 BC). Unas' name is also present on the Saqqara Tablet (32nd entry) and on the Turin canon (third column, 25th row), both of which were written during the reign of Ramses II (1279–1213 BC). The Turin canon further credits Unas with 30 years of reign. These sources all place Unas as the ninth and final ruler of the Fifth Dynasty, succeeding Djedkare Isesi and preceding Teti on the throne. This relative chronology is corroborated by archaeological evidence, for example in the tomb of officials serving under these kings. In addition to these sources, Unas was also likely mentioned in the Aegyptiaca, a history of Egypt written in the 3rd century BC during the reign of Ptolemy II (283–246 BC) by the Egyptian priest Manetho. No copies of the Aegyptiaca have survived to this day and it is known to us only through later writings by Sextus Julius Africanus and Eusebius. Africanus relates that the Aegyptiaca mentioned a pharaoh "Onnos" reigning for 33 years at the end of the Fifth Dynasty. Onnos is believed to be the hellenized form for Unas, and Africanus' 33-year figure fits well with the 30 years of reign given to Unas on the Turin canon. ### Contemporaneous sources The primary contemporaneous sources attesting to Unas' activities are the many reliefs from his pyramid complex. Excluding these, surprisingly few documents dating to Unas' reign have survived to this day, considering the 30-year length that later records give for his reign. Excavations at Abusir, the royal necropolis of the Fifth Dynasty, have produced only four dated inscriptions safely attributable to Unas. They explicitly mention his third, fourth, sixth and eighth years on the throne. Unas also left a rock inscription on the island of Elephantine, next to the First Cataract of the Nile in Nubia. In addition, several alabaster vases bearing Unas' cartouche are known. A complete vessel and additional fragments originating from Byblos on the Levantine coast are now in the National Museum of Beirut. A vase of unknown provenance is located in the National Archaeological Museum of Florence and reads "Horus Wadjtawy, living eternally, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, son of Ra, Unas, living eternally". Another vessel, of unknown origins, is on display at the Louvre Museum. It is a 17-centimetre-tall (6.7 in), 13.2-centimetre-wide (5.2 in) globular alabaster vase finely decorated with a falcon with outstretched wings and two uraei, or rearing cobras, holding ankh signs surrounding Unas' cartouche. An ointment jar bearing Unas' cartouche and Horus name is in the Brooklyn Museum. Finally, a fragment of a calcite vase rim bearing two cartouches of Unas is on display in the Petrie Museum. ## Reign ### Family Unas assumed the throne at the death of his predecessor Djedkare Isesi. Djedkare is thought to have been Unas' father, in spite of the complete lack of evidence bearing on the question. The succession from Djedkare Isesi to Unas seems to have been smooth. Unas had at least two queens, Nebet and Khenut, who were buried in a large double mastaba adjacent to their husband's pyramid. Unas and Nebet possibly had a son, the "king's son", "royal chamberlain", "priest of Maat" and "overseer of Upper Egypt" Unas-Ankh, who died about 10 years into Unas' reign. The filiation of Unas-Ankh is indirectly hinted at by his name and titles and by the presence of his tomb near those of Nebet and Unas but is not universally accepted. Two other sons have been proposed, Nebkauhor and Shepsespuptah, but these filiations are conjectural and contested. Unas likely died without a male heir. Unas had at least five daughters named Hemetre Hemi, Khentkaues, Neferut, Nefertkaues Iku, and Sesheshet Idut. The status of another possible daughter, Iput, is uncertain. ### Duration The duration of Unas' reign is uncertain. As indicated above, historical sources credit him with 30 and 33 years on the throne, figures that have been adopted by many Egyptologists, including Flinders Petrie, William C. Hayes, Darrell Baker, Peter Munro, and Jaromir Malek. In favor of such a long reign are scenes of a Sed festival found in Unas' mortuary temple. This festival was normally celebrated only after 30 years of reign and was meant to rejuvenate the pharaoh's strength and power. Mere depictions of the festival do not necessarily imply a long reign, however. For example, a relief showing pharaoh Sahure in the tunic of the Sed festival has been found in his mortuary temple, although both historical sources and archeological evidence agree that he ruled Egypt for less than 14 full years. Other Egyptologists suspect a reign of less than 30 years for Unas, owing to the scarcity of artefacts datable to his reign as well as the lack of documents dated to beyond his eighth year on the throne. Hence, Jürgen von Beckerath believes that Unas ruled Egypt for 20 years while Rolf Krauss, David Warburton and Erik Hornung shortened this number to 15 years in their 2012 study of Egyptian chronology. Krauss and Miroslav Verner further question the credibility of the Turin Canon concerning the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties, so that the 30-year figure credited to Unas by the canon might not be reliable. Excavations of the tomb of Nikau-Isesi under the direction of Naguib Kanawati at Saqqara have yielded evidence in support of a shorter reign. Nikau-Isesi was an official who started his career during the reign of Djedkare Isesi. He lived through that of Unas and died as overseer of Upper-Egypt under Unas' successor Teti. Nikau-Isesi is known to have died on the year of the eleventh cattle count during Teti's reign, an event consisting of counting the livestock throughout the country to evaluate the amount of taxes to be levied. It is traditionally believed that such counts occurred every two years during the Old Kingdom and every year during the later Middle Kingdom (c. 2055 – c. 1650 BC). Thus, Nikau-Isesi would have lived for 22 years after Teti took the throne and together with the 30 years of reign credited to Unas, would have died past 70 years old. However, forensic examination of his mummy yielded an age at death of no more than 45 years old. This suggests that the cattle count occurred more than once every two years during Unas and Teti's time, possibly irregularly. If so, Unas' 30-year figure on the Turin canon, understood to mean 15 cattle counts, could translate into as little as 15 years, which together with just 11 years during Teti's reign would account for Nikau-Isesi's death at around 40 to 45 years of age. ### Activities Trade and warfare Owing to the scarcity of evidence dating to Unas' reign, we know very little about his activities. Existing trade relations with foreign countries and cities, in particular Byblos, seem to have continued during Unas' time on the throne. Reliefs from the causeway of his pyramid complex show two large seagoing ships coming back from an expedition to the Levantine coast with Syro-Canaanite men, who were either the boat crews or slaves. Another relief depicts a military campaign, Egyptians armed with bows and daggers attacking Canaanite nomads called the Shasu. Similar reliefs have been found in preceding pyramid complexes, such as that of Sahure, and they may thus be standard themes rather than depictions of actual events. Other sources tend to confirm the accuracy of these depictions; for example, the autobiography of Weni relates many punitive raids against Canaanite nomads in the early Sixth Dynasty. To the South of Egypt, inscriptions of Unas on Elephantine record a visit of the king to Lower Nubia, possibly to receive tribute from local chieftains or because of growing unrest in the region. In addition, a relief from the causeway of Unas leading to his pyramid shows a giraffe, suggesting trade relations with Nubia. Domestic Unas' reign was a time of economic decline although, as the French Egyptologist Nicolas Grimal writes, it was "by no means a time of decadence". Indeed, the Egyptian state was still capable of mounting important expeditions to provide building stones for the king's pyramid complex. These expeditions are depicted on unique reliefs found in Unas' causeway and are also referred to in the autobiographical stela of an administration official. This official reports the transport of 10.40-metre-tall (34.1-foot) palmiform columns of red granite from Elephantine to Saqqara in only four days, a feat for which he was praised by the king. In addition to the important construction works undertaken in Saqqara for the construction of his pyramid complex, building activities also took place on Elephantine. Until 1996, the domestic situation during Unas' reign was thought to have been disastrous, based on reliefs from the causeway of his pyramid complex showing emaciated people and thus suggesting times of famine. This changed when excavations at Abusir in 1996 yielded similar reliefs in the mortuary complex of Sahure, who reigned at a prosperous time in the early Fifth Dynasty. In addition, research showed that the starving people are likely to be desert dwellers, nomads distinguished by their specific hair-style, rather than Egyptians. Thus, these reliefs are now understood to be standard representations of the generosity of the king towards the destitute and of the hardships of life in the desert regions bordering Egypt rather than referring to actual events. ### Death and end of a dynasty In his history of Egypt, Manetho states that with the death of Unas the Fifth Dynasty came to an end. This may be because Unas died without a male heir, his probable son Unas-Ankh having predeceased him. This might have caused a succession crisis hinted at by the personal name chosen by Teti upon his accession to the throne: "Seheteptawy" meaning "He who reconciles/pacifies the two lands". Teti's claim to the throne could have relied on his marriage to Iput, who may have been a daughter of Unas. This possibility is heavily debated, as the interpretation of Iput's titles that would indicate that she was the daughter of a king is uncertain. Furthermore, the idea that Teti could legitimate his claim by marrying into the royal family is rejected by many Egyptologists, including Munro, Dobrev, Baud, Mertz, Pirenne, and Robin, who do not think that the right to the pharaonic throne passed through the female line. In addition to Manetho's statement, the Turin king list presents a special break point between Unas and his successor Teti. Although the king list is not organized in dynasties–which were invented by Manetho–the Egyptologist Jaromir Malek explains that "the criterion for such divisions in the Turin Canon invariably was the change of location of the capital and royal residence." Malek thus suggests that the capital of Egypt, then known as Inbu-Hedj, was indeed supplanted at the time by settlements located to the South, East of South Saqqara, where Unas' palace may have been located. In the second millennium BC these cities finally merged and gave rise to Memphis. Whatever the basis for Manetho's choice to end the Fifth Dynasty with Unas, Egyptians living at the time probably perceived no particular change from one dynasty to the next. The administration of the state shows no evidence of disturbances, with many officials continuing their careers from Unas' onto Teti's reign. These include the viziers Mehu, Kagemni and Nikau-Isesi and the overseer of the province of Edfu Isi. Given that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom might not have conceived of dynasties, the distinction between the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties might be illusory. ## Evolution of religion and kingship The reigns of Djedkare Isesi and of Unas were a time of changes in Ancient Egyptian religion and in the ideology of kingship, changes that are first demonstrable under Unas. A statistical analysis of clay seal fragments bearing Horus names of pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty points to a marked decline of the cult of the king during Unas' time on the throne. This continued under Unas' successor Teti, for whom we know only two seals bearing his Horus name. This trend reflects the lessening of the king's power in conjunction with the growth of the administration and priesthood. Meanwhile, the cult of Osiris was becoming more important with this god replacing the king as the guarantor of life after death for the pharaoh's subjects. The German Egyptologist Hartwig Altenmüller writes that for an Egyptian of the time "the [...] afterlife no longer depends on the relationship between the individual mortal and the king, [...] instead it is linked to his ethical position in direct relation to Osiris". In contrast, the cult of the sun god Ra was in apparent decline, even though Ra was still the most important deity of the Egyptian pantheon. Thus, Djedkare Isesi and Unas did not build a sun temple in contrast with most of their Fifth Dynasty predecessors. In addition, the names of Menkauhor Kaiu and Unas do not incorporate any reference to Ra, in rupture with a tradition which held since the reign of Userkaf, about a century earlier. The Pyramid Texts found in Unas' pyramid demonstrate the importance of Osiris and Ra in ancient Egyptian religion at the time. Both gods were believed to play the key roles in accessing the afterlife, with Ra as the source of life and Osiris as the force through which the next life would be attained. ## Pyramid complex Unas had a pyramid built for himself in North Saqqara, between the pyramid of Sekhemkhet and the southwestern corner of the pyramid complex of Djoser, in symmetry with the pyramid of Userkaf located at the northeastern corner. In the process, workers leveled and covered older tombs located in the area, most notably the tomb of the Second Dynasty pharaoh Hotepsekhemwy (c. 2890 BC). The original Egyptian name of the pyramid was "Nefer Isut Unas", meaning "Beautiful are the places of Unas". The pyramid of Unas is the smallest of the pyramids completed during the Old Kingdom, having a square base of 57.7 m × 57.7 m (189 ft × 189 ft) for a height of 43 m (141 ft). ### Mortuary complex The pyramid of Unas is part of a larger mortuary complex built around it. It was approached via an ancient lake on the shores of which Unas' valley temple was located. This temple received the provisions for the cult of the king and the offerings to be made were prepared there. At the back of the valley temple was the beginning of a 750-metre (2,460-foot) causeway, equaled only by that of Khufu, and leading to an upper temple adjacent to the pyramid. A thin slit in the roof of the causeway allowed the light to illuminate its walls covered for their entire length in painted reliefs. These depicted the Egyptian seasons, processions of people from the nomes of Egypt, craftsmen at work, offerings bearers, battle scenes and the transport of granite columns for the construction of the pyramid complex. At the end of the causeway was a large hall leading to a pillared open court surrounded by magazine chambers. The court led into the mortuary temple proper which housed statues of the king and where the offerings to the deceased took place. This was immediately adjacent to the eastern side of the pyramid, which was surrounded by an enclosure wall defining the sacred space. At the southeast corner of the enclosure was a small satellite pyramid for the Ka of the king. The internal chambers of the pyramid were entered in 1881 by Gaston Maspero, who thus discovered the pyramid texts. The burial chamber housed nothing but a black greywacke sarcophagus sunk into the floor and a canopic chest. The sarcophagus proved to contain scattered bones, which may belong to Unas. ### Pyramid Texts The main innovation of the pyramid of Unas is the first appearance of the Pyramid Texts, one of the oldest religious texts in Egypt to have survived to this day. In doing so, Unas initiated a tradition that would be followed in the pyramid of the kings and queens of the Sixth to Eighth Dynasties, until the end of the Old Kingdom circa 200 years later. In total 283 magical spells, also known as utterances, were carved and the signs painted blue on the walls of the corridor, antechamber, and burial chamber of Unas' pyramid. They constitute the most complete rendition of the Pyramid Texts existing today. These spells were intended to help the king in overcoming hostile forces and powers in the Underworld and thus join with the sun god Ra, his divine father in the afterlife. By writing the texts on the walls of the pyramid's internal chambers, the architects of Unas' pyramid ensured that the king would benefit from their potency even if the funerary cult was to cease. Hence, the Pyramid Texts of the pyramid of Unas incorporate instructions for ritual actions and words to be spoken, suggesting that they were precisely those performed and recited during the cult of the king in his mortuary temple. The good preservation of the texts in Unas' pyramid shows that they were arranged so as to be read by the Ba of Unas, as it arose from the sarcophagus thanks to resurrection utterances and surrounded by protective spells and ritual offerings. The Ba would then leave the burial chamber, which incorporates texts identifying the king with Osiris in the Duat, and would move to the antechamber symbolizing the Akhet. Included in the spells written on the walls of the antechamber of Unas are two utterances known as the Cannibal Hymn, which portrays the pharaoh as flying to heaven through a stormy sky and eating both gods and men. In doing so the king would receive the life force of the gods. At this point the Ba of Unas would face east, the direction of the sunrise, and beyond the pyramid masonry, the false door of the mortuary temple where funerary rituals were performed. Finally, turning left the Ba would join Ra in the sky by passing through the pyramid corridor. An example of a spell from the pyramid of Unas is Utterance 217: > Re-Atum, this Unas comes to you > A spirit indestructible > Your son comes to you > This Unas comes to you > May you cross the sky united in the dark > May you rise in lightland, the place in which you shine! ## Legacy Unas' most immediate legacy is his funerary cult, which continued at least until the end of the Old Kingdom. This cult is attested by the tombs at Saqqara of seven priests responsible for the religious duties to be performed in the funerary complex. Three of these tombs date to the early Sixth Dynasty in the time following the death of Pepi I. Three more tombs date to the reign of Pepi II and the last one dates to the very end of the Old Kingdom (c. 2180 BC). The priests of the cult of Unas adopted basilophorous names, incorporating that of the king, possibly upon taking office. Unas' funerary cult appears to have survived during the chaotic First Intermediate Period until the Middle Kingdom. By the time of the 12th Dynasty (c. 1990–c. 1800 BC), the lector-priest Unasemsaf and his family were involved in the cult of Unas. In spite of this, Unas' funerary complex was partially dismantled and its materials reemployed for the construction of Amenemhat I and Senusret I own pyramid complexes. In addition to his official cult, Unas was deified and became a local god of the Saqqara necropolis. Grimal attributes this directly to the grandeur of his funerary complex. Malek doubts the existence of a popular cult of Unas during the Old Kingdom but acknowledges it from the Middle Kingdom onwards. He attributes this Middle Kingdom revival to the geographic position of Unas' complex making it a natural gateway to the Saqqara necropolis. The popular cult of the deified Unas continued for nearly 2,000 years as shown by the numerous scarabs bearing Unas' name found in Saqqara and dated from the New Kingdom (c.1550–c.1077 BC) until the Late Period (664–332 BC). The epicenter of this cult was not the pyramid of Unas nor the associated mortuary temple but rather the statues of the king in the valley temple. This activity could explain why the pyramid complex of Unas was the object of restoration works under the impulse of Prince Khaemweset, a son of Ramesses II (1279–1213 BC).
51,437,105	Hove War Memorial	1,172,165,054	Public sculpture by George Frampton	[ "1921 establishments in the United Kingdom", "1921 sculptures", "Bronze sculptures in England", "Buildings and structures completed in 1921", "Grade II listed buildings in East Sussex", "Grade II listed monuments and memorials", "Hove", "Military history of East Sussex", "Monuments and memorials in East Sussex", "Sculptures by George Frampton", "Statues in England", "War memorials by Edwin Lutyens", "Works of Edwin Lutyens in England", "World War I memorials in England", "World War II memorials in England" ]	Hove War Memorial is a First World War memorial designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and located on Grand Avenue in Hove, part of the city of Brighton and Hove, on the south coast of England. Hove was the site of one of the earliest recruiting events at the beginning of the war and later of several military hospitals. Over 600 men from the town were killed during the war, a quarter of them from the local regiment alone. A war memorial committee was established in 1919 and Lutyens was engaged as architect. A design was agreed in 1920 after two unsuccessful proposals; Lutyens chose the site from several options. Lutyens designed a Tuscan column on a three-staged base, topped with a statue of Saint George, patron saint of England. George, cast in the studio of Sir George Frampton, holds a sword by the blade in one hand and a shield in the other. The same statue, with variations, appears on several of Frampton's other monuments, including Fordham War Memorial in Cambridgeshire, also by Lutyens. The base contains several dedicatory inscriptions but no names, which are instead recorded on plaques in the town's library. The memorial was unveiled on 27 February 1921 by Lord Leconfield; Lutyens, in India, was represented by his office manager. It is a grade II listed building. ## Background In the aftermath of the First World War and its unprecedented casualties, thousands of war memorials were built across Britain. Amongst the most prominent designers of memorials was the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, described by Historic England as "the leading English architect of his generation". Lutyens established his reputation designing country houses for wealthy clients around the turn of the twentieth century and later built much of New Delhi, but the war had a profound effect on him. Thereafter, he dedicated much of his time to commemorating its casualties. He became renowned for The Cenotaph in London, which became Britain's national memorial, and for his work for the Imperial War Graves Commission. Located on the English south coast, Hove was the site of a Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve station prior to the First World War. The establishment grew in importance as war loomed and the 1st Battle Squadron visited the town in July 1914 at the invitation of the mayor. Hove Town Hall was the scene of one of the first large-scale recruitment events the following month, following Britain's declaration of war on Germany and the subsequent drive to expand the armed forces. Long lines of men from Hove, Portslade, and surrounding areas marched to the hall to enlist and were addressed by the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Field hospitals, including one at the Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School in the town, were established along the south coast to care for injured servicemen evacuated from France. Other schools and large buildings were similarly taken over, and the local cottage hospital treated nearly 900 men over the course of the war. The town also hosted several Belgian refugee families and a contingent of German prisoners of war. Over 600 men from Hove died in the war, of whom 163 were serving with the local regiment, the Royal Sussex. ## Commissioning The proposal for a war memorial in Hove first appeared in the vestry notes section of a local newspaper. As in many places, a war memorial committee was formed to handle the town's commemorations and raise funds, beginning its work in January 1919. There were calls from within the community for a functional memorial, such as a meeting hall—which would be of benefit to the living—rather than a decorative monument. By May, the committee had decided to allocate a minority of its funds to a decorative memorial, the rest to be used for practical purposes such as grants for war widows and orphans. They chose Lutyens to design the monument, desiring an eminent architect. Lutyens' first proposal was for a cenotaph and he built a wooden model for public exhibition on the sea front. This was rejected by public opinion, as was his next proposal, for an obelisk. The successful design, for a statue and column, was agreed in March 1920. The committee's first choice of location was Palmeira Gardens but the landowner refused permission, leaving the committee with three sites on Grand Avenue. In June 1920, Lutyens visited Hove and chose a site in the middle of the road, near its northern end and parallel to the statue of Queen Victoria at the southern end. Lutyens designed dozens of war memorials across England, though Hove's was his only one in Sussex. Many war memorials were delayed by local disagreements or fundraising problems, but Hove's proceeded relatively smoothly once the design was agreed. The project was among the first of Lutyen's to be completed. ## Design The memorial consists of a bronze statue of Saint George atop a stone column. The statue wears Renaissance-style armour and holds a sword by the blade below the hilt in his right hand, and a shield in his left. The figure was a modified version of a generic design from Sir George Frampton's studio, though there is no evidence that the sculptor was personally involved. Saint George stands on a plinth at the top of a Tuscan column. At the bottom of the column is a two-staged square dado (the middle section), which contains the inscriptions, and below that is a base of two square stone blocks. The whole memorial stands on three shallow stone steps, taking the memorial to a total height of 10 metres (33 feet). At the corners of the bottom step are low stone bollards, part of the original design; next to these are metal lamp pillars, which are a modern addition. The main inscription is on the north face: > IN EVER GLORIOUS MEMORY OF HOVE CITIZENS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR THEIR COUNTRY IN THE GREAT WAR AND WORLD WAR The dates of the wars are inscribed above the dedication. The south face bears the phrase "Their name liveth for evermore", a biblical quote (from Ecclesiasticus chapter 44, verse 14) suggested to Lutyens by Rudyard Kipling and which appears on many of Lutyens' memorials. The dates of the First and Second World Wars are inscribed in Roman numerals on each face higher on the plinth: "MCMXIV TO MCMXIX" (1914–1919) on the north and south faces and "MCMXXXIX TO MCMXLV" (1939–1945) on the east and west. The inscriptions relating to the Second World War were added after that conflict. No names are listed on the memorial. Instead, 631 names were embossed on a series of brass plaques, which were framed in oak and mounted in the entrance to Hove Library. Columns were fairly unusual as First World War memorials in Britain. Where they were topped with a sculpture, allegorical figures such as Victory were the usual choice, but several memorial committees chose Saint George, the patron saint of England. Variations of Frampton's template appear in several places, the first (a Boer War memorial) at Radley College, Oxfordshire. Another stands in Maidstone in Kent, and Lutyens produced a near-identical design for Fordham War Memorial in Cambridgeshire, unveiled the same year as Hove's. All bear some resemblance to the statues of David by the Renaissance sculptor Donatello. Saint George was traditionally used to embody traditions of bravery, chivalry, and honour, which were also applied to Britain's war dead. A Guide to the Buildings of Brighton calls the memorial an "elegant and restrained homage to citizens of Hove who died during the First World War" and Historic England describes it as "an eloquent witness to the tragic impacts of world events on this community". Alasdair Glass, in an article for the Regency Society of Brighton and Hove, compared it unfavourably to the nearby Lewes War Memorial. Glass described the column as "unimpressive" and "diminished by its setting in the yawning void of Grand Avenue" and the statue as "formulaic and lacking originality" given its similarity to other works by Frampton. Glass also criticised the positioning of Saint George with his back to the sea, compared to Lewes's, which faces east towards the battlefields. The art historian Geoff Archer points out that Frampton was too old to have fought in the First World War and it is "therefore unsurprising that [he] would have recourse to the well-tried iconography of the mythical hero", whereas younger sculptors with personal experience of the war tended to prefer greater realism. ## History The total cost of the memorial was £1,537 (1920). It was unveiled on 27 February 1921 by Charles Wyndham, 3rd Baron Leconfield, the Lord Lieutenant of Sussex, 11 months after the newspaper article which prompted it. Lutyens was away in India, working on his design for New Delhi, but sent his office manager, A. J. Thomas, in his place. Thousands of local people attended the unveiling ceremony, including 1,000 bereaved relatives. The ceremony concluded with the lowering of flags and four buglers sounding the "Last Post". Members of the public and local organisations laid wreaths and other floral tributes, including Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club, who lost four players and a member of staff during the war. The height of the memorial and the gradient of the road mean that it overlooks the sea and Sir Thomas Brock's statue of Queen Victoria (1901). Its setting was spacious and quiet when it was first built but has since become busy with traffic. Lutyens adapted the design for a proposal for a war memorial in Shere in Surrey, but the memorial committee there opted for a different architect and design. Hove War Memorial was designated a grade II listed building on 2 November 1992, meaning it is considered to be of special architectural or historic interest. Listed building status provides legal protection from demolition or unsympathetic modification. In 2015, as part of commemorations for the centenary of the First World War, Lutyens' war memorials were recognised as a national collection and all of his free-standing memorials in England, including Hove's, were listed or had their list entries updated with new research. ## See also - Grade II listed buildings in Brighton and Hove: E–H - List of works by Edwin Lutyens
84,636	OK Computer	1,173,602,511	1997 studio album by Radiohead	[ "1997 albums", "Albums produced by Nigel Godrich", "Alternative rock albums by British artists", "Art rock albums by British artists", "Capitol Records albums", "Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album", "Parlophone albums", "Radiohead albums", "United States National Recording Registry albums", "United States National Recording Registry recordings" ]	OK Computer is the third studio album by the English rock band Radiohead, released in the UK on 16 June 1997 by EMI. With their producer, Nigel Godrich, Radiohead recorded most of OK Computer in their rehearsal space in Oxfordshire and the historic mansion of St Catherine's Court in Bath in 1996 and early 1997. They distanced themselves from the guitar-centred, lyrically introspective style of their previous album, The Bends. OK Computer's abstract lyrics, densely layered sound and eclectic influences laid the groundwork for Radiohead's later, more experimental work. The album's lyrics depict a world fraught with rampant consumerism, social alienation, emotional isolation and political malaise; in this capacity, OK Computer is said to have prescient insight into the mood of 21st-century life. The band used unconventional production techniques, including natural reverberation, and no audio separation. Strings were recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London. Most of the album was recorded live. Despite lowered sales estimates by EMI, who deemed the record uncommercial and difficult to market, OK Computer reached number one on the UK Albums Chart and debuted at number 21 on the Billboard 200, Radiohead's highest album entry on the US charts at the time, and was soon certified five times platinum in the UK and double platinum in the US. "Paranoid Android", "Karma Police", "Lucky" and "No Surprises" were released as singles. The album expanded Radiohead's international popularity and has sold at least 7.8 million units worldwide. OK Computer received acclaim and has been cited as one of the greatest albums of all time. It was nominated for the Album of the Year and won Best Alternative Music Album at the 1998 Grammy Awards. It was also nominated for Best British Album at the 1998 Brit Awards. The album initiated a stylistic shift in British rock away from Britpop toward melancholic, atmospheric alternative rock that became more prevalent in the next decade. In 2014, it was included by the United States Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". A remastered version with additional tracks, OKNOTOK 1997 2017, was released in 2017, marking the album's twentieth anniversary. In 2019, in response to an internet leak, Radiohead released MiniDiscs [Hacked], comprising hours of additional material. ## Background In 1995, Radiohead toured in support of their second album, The Bends (1995). Midway through the tour, Brian Eno commissioned them to contribute a song to The Help Album, a charity compilation organised by War Child; the album was to be recorded over the course of a single day, 4 September 1995, and rush-released that week. Radiohead recorded "Lucky" in five hours with the engineer Nigel Godrich, who had engineered on The Bends and produced several Radiohead B-sides. Godrich said of the session: "Those things are the most inspiring, when you do stuff really fast and there's nothing to lose. We left feeling fairly euphoric. So after establishing a bit of a rapport work-wise, I was sort of hoping I would be involved with the next album." The singer, Thom Yorke, said "Lucky" shaped the nascent sound and mood of their upcoming record: "'Lucky' was indicative of what we wanted to do. It was like the first mark on the wall." Radiohead found touring stressful and took a break in January 1996. They sought to move away from the introspective style of The Bends. The drummer, Philip Selway, said: "There was an awful lot of soul-searching [on The Bends]. To do that again on another album would be excruciatingly boring." Yorke said he did not want to do "another miserable, morbid and negative record", and was "writing down all the positive things that I hear or see. I'm not able to put them into music yet and I don't want to just force it." The critical and commercial success of The Bends gave Radiohead the confidence to self-produce their third album. Their label Parlophone gave them a £100,000 budget for recording equipment. The lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, said "the only concept that we had for this album was that we wanted to record it away from the city and that we wanted to record it ourselves". According to the guitarist Ed O'Brien, "Everyone said, 'You'll sell six or seven million if you bring out The Bends Pt 2,' and we're like, 'We'll kick against that and do the opposite'." A number of producers were suggested, including major figures such as Scott Litt, but Radiohead were encouraged by their sessions with Godrich. They consulted him for advice on equipment, and prepared for the sessions by buying their own, including a plate reverberator purchased from the songwriter Jona Lewie. Although Godrich had sought to focus on electronic dance music, he outgrew his role as advisor and became the album's co-producer. ## Recording In early 1996, Radiohead recorded demos for their third album at Chipping Norton Recording Studios, Oxfordshire. In July, they began rehearsing and recording in their Canned Applause studio, a converted shed near Didcot, Oxfordshire. Even without the deadline that contributed to the stress of The Bends, the band had difficulties, which Selway blamed on their choice to self-produce: "We're jumping from song to song, and when we started to run out of ideas, we'd move on to a new song ... The stupid thing was that we were nearly finished when we'd move on, because so much work had gone into them." The members worked with nearly equal roles in the production and formation of the music, though Yorke was still firmly "the loudest voice", according to O'Brien. Selway said "we give each other an awful lot of space to develop our parts, but at the same time we are all very critical about what the other person is doing." Godrich's role as co-producer was part collaborator, part managerial outsider. He said that Radiohead "need to have another person outside their unit, especially when they're all playing together, to say when the take goes well ... I take up slack when people aren't taking responsibility—the term producing a record means taking responsibility for the record ... It's my job to ensure that they get the ideas across." Godrich has produced every Radiohead album since, and has been characterised as Radiohead's "sixth member", an allusion to George Martin's nickname as the "fifth Beatle". Radiohead decided that Canned Applause was an unsatisfactory recording location, which Yorke attributed to its proximity to the band members' homes, and Jonny Greenwood attributed to its lack of dining and bathroom facilities. The group had nearly completed four songs: "Electioneering", "No Surprises", "Subterranean Homesick Alien" and "The Tourist". They took a break from recording to embark on an American tour in 1996, opening for Alanis Morissette, performing early versions of several new songs. During the tour, Baz Luhrmann commissioned Radiohead to write a song for his upcoming film Romeo + Juliet and gave them the final 30 minutes of the film. Yorke said: "When we saw the scene in which Claire Danes holds the Colt .45 against her head, we started working on the song immediately." Soon afterwards, the band wrote and recorded "Exit Music (For a Film)"; the track plays over the film's end credits but was excluded from the soundtrack album at the band's request. The song helped shape the direction of the rest of the album. Yorke said it "was the first performance we'd ever recorded where every note of it made my head spin—something I was proud of, something I could turn up really, really loud and not wince at any moment." Radiohead resumed recording in September 1996 at St Catherine's Court, a historic mansion near Bath owned by the actress Jane Seymour. It was unoccupied but sometimes used for corporate functions. The change of setting marked an important transition in the recording process. Greenwood, comparing the mansion to previous studio settings, said it "was less like a laboratory experiment, which is what being in a studio is usually like, and more about a group of people making their first record together". The band made extensive use of the different rooms and acoustics in the house. The vocals on "Exit Music (For a Film)" feature natural reverberation achieved by recording on a stone staircase, and "Let Down" was recorded in a ballroom at 3 a.m. Isolation allowed the band to work at a different pace, with more flexible and spontaneous working hours. O'Brien said that "the biggest pressure was actually completing [the recording]. We weren't given any deadlines and we had complete freedom to do what we wanted. We were delaying it because we were a bit frightened of actually finishing stuff." Yorke was satisfied with the recordings made at the location, and enjoyed working without audio separation, meaning that instruments were not overdubbed separately. O'Brien estimated that 80 per cent of the album was recorded live, and said: "I hate doing overdubs, because it just doesn't feel natural. ... Something special happens when you're playing live; a lot of it is just looking at one another and knowing there are four other people making it happen." Many of Yorke's vocals were first takes; he felt that if he made other attempts he would "start to think about it and it would sound really lame". Radiohead returned to Canned Applause in October for rehearsals, and completed most of OK Computer in further sessions at St. Catherine's Court. By Christmas, they had narrowed the track listing to 14 songs. The strings were recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London in January 1997. The album was mixed over the next two months at various London studios, then mastered by Chris Blair at Abbey Road. Godrich preferred a quick and "hands-off" approach to mixing, and said: "I feel like I get too into it. I start fiddling with things and I fuck it up ... I generally take about half a day to do a mix. If it's any longer than that, you lose it. The hardest thing is trying to stay fresh, to stay objective." ## Music and lyrics ### Style and influences Yorke said that the starting point for the record was the "incredibly dense and terrifying sound" of Bitches Brew, the 1970 avant-garde jazz fusion album by Miles Davis. He described the sound of Bitches Brew to Q: "It was building something up and watching it fall apart, that's the beauty of it. It was at the core of what we were trying to do with OK Computer." Yorke identified "I'll Wear It Proudly" by Elvis Costello, "Fall on Me" by R.E.M., "Dress" by PJ Harvey and "A Day in the Life" by the Beatles as particularly influential on his songwriting. Radiohead drew further inspiration from the recording style of film soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone and the krautrock band Can, musicians Yorke described as "abusing the recording process". Jonny Greenwood described OK Computer as a product of being "in love with all these brilliant records ... trying to recreate them, and missing". According to Yorke, Radiohead hoped to achieve an "atmosphere that's perhaps a bit shocking when you first hear it, but only as shocking as the atmosphere on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds". They extended their instrumentation to include electric piano, Mellotron, strings and glockenspiel. Jonny Greenwood summarised the exploratory approach as "when we've got what we suspect to be an amazing song, but nobody knows what they're gonna play on it". Spin characterised OK Computer as sounding like "a DIY electronica album made with guitars". Critics suggested a stylistic debt to 1970s progressive rock, an influence that Radiohead have disavowed. According to Andy Greene in Rolling Stone, Radiohead "were collectively hostile to seventies progressive rock ... but that didn't stop them from reinventing prog from scratch on OK Computer, particularly on the six-and-a-half-minute 'Paranoid Android'." Tom Hull believed the album was "still prog, but may just be because rock has so thoroughly enveloped musical storytelling that this sort of thing has become inevitable." Writing in 2017, The New Yorker's Kelefa Sanneh said OK Computer "was profoundly prog: grand and dystopian, with a lead single that was more than six minutes long". ### Lyrics The album's lyrics, written by Yorke, are more abstract compared to his personal, emotional lyrics for The Bends. Critic Alex Ross said the lyrics "seemed a mixture of overheard conversations, techno-speak, and fragments of a harsh diary" with "images of riot police at political rallies, anguished lives in tidy suburbs, yuppies freaking out, sympathetic aliens gliding overhead." Recurring themes include transport, technology, insanity, death, modern British life, globalisation and anti-capitalism. Yorke said: "On this album, the outside world became all there was ... I'm just taking Polaroids of things around me moving too fast." He told Q: "It was like there's a secret camera in a room and it's watching the character who walks in—a different character for each song. The camera's not quite me. It's neutral, emotionless. But not emotionless at all. In fact, the very opposite." Yorke also drew inspiration from books, including Noam Chomsky's political writing, Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes, Will Hutton's The State We're In, Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up! and Philip K. Dick's VALIS. The songs of OK Computer do not have a coherent narrative, and the album's lyrics are generally considered abstract or oblique. Nonetheless, many musical critics, journalists, and scholars consider the album to be a concept album or song cycle, or have analysed it as a concept album, noting its strong thematic cohesion, aesthetic unity, and the structural logic of the song sequencing. Although the songs share common themes, Radiohead have said they do not consider OK Computer a concept album and did not intend to link the songs through a narrative or unifying concept while it was being written. Jonny Greenwood said: "I think one album title and one computer voice do not make a concept album. That's a bit of a red herring." However, the band intended the album to be heard as a whole, and spent two weeks ordering the track list. O'Brien said: "The context of each song is really important ... It's not a concept album but there is a continuity there." ### Composition #### Tracks 1–6 The opening track, "Airbag", is underpinned by a beat built from a seconds-long recording of Selway's drumming. The band sampled the drum track with a sampler and edited it with a Macintosh computer, inspired by the music of DJ Shadow, but admitted to making approximations in emulating Shadow's style due to their programming inexperience. The bassline stops and starts unexpectedly, achieving an effect similar to 1970s dub. The original draft of the lyrics for "Airbag" were written inside a copy of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience that Yorke had also annotated with his own notes; this personal copy was later auctioned off by Yorke in 2016 with proceeds going to Oxfam. The song's references to automobile crashes and reincarnation were inspired by a magazine article titled "An Airbag Saved My Life" and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Yorke wrote "Airbag" about the illusion of safety offered by modern transit, and "the idea that whenever you go out on the road you could be killed". The BBC wrote about the influence of J. G. Ballard, especially his 1973 novel Crash, on the lyrics. Music journalist Tim Footman noted that the song's technical innovations and lyrical concerns demonstrated the "key paradox" of the album: "The musicians and producer are delighting in the sonic possibilities of modern technology; the singer, meanwhile, is railing against its social, moral, and psychological impact ... It's a contradiction mirrored in the culture clash of the music, with the 'real' guitars negotiating an uneasy stand-off with the hacked-up, processed drums." Split into four sections with an overall running time of 6:23, "Paranoid Android" is among the band's longest songs. The unconventional structure was inspired by the Beatles' "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", which also eschew a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure. Its musical style was also inspired by the music of the Pixies. The song was written by Yorke after an unpleasant night at a Los Angeles bar, where he saw a woman react violently after someone spilled a drink on her. Its title and lyrics are a reference to Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. The use of electric keyboards in "Subterranean Homesick Alien" is an example of the band's attempts to emulate the atmosphere of Bitches Brew. Its title references the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues", and the lyrics describe an isolated narrator who fantasises about being abducted by extraterrestrials. The narrator speculates that, upon returning to Earth, his friends would not believe his story and he would remain a misfit. The lyrics were inspired by an assignment from Yorke's time at Abingdon School to write a piece of "Martian poetry", a British literary movement that humorously recontextualises mundane aspects of human life from an alien perspective. William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet inspired the lyrics for "Exit Music (For a Film)". Initially Yorke wanted to work lines from the play into the song, but the final draft of the lyrics became a broad summary of the narrative. He said: "I saw the Zeffirelli version when I was 13 and I cried my eyes out, because I couldn't understand why, the morning after they shagged, they didn't just run away. It's a song for two people who should run away before all the bad stuff starts." Yorke compared the opening of the song, which mostly features his singing paired with acoustic guitar, to Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison. Mellotron choir and other electronic voices are used throughout the track. The song climaxes with the entrance of drums and distorted bass run through a fuzz pedal. The climactic portion of the song is an attempt to emulate the sound of trip hop group Portishead, but in a style that the bassist, Colin Greenwood, called more "stilted and leaden and mechanical". The song concludes by fading back to Yorke's voice, acoustic guitar and Mellotron. "Let Down" contains multilayered arpeggiated guitars and electric piano. Jonny Greenwood plays his guitar part in a different time signature to the other instruments. O'Brien said the song was influenced by Phil Spector, a producer and songwriter best known for his reverberating "Wall of Sound" recording techniques. The lyrics, Yorke said, are about a fear of being trapped, and "about that feeling that you get when you're in transit but you're not in control of it—you just go past thousands of places and thousands of people and you're completely removed from it". Of the line "Don't get sentimental / It always ends up drivel", Yorke said: "Sentimentality is being emotional for the sake of it. We're bombarded with sentiment, people emoting. That's the Let Down. Feeling every emotion is fake. Or rather every emotion is on the same plane whether it's a car advert or a pop song." Yorke felt that scepticism of emotion was characteristic of Generation X and that it had informed the band's approach to the album. "Karma Police" has two main verses that alternate with a subdued break, followed by a different ending section. The verses centre around acoustic guitar and piano, with a chord progression indebted to the Beatles' "Sexy Sadie". Starting at 2:34, the song transitions into an orchestrated section with the repeated line "For a minute there, I lost myself". It ends with guitarist Ed O'Brien generating feedback using a delay effect. The title and lyrics to "Karma Police" originate from an in-joke during The Bends tour; Jonny Greenwood said "whenever someone was behaving in a particularly shitty way, we'd say 'The karma police will catch up with him sooner or later.'" #### Tracks 7–12 "Fitter Happier" is a short musique concrète track that consists of sampled musical and background sound and spoken-word lyrics recited by "Fred", a synthesised voice from the Macintosh SimpleText application. Yorke wrote the lyrics "in ten minutes" after a period of writer's block while the rest of the band were playing. He described the words as a checklist of slogans for the 1990s; he considered it "the most upsetting thing I've ever written", and said it was "liberating" to give the words to a neutral-sounding computer voice. Among the samples in the background is a loop from the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor. The band considered using "Fitter Happier" as the album's opening track, but decided the effect was off-putting. Steve Lowe called the song "penetrating surgery on pseudo-meaningful corporations' lifestyles" with "a repugnance for prevailing yuppified social values". Among the loosely connected imagery of the lyrics, Footman identified the song's subject as "the materially comfortable, morally empty embodiment of modern, Western humanity, half-salaryman, half-Stepford Wife, destined for the metaphorical farrowing crate, propped up on Prozac, Viagra and anything else his insurance plan can cover." Sam Steele called the lyrics "a stream of received imagery: scraps of media information, interspersed with lifestyle ad slogans and private prayers for a healthier existence. It is the hum of a world buzzing with words, one of the messages seeming to be that we live in such a synthetic universe we have grown unable to detect reality from artifice." "Electioneering", featuring a cowbell and a distorted guitar solo, is the album's most rock-oriented track and one of the heaviest songs Radiohead has recorded. It has been compared to Radiohead's earlier style on Pablo Honey. The cynical "Electioneering" is the album's most directly political song, with lyrics inspired by the Poll Tax Riots. The song was also inspired by Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, a book analysing contemporary mass media under the propaganda model. Yorke likened its lyrics, which focus on political and artistic compromise, to "a preacher ranting in front of a bank of microphones". Regarding its oblique political references, Yorke said, "What can you say about the IMF, or politicians? Or people selling arms to African countries, employing slave labour or whatever. What can you say? You just write down 'Cattle prods and the IMF' and people who know, know." O'Brien said the song was about the promotional cycle of touring: "After a while you feel like a politician who has to kiss babies and shake hands all day long." "Climbing Up the Walls" – described by Melody Maker as "monumental chaos" – is layered with a string section, ambient noise and repetitive, metallic percussion. The string section, composed by Jonny Greenwood and written for 16 instruments, was inspired by modern classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. Greenwood said, "I got very excited at the prospect of doing string parts that didn't sound like 'Eleanor Rigby', which is what all string parts have sounded like for the past 30 years." Select described Yorke's distraught vocals and the atonal strings as "Thom's voice dissolving into a fearful, blood-clotted scream as Jonny whips the sound of a million dying elephants into a crescendo". For the lyrics, Yorke drew from his time as an orderly in a mental hospital during the Care in the Community policy of deinstitutionalising mental health patients, and a New York Times article about serial killers. He said: > This is about the unspeakable. Literally skull-crushing. I used to work in a mental hospital around the time that Care in the Community started, and we all just knew what was going to happen. And it's one of the scariest things to happen in this country, because a lot of them weren't just harmless ... It was hailing violently when we recorded this. It seemed to add to the mood. "No Surprises", recorded in a single take, is arranged with electric guitar (inspired by the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice"), acoustic guitar, glockenspiel and vocal harmonies. The band strove to replicate the mood of Louis Armstrong's 1968 recording of "What a Wonderful World" and the soul music of Marvin Gaye. Yorke identified the subject of the song as "someone who's trying hard to keep it together but can't". The lyrics seem to portray a suicide or an unfulfilling life, and dissatisfaction with contemporary social and political order. Some lines refer to rural or suburban imagery. One of the key metaphors in the song is the opening line, "a heart that's full up like a landfill"; according to Yorke, the song is a "fucked-up nursery rhyme" that "stems from my unhealthy obsession of what to do with plastic boxes and plastic bottles ... All this stuff is getting buried, the debris of our lives. It doesn't rot, it just stays there. That's how we deal, that's how I deal with stuff, I bury it." The song's gentle mood contrasts sharply with its harsh lyrics; Steele said, "even when the subject is suicide ... O'Brien's guitar is as soothing as balm on a red-raw psyche, the song rendered like a bittersweet child's prayer." "Lucky" was inspired by the Bosnian War. Sam Taylor said it was "the one track on [The Help Album] to capture the sombre terror of the conflict", and that its serious subject matter and dark tone made the band "too 'real' to be allowed on the Britpop gravy train". The lyrics were pared down from many pages of notes, and were originally more politically explicit. The lyrics depict a man surviving an aeroplane crash and are drawn from Yorke's anxiety about transportation. The musical centerpiece of "Lucky" is its three-piece guitar arrangement, which grew out of the high-pitched chiming sound played by O'Brien in the song's introduction, achieved by strumming above the guitar nut. Critics likened its lead guitar to Pink Floyd and, more broadly, arena rock. The album ends with "The Tourist", which Jonny Greenwood wrote as an unusually staid piece where something "doesn't have to happen ... every three seconds". He said, "'The Tourist' doesn't sound like Radiohead at all. It has become a song with space." The lyrics, written by Yorke, were inspired by his experience of watching American tourists in France frantically trying to see as many tourist attractions as possible. He said it was chosen as the closing track because "a lot of the album was about background noise and everything moving too fast and not being able to keep up. It was really obvious to have 'Tourist' as the last song. That song was written to me from me, saying, 'Idiot, slow down.' Because at that point, I needed to. So that was the only resolution there could be: to slow down." The "unexpectedly bluesy waltz" draws to a close as the guitars drop out, leaving only drums and bass, and concludes with the sound of a small bell. ## Title The title OK Computer is taken from the 1978 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series, in which the character Zaphod Beeblebrox speaks the phrase "Okay, computer, I want full manual control now." The members of Radiohead listened to the series on the bus during their 1996 tour and Yorke made a note of the phrase. "OK Computer" became a working title for the B-side "Palo Alto", which had been considered for inclusion on the album. The title stuck with the band; according to Jonny Greenwood, it "started attaching itself and creating all these weird resonances with what we were trying to do". Yorke said the title "refers to embracing the future, it refers to being terrified of the future, of our future, of everyone else's. It's to do with standing in a room where all these appliances are going off and all these machines and computers and so on ... and the sound it makes." He described the title as "a really resigned, terrified phrase", to him similar to the Coca-Cola advertisement "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing". Wired writer Leander Kahney suggests that it is an homage to Macintosh computers, as the Mac's speech recognition software responds to the command "OK computer" as an alternative to clicking the "OK" button. Other titles considered were Ones and Zeroes—a reference to the binary numeral system—and Your Home May Be at Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Payments. ## Artwork The OK Computer artwork is a computer-generated collage of images and text created by Yorke, credited under the pseudonym the White Chocolate Farm, and Stanley Donwood. Yorke commissioned Donwood to work on a visual diary alongside the recording sessions. Yorke explained, "If I'm shown some kind of visual representation of the music, only then do I feel confident. Up until that point, I'm a bit of a whirlwind." The blue-and-white palette was, according to Donwood, the result of "trying to make something the colour of bleached bone". The image of two stick figures shaking hands appears in the liner notes and on the disc label in CD and LP releases. Yorke explained the image as emblematic of exploitation: "Someone's being sold something they don't really want, and someone's being friendly because they're trying to sell something. That's what it means to me." The image would later be used as the artwork for Radiohead's first compilation album, Radiohead: The Best Of. Explaining the artwork's themes, Yorke said, "It's quite sad, and quite funny as well. All the artwork and so on ... It was all the things that I hadn't said in the songs." Motifs in the artwork include motorways, aeroplanes, families with children, corporate logos and cityscapes. The photograph of a motorway on the cover was likely taken in Hartford, Connecticut, where Radiohead performed in 1996. The words "Lost Child" feature prominently on the cover, and the booklet artwork contains phrases in the constructed language Esperanto and health-related instructions in both English and Greek. The Uncut critic David Cavanagh said the use of non-sequiturs created an effect "akin to being lifestyle-coached by a lunatic". White scribbles, Donwood's method of correcting mistakes rather than using the computer function undo, are present everywhere in the collages. The liner notes contain the full lyrics, rendered with atypical syntax, alternate spelling and small annotations. The lyrics are also arranged and spaced in shapes that resemble hidden images. In keeping with the band's then-emerging anti-corporate stance, the production credits contain the ironic copyright notice "Lyrics reproduced by kind permission even though we wrote them." ## Release and promotion ### Commercial expectations According to Selway, Radiohead's American label Capitol saw the album as "'commercial suicide'. They weren't really into it. At that point, we got the fear. How is this going to be received?" Yorke recalled: "When we first gave it to Capitol, they were taken aback. I don't really know why it's so important now, but I'm excited about it." Capitol lowered its sales forecast from two million to half a million. In O'Brien's view, only Parlophone, the band's British label, remained optimistic, while global distributors dramatically reduced their sales estimates. Label representatives were reportedly disappointed with the lack of marketable singles, especially the absence of anything resembling Radiohead's 1992 hit "Creep". "OK Computer isn't the album we're going to rule the world with", Colin Greenwood predicted at the time. "It's not as hitting-everything-loudly-whilst-waggling-the-tongue-in-and-out, like The Bends. There's less of the Van Halen factor." ### Marketing Parlophone launched an unorthodox advertising campaign, taking full-page advertisements in high-profile British newspapers and tube stations with lyrics for "Fitter Happier" in large black letters against white backgrounds. The same lyrics, and artwork adapted from the album, were repurposed for shirt designs. Yorke said they chose the "Fitter Happier" lyrics to link what a critic called "a coherent set of concerns" between the album artwork and its promotional material. Other unconventional merchandise included a floppy disk containing Radiohead screensavers and an FM radio in the shape of a desktop computer. In America, Capitol sent 1,000 cassette players to prominent members of the press and music industry, each with a copy of the album permanently glued inside. Capitol president Gary Gersh said, "Our job is just to take them as a left-of-centre band and bring the centre to them. That's our focus, and we won't let up until they're the biggest band in the world." Radiohead planned to produce a video for every song on the album, but the project was abandoned due to financial and time constraints. According to "No Surprises" video director Grant Gee, the plan was scrapped when the videos for "Paranoid Android" and "Karma Police" went over budget. Also scrapped were plans for trip hop group Massive Attack to remix the album. Radiohead's website was created to promote the album, which went live at the time of its release, making the band one of the first to manage an online presence. The first major Radiohead fansite, "atease", was made shortly following the album's release, with its title taken from "Fitter Happier". In 2017, for OK Computer's 20th anniversary, Radiohead temporarily restored their website to its 1997 state. ### Singles Radiohead chose "Paranoid Android" as the lead single, despite its unusually long running time and lack of a catchy chorus. Colin Greenwood said the song was "hardly the radio-friendly, breakthrough, buzz bin unit shifter [radio stations] can have been expecting", but that Capitol supported the choice. The song premiered on the Radio 1 programme The Evening Session in April 1997 and was released as a single in May 1997. On the strength of frequent radio play on Radio 1 and rotation of the song's music video on MTV, "Paranoid Android" reached number three in the UK, giving Radiohead their highest chart position. "Karma Police" was released in August 1997 and "No Surprises" in January 1998. Both singles charted in the UK top ten, and "Karma Police" peaked at number 14 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. "Lucky" was released as a single in France, but did not chart. "Let Down", considered for release as the lead single, was issued as a promotional single in September 1997 and charted on the Modern Rock Tracks chart at number 29. ### Tour Radiohead embarked on the "Against Demons" world tour in promotion of OK Computer, commencing at the album launch in Barcelona on 22 May 1997. They toured the UK and Ireland, continental Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia, concluding on 18 April 1998 in New York. A documentary by Grant Gee following Radiohead on the tour, Meeting People Is Easy, premiered in November 1998. The tour was taxing for the band, particularly Yorke, who said: "That tour was a year too long. I was the first person to tire of it, then six months later everyone in the band was saying it. Then six months after that, nobody was talking any more." In 2003, Colin Greenwood said the tour was the lowest point in Radiohead’s career: "There is nothing worse than having to play in front of 20,000 people when someone — when Thom — absolutely does not want to be there, and you can see that hundred-yard stare in his eyes. You hate having to put your friend through that experience." The tour included Radiohead's first headline performance at Glastonbury Festival on 28 June 1997. Despite technical problems that almost caused Yorke to abandon the stage, the performance was acclaimed and cemented Radiohead as a major live act. Rolling Stone described it as "an absolute triumph", and in 2004 Q named it the greatest concert of all time. In 2023, the Guardian named it the greatest Glastonbury headline set, writing that "frustration and tension led to the band playing out of their skins, adding a startling potency to a set that confirmed OK Computer as the defining sound of rock’s post-Britpop shift". ### Sales OK Computer was released in Japan on 21 May, in the UK on 16 June, in Canada on 17 June and in the US on 1 July. It was released on CD, double-LP vinyl record, cassette and MiniDisc. It debuted at number one in the UK with sales of 136,000 copies in its first week. In the US, it debuted at number 21 on the Billboard 200. It held the number-one spot in the UK for two weeks and stayed in the top ten for several more, becoming the UK's eighth-bestselling record that year. By February 1998, OK Computer had sold at least half a million copies in the UK and 2 million worldwide. By September 2000, it had sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. The Los Angeles Times reported that by June 2001 it had sold 1.4 million copies in the US, and in April 2006 the IFPI announced it had sold 3 million copies across Europe. It has been certified triple platinum in the UK and double platinum in the US, in addition to certifications in other markets. By May 2016, Nielsen SoundScan figures showed OK Computer had sold 2.5 million digital album units in the US, plus 900,000 sales measured in album-equivalent units. Twenty years to the week after its release, the Official Charts Company recorded total UK sales of 1.5 million, including album-equivalent units. Tallying American and European sales, OK Computer has sold at least 6.9 million copies worldwide (or 7.8 million with album-equivalent units). ## Critical reception OK Computer was almost uniformly praised. Critics described it as a landmark release of far-reaching impact and importance, but noted that its experimentalism made it a challenging listen. According to Tim Footman, "Not since 1967, with the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, had so many major critics agreed immediately, not only on an album's merits, but on its long-term significance, and its ability to encapsulate a particular point in history." In the British press, the album garnered favourable reviews in NME, Melody Maker, The Guardian and Q. Nick Kent wrote in Mojo that "Others may end up selling more, but in 20 years' time I'm betting OK Computer will be seen as the key record of 1997, the one to take rock forward instead of artfully revamping images and song-structures from an earlier era." John Harris wrote in Select: "Every word sounds achingly sincere, every note spewed from the heart, and yet it roots itself firmly in a world of steel, glass, random-access memory and prickly-skinned paranoia." The album was well received by critics in North America. Rolling Stone, Spin, the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pitchfork and the Daily Herald published positive reviews. In The New Yorker, Alex Ross praised its progressiveness, and contrasted Radiohead's risk-taking with the musically conservative "dadrock" of their contemporaries Oasis. Ross wrote: "Throughout the album, contrasts of mood and style are extreme ... This band has pulled off one of the great art-pop balancing acts in the history of rock." Ryan Schreiber of Pitchfork lauded the record's emotional appeal, writing that it "is brimming with genuine emotion, beautiful and complex imagery and music, and lyrics that are at once passive and fire-breathing". Reviews for Entertainment Weekly, the Chicago Tribune, and Time were mixed. Robert Christgau from The Village Voice said Radiohead immersed Yorke's vocals in "enough electronic marginal distinction to feed a coal town for a month" to compensate for the "soulless" songs, resulting in "arid" art rock. In an otherwise positive review, Andy Gill wrote for The Independent: "For all its ambition and determination to break new ground, OK Computer is not, finally, as impressive as The Bends, which covered much the same sort of emotional knots, but with better tunes. It is easy to be impressed by, but ultimately hard to love, an album that luxuriates so readily in its own despondency." ### Accolades OK Computer was nominated for Grammy Awards as Album of the Year and Best Alternative Music Album at the 40th Annual Grammy Awards in 1998, winning the latter. It was also nominated for Best British Album at the 1998 Brit Awards. The album was shortlisted for the 1997 Mercury Prize, a prestigious award recognising the best British or Irish album of the year. The day before the winner was announced, oddsmakers had given OK Computer the best chance to win among ten nominees, but it lost to New Forms by Roni Size/Reprazent. The album appeared in many 1997 critics' lists and listener polls for best album of the year. It topped the year-end polls of Mojo, Vox, Entertainment Weekly, Hot Press, Muziekkrant OOR, HUMO, Eye Weekly and Inpress, and tied for first place with Daft Punk's Homework in The Face. The album came second in NME, Melody Maker, Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Spin and Uncut. Q and Les Inrockuptibles both listed the album in their unranked year-end polls. Praise for the album overwhelmed the band; Greenwood felt the praise had been exaggerated because The Bends had been "under-reviewed possibly and under-received." They rejected links to progressive rock and art rock, despite comparisons to Pink Floyd's 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon. Yorke responded: "We write pop songs ... There was no intention of it being 'art'. It's a reflection of all the disparate things we were listening to when we recorded it." He was nevertheless pleased that listeners identified their influences: "What really blew my head off was the fact that people got all the things, all the textures and the sounds and the atmospheres we were trying to create." ## Legacy ### Retrospective appraisal OK Computer has appeared frequently in professional lists of the greatest albums of all time. A number of publications, including NME, Melody Maker, Alternative Press, Spin, Pitchfork, Time, Metro Weekly and Slant Magazine placed OK Computer prominently in lists of best albums of the 1990s or of all time. It was voted number 4 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums 3rd Edition (2000). Rolling Stone ranked it 42 on its list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2020. It was previously ranked at 162 in 2003 and 2012. Retrospective reviews from BBC Music, The A.V. Club and Slant were favourable. Rolling Stone gave the album five out of five in the 2004 edition of The Rolling Stone Album Guide, with Rob Sheffield writing: "Radiohead was claiming the high ground abandoned by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, U2, R.E.M., everybody; and fans around the world loved them for trying too hard at a time when nobody else was even bothering." Christgau said later that "most would rate OK Computer the apogee of pomo texture". In 2014, the United States National Recording Preservation Board selected the album for preservation in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress, which designates it as a sound recording that has had significant cultural, historical or aesthetic impact in American life. In The New Yorker, Kevin Dettmar of described it as the record that made modern world possible for alternative rock music. OK Computer has been cited by some as undeserving of its acclaim. In a poll surveying thousands conducted by BBC Radio 6 Music, OK Computer was named the sixth-most overrated album. David H. Green of The Daily Telegraph called the album "self-indulgent whingeing" and maintains that the positive critical consensus towards OK Computer is an indication of "a 20th-century delusion that rock is the bastion of serious commentary on popular music" to the detriment of electronic and dance music. The album was selected as an entry in "Sacred Cows", an NME column questioning the critical status of "revered albums", in which Henry Yates said "there's no defiance, gallows humour or chink of light beneath the curtain, just a sense of meek, resigned despondency" and criticised the record as "the moment when Radiohead stopped being 'good' [compared to The Bends] and started being 'important'". In a Spin article on the "myth" that "Radiohead Can Do No Wrong", Chris Norris argues that the acclaim for OK Computer inflated expectations for subsequent Radiohead releases. Christgau felt "the reason the readers of the British magazine Q absurdly voted OK Computer the greatest album of the 20th century is that it integrated what was briefly called electronica into rock". Having deemed it "self-regarding" and overrated, he later warmed to the record and found it indicative of Radiohead's cerebral sensibility and "rife with discrete pleasures and surprises". ### Commentary, interpretation and analysis OK Computer was recorded in the lead up to the 1997 general election and released a month after the victory of Tony Blair's New Labour government. The album was perceived by critics as an expression of dissent and scepticism toward the new government and a reaction against the national mood of optimism. Dorian Lynskey wrote, "On May 1, 1997, Labour supporters toasted their landslide victory to the sound of 'Things Can Only Get Better.' A few weeks later, OK Computer appeared like Banquo's ghost to warn: No, things can only get worse." According to Amy Britton, the album "showed not everyone was ready to join the party, instead tapping into another feeling felt throughout the UK—pre-millennial angst. ... huge corporations were impossible to fight against—this was the world OK Computer soundtracked, not the wave of British optimism." In an interview, Yorke doubted that Blair's policies would differ from the preceding two decades of Conservative government. He said the public reaction to the death of Princess Diana was more significant, as a moment when the British public realised "the royals had had us by the balls for the last hundred years, as had the media and the state." The band's distaste with the commercialised promotion of OK Computer reinforced their anti-capitalist politics, which would be further explored on their subsequent releases. Critics have compared Radiohead's statements of political dissatisfaction to those of earlier rock bands. David Stubbs said that, where punk rock had been a rebellion against a time of deficit and poverty, OK Computer protested the "mechanistic convenience" of contemporary surplus and excess. Alex Ross said the album "pictured the onslaught of the Information Age and a young person's panicky embrace of it" and made the band into "the poster boys for a certain kind of knowing alienation—as Talking Heads and R.E.M. had been before." Jon Pareles of The New York Times found precedents in the work of Pink Floyd and Madness for Radiohead's concerns "about a culture of numbness, building docile workers and enforced by self-help regimes and anti-depressants". The album's tone has been described as millennial or futuristic, anticipating cultural and political trends. According to The A.V. Club writer Steven Hyden in the feature "Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation", "Radiohead appeared to be ahead of the curve, forecasting the paranoia, media-driven insanity, and omnipresent sense of impending doom that's subsequently come to characterise everyday life in the 21st century." In 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, Tom Moon described OK Computer as a "prescient ... dystopian essay on the darker implications of technology ... oozing [with] a vague sense of dread, and a touch of Big Brother foreboding that bears strong resemblance to the constant disquiet of life on Security Level Orange, post-9/11." Chris Martin of Coldplay remarked that, "It would be interesting to see how the world would be different if Dick Cheney really listened to Radiohead's OK Computer. I think the world would probably improve. That album is fucking brilliant. It changed my life, so why wouldn't it change his?" The album inspired a radio play, also titled OK Computer, which was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2007. The play, written by Joel Horwood, Chris Perkins, Al Smith and Chris Thorpe, interprets the album's 12 tracks into a story about a man who awakens in a Berlin hospital with memory loss and returns to England with doubts that the life he's returned to is his own. ### Influence The release of OK Computer coincided with the decline of Britpop. Through OK Computer's influence, the dominant UK guitar pop shifted toward an approximation of "Radiohead's paranoid but confessional, slurry but catchy" approach. Many newer British acts adopted similarly complex, atmospheric arrangements; for example, the post-Britpop band Travis worked with Godrich to create the languid pop texture of The Man Who, which became the fourth best-selling album of 1999 in the UK. Some in the British press accused Travis of appropriating Radiohead's sound. Steven Hyden of AV Club said that by 1999, starting with The Man Who, "what Radiohead had created in OK Computer had already grown much bigger than the band," and that the album went on to influence "a wave of British-rock balladeers that reached its zenith in the '00s". OK Computer's popularity influenced the next generation of British alternative rock bands, and established musicians in a variety of genres have praised it. Bloc Party and TV on the Radio listened to or were influenced by OK Computer; TV on the Radio's debut album was titled OK Calculator as a lighthearted tribute. Radiohead described the pervasiveness of bands that "sound like us" as one reason to break with the style of OK Computer for their next album, Kid A. Although OK Computer's influence on rock musicians is widely acknowledged, several critics believe that its experimental inclination was not authentically embraced on a wide scale. Footman said the "Radiohead Lite" bands that followed were "missing [OK Computer's] sonic inventiveness, not to mention the lyrical substance." David Cavanagh said that most of OK Computer's purported mainstream influence more likely stemmed from the ballads on The Bends. According to Cavanagh, "The populist albums of the post-OK Computer era—the Verve's Urban Hymns, Travis's Good Feeling, Stereophonics' Word Gets Around, Robbie Williams' Life thru a Lens—effectively closed the door that OK Computer's boffin-esque inventiveness had opened." John Harris believed that OK Computer was one of the "fleeting signs that British rock music might [have been] returning to its inventive traditions" in the wake of Britpop's demise. While Harris concludes that British rock ultimately developed an "altogether more conservative tendency", he said that with OK Computer and their subsequent material, Radiohead provided a "clarion call" to fill the void left by Britpop. The Pitchfork journalist Marc Hogan argued that OK Computer marked an "ending point" for the rock-oriented album era, as its mainstream and critical success remained unmatched by any rock album since. OK Computer triggered a minor revival of progressive rock and ambitious concept albums, with a new wave of prog-influenced bands crediting OK Computer for enabling their scene to thrive. Brandon Curtis of Secret Machines said, "Songs like 'Paranoid Android' made it OK to write music differently, to be more experimental ... OK Computer was important because it reintroduced unconventional writing and song structures." Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree said, "I don't think ambition is a dirty word any more. Radiohead were the Trojan Horse in that respect. Here's a band that came from the indie rock tradition that snuck in under the radar when the journalists weren't looking and started making these absurdly ambitious and pretentious—and all the better for it—records." In 2005, Q named OK Computer the tenth-best progressive rock album. ## Reissues and compilations Radiohead left EMI, the parent company of Parlophone, in 2007 after failed contract negotiations. EMI retained the rights to Radiohead's material recorded before 2003. After a period of being out of print on vinyl, OK Computer was reissued as a double LP by EMI on 19 August 2008 as part of the "From the Capitol Vaults" series, along with other Radiohead albums. It became the tenth-bestselling vinyl record of 2008, selling almost 10,000 copies. The reissue was connected in the press to the resurgence of interest in vinyl in the early 21st century. ### 2009 "Collector's Edition" reissue EMI reissued OK Computer as an expanded "Collector's Edition" on 24 March 2009, alongside Pablo Honey and The Bends, without Radiohead's involvement. The reissue was released in a 2-CD edition and an expanded 2-CD, 1-DVD edition. The first disc contains the original album, the second disc contains B-sides collected from OK Computer singles and live recording sessions, and the DVD contains a collection of music videos and a live television performance. All the material had been previously released and the music was not remastered. Press reaction to the reissue expressed concern that EMI was exploiting Radiohead's back catalogue. Larry Fitzmaurice of Spin accused EMI of planning to "issue and reissue [Radiohead's] discography until the cash stops rolling in". Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal said it was "hard to look at these reissues as anything other than a cash-grab for EMI/Capitol—an old media company that got dumped by their most forward-thinking band". Daniel Kreps of Rolling Stone defended the release, saying: "While it's easy to accuse Capitol of milking the cash cow once again, these sets are pretty comprehensive." Reviews were generally positive. AllMusic, Uncut, Q, Rolling Stone, Paste and PopMatters praised the supplemental material, but with reservations. Scott Plagenhoef of Pitchfork awarded the reissue a perfect score, arguing that it was worth buying for fans who did not already own the extra material. Plagenhoef said: "That the band had nothing to do with these is beside the point: this is the final word on these records, if for no other reason that the Beatles' September 9 remaster campaign is, arguably, the end of the CD era." The A.V. Club writer Josh Modell praised the bonus disc and DVD, and said OK Computer was "the perfect synthesis of Radiohead's seemingly conflicted impulses". ### Radiohead Box Set and XL reissues In 2007, EMI released Radiohead Box Set, a compilation of albums recorded while Radiohead were signed to EMI, including The Bends. In April 2016, XL Recordings acquired Radiohead's back catalogue. The EMI reissues, released without Radiohead's approval, were removed from streaming services. In May 2016, XL reissued Radiohead's back catalogue on vinyl, including OK Computer. ### OKNOTOK 1997 2017 On 23 June 2017, Radiohead released a 20th-anniversary OK Computer reissue, OKNOTOK 1997 2017, on XL. It includes a remastered version of the album, plus eight B-sides and three previously unreleased tracks: "I Promise", "Man of War" and "Lift". The special edition includes books of artwork and notes and an audio cassette of demos and session recordings, including previously unreleased songs. OKNOTOK debuted at number two on the UK Album Chart, boosted by Radiohead's third headline performance at Glastonbury Festival. It was the best-selling album in independent UK record shops for a year. ### MiniDiscs [Hacked] In early June 2019, nearly 18 hours of demos, outtakes and other material recorded during the OK Computer period leaked online. On 11 June, Radiohead made the archive available to stream or purchase from the music sharing site Bandcamp for 18 days, with proceeds going to the environmental advocacy group Extinction Rebellion. ## Track listing All tracks are written by Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Philip Selway, Ed O'Brien and Colin Greenwood. 1. "Airbag" – 4:44 2. "Paranoid Android" – 6:23 3. "Subterranean Homesick Alien" – 4:27 4. "Exit Music (For a Film)" – 4:24 5. "Let Down" – 4:59 6. "Karma Police" – 4:21 7. "Fitter Happier" – 1:57 8. "Electioneering" – 3:50 9. "Climbing Up the Walls" – 4:45 10. "No Surprises" – 3:48 11. "Lucky" – 4:19 12. "The Tourist" – 5:24 ## Personnel - Nigel Godrich – committing to tape, audio level balancing - Radiohead – committing to tape, music - Thom Yorke - Jonny Greenwood - Philip Selway - Ed O'Brien - Colin Greenwood - Stanley Donwood – pictures - The White Chocolate Farm – pictures - Gerard Navarro – studio assistance - Jon Bailey – studio assistance - Chris Scard – studio assistance - Chris "King Fader" Blair – mastering - Nick Ingman – string conducting - Matt Bale – additional artwork ## Charts ### Weekly charts ### Year-end charts ## Certifications and sales
10,608,031	Ediacaran biota	1,173,171,041	All organisms of the Ediacaran Period (c. 635–538.8 million years ago)	[ "Ediacaran", "Ediacaran life", "Proterozoic life" ]	The Ediacaran (/ˌiːdiˈækərən/; formerly Vendian) biota is a taxonomic period classification that consists of all life forms that were present on Earth during the Ediacaran Period (c. 635–538.8 Mya). These were enigmatic tubular and frond-shaped, mostly sessile, organisms. Trace fossils of these organisms have been found worldwide, and represent the earliest known complex multicellular organisms. The term "Ediacara biota" has received criticism from some scientists due to its alleged inconsistency, arbitrary exclusion of certain fossils, and inability to be precisely defined. The Ediacaran biota may have undergone evolutionary radiation in a proposed event called the Avalon explosion, . This was after the Earth had thawed from the Cryogenian period's extensive glaciation. This biota largely disappeared with the rapid increase in biodiversity known as the Cambrian explosion. Most of the currently existing body plans of animals first appeared in the fossil record of the Cambrian rather than the Ediacaran. For macroorganisms, the Cambrian biota appears to have almost completely replaced the organisms that dominated the Ediacaran fossil record, although relationships are still a matter of debate. The organisms of the Ediacaran Period first appeared around and flourished until the cusp of the Cambrian , when the characteristic communities of fossils vanished. A diverse Ediacaran community was discovered in 1995 in Sonora, Mexico, and is approximately 555 million years in age, roughly coeval with Ediacaran fossils of the Ediacara Hills in South Australia and the White Sea on the coast of Russia. While rare fossils that may represent survivors have been found as late as the Middle Cambrian (510–500 Mya), the earlier fossil communities disappear from the record at the end of the Ediacaran leaving only curious fragments of once-thriving ecosystems. Multiple hypotheses exist to explain the disappearance of this biota, including preservation bias, a changing environment, the advent of predators and competition from other life-forms. A sampling, reported in 2018, of late Ediacaran strata across Baltica (\< 560 Mya) suggests the flourishing of the organisms coincided with conditions of low overall productivity with a very high percentage produced by bacteria, which may have led to high concentrations of dissolved organic material in the oceans. Determining where Ediacaran organisms fit in the tree of life has proven challenging; it is not even established that most of them were animals, with suggestions that they were lichens (fungus-alga symbionts), algae, protists known as foraminifera, fungi or microbial colonies, or hypothetical intermediates between plants and animals. The morphology and habit of some taxa (e.g. Funisia dorothea) suggest relationships to Porifera or Cnidaria (e.g. Auroralumina). Kimberella may show a similarity to molluscs, and other organisms have been thought to possess bilateral symmetry, although this is controversial. Most macroscopic fossils are morphologically distinct from later life-forms: they resemble discs, tubes, mud-filled bags or quilted mattresses. Due to the difficulty of deducing evolutionary relationships among these organisms, some palaeontologists have suggested that these represent completely extinct lineages that do not resemble any living organism. Palaeontologist Adolf Seilacher proposed a separate subkingdom level category Vendozoa (now renamed Vendobionta) in the Linnaean hierarchy for the Ediacaran biota. If these enigmatic organisms left no descendants, their strange forms might be seen as a "failed experiment" in multicellular life, with later multicellular life evolving independently from unrelated single-celled organisms. A 2018 study confirmed that one of the period's most-prominent and iconic fossils, Dickinsonia, included cholesterol, suggesting affinities to animals, fungi, or red algae. ## History The first Ediacaran fossils discovered were the disc-shaped Aspidella terranovica in 1868. Their discoverer, Scottish geologist Alexander Murray, found them useful aids for correlating the age of rocks around Newfoundland. However, since they lay below the "Primordial Strata" of the Cambrian that was then thought to contain the very first signs of animal life, a proposal four years after their discovery by Elkanah Billings that these simple forms represented fauna was dismissed by his peers. Instead, they were interpreted as gas escape structures or inorganic concretions. No similar structures elsewhere in the world were then known and the one-sided debate soon fell into obscurity. In 1933, Georg Gürich discovered specimens in Namibia but assigned them to the Cambrian Period. In 1946, Reg Sprigg noticed "jellyfishes" in the Ediacara Hills of Australia's Flinders Ranges, which were at the time believed to be Early Cambrian. It was not until the British discovery of the iconic Charnia that the Precambrian was seriously considered as containing life. This frond-shaped fossil was found in England's Charnwood Forest first by a 15 year-old girl in 1956 (Tina Negus, who was not believed) and then the next year by a group of three schoolboys including 15 year-old Roger Mason. Due to the detailed geological mapping of the British Geological Survey, there was no doubt these fossils sat in Precambrian rocks. Palaeontologist Martin Glaessner finally, in 1959, made the connection between this and the earlier finds and with a combination of improved dating of existing specimens and an injection of vigour into the search many more instances were recognised. All specimens discovered until 1967 were in coarse-grained sandstone that prevented preservation of fine details, making interpretation difficult. S.B. Misra's discovery of fossiliferous ash-beds at the Mistaken Point assemblage in Newfoundland changed all this as the delicate detail preserved by the fine ash allowed the description of features that were previously undiscernible. It was also the first discovery of Ediacarans in deep water sediments. Poor communication, combined with the difficulty in correlating globally distinct formations, led to a plethora of different names for the biota. In 1960 the French name "Ediacarien" – after the Ediacara Hills – was added to the competing terms "Sinian" and "Vendian" for terminal-Precambrian rocks, and these names were also applied to the life-forms. "Ediacaran" and "Ediacarian" were subsequently applied to the epoch or period of geological time and its corresponding rocks. In March 2004, the International Union of Geological Sciences ended the inconsistency by formally naming the terminal period of the Neoproterozoic after the Australian locality. The term "Ediacaran biota" and similar ("Ediacara" / "Ediacaran" / "Ediacarian" / "Vendian" and "fauna" / "biota") has, at various times, been used in a geographic, stratigraphic, taphonomic, or biological sense, with the latter the most common in modern literature. ## Preservation ### Microbial mats Microbial mats are areas of sediment stabilised by the presence of colonies of microbes that secrete sticky fluids or otherwise bind the sediment particles. They appear to migrate upwards when covered by a thin layer of sediment but this is an illusion caused by the colony's growth; individuals do not, themselves, move. If too thick a layer of sediment is deposited before they can grow or reproduce through it, parts of the colony will die leaving behind fossils with a characteristically wrinkled ("elephant skin") and tubercular texture. Some Ediacaran strata with the texture characteristics of microbial mats contain fossils, and Ediacaran fossils are almost always found in beds that contain these microbial mats. Although microbial mats were once widespread, the evolution of grazing organisms in the Cambrian vastly reduced their numbers. These communities are now limited to inhospitable refugia, such as the stromatolites found in Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve in Shark Bay, Western Australia, where the salt levels can be twice those of the surrounding sea. ### Fossilization The preservation of Ediacaran fossils is of interest, since as soft-bodied organisms they would normally not fossilize. Further, unlike later soft-bodied fossil biota such as the Burgess Shale or Solnhofen Limestone, the Ediacaran biota is not found in a restricted environment subject to unusual local conditions: they are global. The processes that were operating must therefore have been systemic and worldwide. Something about the Ediacaran Period permitted these delicate creatures to be left behind; the fossils may have been preserved by virtue of rapid covering by ash or sand, trapping them against the mud or microbial mats on which they lived. Their preservation was possibly enhanced by the high concentration of silica in the oceans before silica-secreting organisms such as sponges and diatoms became prevalent. Ash beds provide more detail and can readily be dated to the nearest million years or better using radiometric dating. However, it is more common to find Ediacaran fossils under sandy beds deposited by storms or in turbidites formed by high-energy bottom-scraping ocean currents. Soft-bodied organisms today rarely fossilize during such events, but the presence of widespread microbial mats probably aided preservation by stabilising their impressions in the sediment below. ### Scale of preservation The rate of cementation of the overlying substrate relative to the rate of decomposition of the organism determines whether the top or bottom surface of an organism is preserved. Most disc-shaped fossils decomposed before the overlying sediment was cemented, whereupon ash or sand slumped in to fill the void, leaving a cast of the organism's underside. Conversely, quilted fossils tended to decompose after the cementation of the overlying sediment; hence their upper surfaces are preserved. Their more resistant nature is reflected in the fact that, in rare occasions, quilted fossils are found within storm beds as the high-energy sedimentation did not destroy them as it would have the less-resistant discs. Further, in some cases, the bacterial precipitation of minerals formed a "death mask", ultimately leaving a positive, cast-like impression of the organism. ## Morphology The Ediacaran biota exhibited a vast range of morphological characteristics. Size ranged from millimetres to metres; complexity from "blob-like" to intricate; rigidity from sturdy and resistant to jelly-soft. Almost all forms of symmetry were present. These organisms differed from earlier, mainly microbial, fossils in having an organised, differentiated multicellular construction and centimetre-plus sizes. These disparate morphologies can be broadly grouped into form taxa: "Embryos" : Recent discoveries of Precambrian multicellular life have been dominated by reports of embryos, particularly from the Doushantuo Formation in China. Some finds generated intense media excitement though some have claimed they are instead inorganic structures formed by the precipitation of minerals on the inside of a hole. Other "embryos" have been interpreted as the remains of the giant sulfur-reducing bacteria akin to Thiomargarita, a view that, while it had enjoyed a notable gain of supporters as of 2007, has since suffered following further research comparing the potential Doushantuo embryos' morphologies with those of Thiomargarita specimens, both living and in various stages of decay. A recent discovery of comparable Ediacaran fossil embryos from the Portfjeld Formation in Greenland has significantly expanded the paleogeograpical occurrence of Doushantuo-type fossil "embryos" with similar biotic forms now reported from differing paleolatitudes. Microfossils dating from – just 3 million years after the end of the Cryogenian glaciations – may represent embryonic 'resting stages' in the life cycle of the earliest known animals. An alternative proposal is that these structures represent adult stages of the multicellular organisms of this period. Microfossils of Caveasphaera are thought to foreshadow the evolutionary origin of animal-like embryology. Discs : Circular fossils, such as Ediacaria, Cyclomedusa, and Rugoconites led to the initial identification of Ediacaran fossils as cnidaria, which include jellyfish and corals. Further examination has provided alternative interpretations of all disc-shaped fossils: not one is now confidently recognised as a jellyfish. Alternate explanations include holdfasts and protists; the patterns displayed where two meet have led to many 'individuals' being identified as microbial colonies, and yet others may represent scratch marks formed as stalked organisms spun around their holdfasts. Bags : Fossils such as Pteridinium preserved within sediment layers resemble "mud-filled bags". The scientific community is a long way from reaching a consensus on their interpretation. Toroids : The fossil Vendoglossa tuberculata from the Nama Group, Namibia, has been interpreted as a dorso-ventrally compressed stem-group metazoan, with a large gut cavity and a transversely ridged ectoderm. The organism is in the shape of a flattened torus, with the long axis of its toroidal body running through the approximate center of the presumed gut cavity. Quilted organisms : The organisms considered in Seilacher's revised definition of the Vendobionta share a "quilted" appearance and resembled an inflatable mattress. Sometimes these quilts would be torn or ruptured prior to preservation: Such damaged specimens provide valuable clues in the reconstruction process. For example, the three (or more) petaloid fronds of Swartpuntia germsi could only be recognised in a posthumously damaged specimen – usually multiple fronds were hidden as burial squashed the organisms flat. These organisms appear to form two groups: the fractal rangeomorphs and the simpler erniettomorphs. Including such fossils as the iconic Charnia and Swartpuntia, the group is both the most iconic of the Ediacaran biota and the most difficult to place within the existing tree of life. Lacking any mouth, gut, reproductive organs, or indeed any evidence of internal anatomy, their lifestyle was somewhat peculiar by modern standards; the most widely accepted hypothesis holds that they sucked nutrients out of the surrounding seawater by osmotrophy or osmosis. However, others argue against this. Non-Vendobionts possible early forms of living phyla, excluding them from some definitions of the Ediacaran biota. The earliest such fossil is the reputed bilaterian Vernanimalcula claimed by some, however, to represent the infilling of an egg-sac or acritarch. In 2020, Ikaria wariootia was claimed to represent one of the oldest organisms with anterior and posterior differentiation. Later examples are almost universally accepted as bilaterians and include the mollusc-like Kimberella, Spriggina (pictured) and the shield-shaped Parvancorina whose affinities are currently debated. A suite of fossils known as the small shelly fossils are represented in the Ediacaran, most famously by Cloudina a shelly tube-like fossil that often shows evidence of predatory boring, suggesting that, while predation may not have been common in the Ediacaran Period, it was at least present. Organic microfossils known as small carbonaceous fossils are found in Ediacaran sediments, including the spiral-shaped Cochleatina which spans the Ediacaran–Cambrian boundary. Representatives of modern taxa existed in the Ediacaran, some of which are recognisable today. Sponges, red and green algæ, protists and bacteria are all easily recognisable with some pre-dating the Ediacaran by nearly three billion years. Possible arthropods have also been described. Fossils of the hard-shelled foraminifera Platysolenites are known from the latest Ediacaran of western Siberia, coexisting with Cloudina and Namacalathus. Filaments Filament-shaped structures in Precambrian fossils have been observed on many occasions. Frondose fossils in Newfoundland have been observed to have developed filamentous bedding planes, inferred to be stolonic outgrowths. A study of Brazilian Ediacaran fossils found filamentous microfossils, suggested to be eukaryotes or large sulfur-oxidizing-bacteria (SOBs). Fungus-like filaments found in the Doushantuo Formation have been interpreted as eukaryotes and possibly fungi, providing possible evidence for the evolution and terrestrialization of fungi \~635 Ma. Trace fossils : With the exception of some very simple vertical burrows the only Ediacaran burrows are horizontal, lying on or just below the surface of the seafloor. Such burrows have been taken to imply the presence of motile organisms with heads, which would probably have had a bilateral symmetry. This could place them in the bilateral clade of animals but they could also have been made by simpler organisms feeding as they slowly rolled along the sea floor. Putative "burrows" dating as far back as may have been made by animals that fed on the undersides of microbial mats, which would have shielded them from a chemically unpleasant ocean; however their uneven width and tapering ends make a biological origin so difficult to defend that even the original proponent no longer believes they are authentic. The burrows observed imply simple behaviour, and the complex efficient feeding traces common from the start of the Cambrian are absent. Some Ediacaran fossils, especially discs, have been interpreted tentatively as trace fossils but this hypothesis has not gained widespread acceptance. As well as burrows, some trace fossils have been found directly associated with an Ediacaran fossil. Yorgia and Dickinsonia are often found at the end of long pathways of trace fossils matching their shape; these fossils are thought to be associated with ciliary feeding but the precise method of formation of these disconnected and overlapping fossils largely remains a mystery. The potential mollusc Kimberella is associated with scratch marks, perhaps formed by a radula. ## Classification and interpretation Classification of the Ediacarans is difficult, and hence a variety of theories exist as to their placement on the tree of life. Martin Glaessner proposed in The Dawn of Animal Life (1984) that the Ediacaran biota were recognizable crown group members of modern phyla, but were unfamiliar because they had yet to evolve the characteristic features we use in modern classification. In 1998 Mark McMenamin claimed Ediacarans did not possess an embryonic stage, and thus could not be animals. He believed that they independently evolved a nervous system and brains, meaning that "the path toward intelligent life was embarked upon more than once on this planet". In 2018 analysis of ancient sterols was taken as evidence that one of the period's most-prominent and iconic fossils, Dickinsonia, was an early animal. ### Cnidarians Since the most primitive eumetazoans—multi-cellular animals with tissues—are cnidarians, and the first recognized Ediacaran fossil Charnia looks very much like a sea pen, the first attempt to categorise these fossils designated them as jellyfish and sea pens. However, more recent discoveries have established that many of the circular forms formerly considered "cnidarian medusa" are actually holdfasts – sand-filled vesicles occurring at the base of the stem of upright frond-like Ediacarans. A notable example is the form known as Charniodiscus, a circular impression later found to be attached to the long 'stem' of a frond-like organism that now bears the name. The link between frond-like Ediacarans and sea pens has been thrown into doubt by multiple lines of evidence; chiefly the derived nature of the most frond-like pennatulacean octocorals, their absence from the fossil record before the Tertiary, and the apparent cohesion between segments in Ediacaran frond-like organisms. Some researchers have suggested that an analysis of "growth poles" discredits the pennatulacean nature of Ediacaran fronds. ### Protozoans Adolf Seilacher has suggested that in the Ediacaran, animals take over from giant protists as the dominant life form. The modern xenophyophores are giant single-celled protozoans found throughout the world's oceans, largely on the abyssal plain. Genomic evidence suggests that the xenophyophores are a specialised group of Foraminifera. One modern species, Syringammina fragilissima, is among the largest known protozoans at up to 20 centimetres (7.9 in) in diameter. ### New phylum Seilacher has suggested that the Ediacaran organisms represented a unique and extinct grouping of related forms descended from a common ancestor (clade) and created the kingdom Vendozoa, named after the now-obsolete Vendian era. He later excluded fossils identified as metazoans and relaunched the phylum "Vendobionta", which he described as "quilted" cnidarians lacking stinging cells. This absence precludes the current cnidarian method of feeding, so Seilacher suggested that the organisms may have survived by symbiosis with photosynthetic or chemoautotrophic organisms. Mark McMenamin saw such feeding strategies as characteristic for the entire biota, and referred to the marine biota of this period as a "Garden of Ediacara". ### Lichen hypothesis Greg Retallack has proposed that Ediacaran organisms were lichens. He argues that thin sections of Ediacaran fossils show lichen-like compartments and hypha-like wisps of ferruginized clay, and that Ediacaran fossils have been found in strata that he interprets as desert soils. The suggestion has been disputed by other scientists; some have described the evidence as ambiguous and unconvincing, for instance noting that Dickinsonia fossils have been found on rippled surfaces (suggesting a marine environment), while trace fossils like Radulichnus could not have been caused by needle ice as Retallack has proposed. Ben Waggoner notes that the suggestion would place the root of the Cnidaria back from around 900 mya to between 1500 mya and 2000 mya, contradicting much other evidence. Matthew Nelsen, examining phylogenies of ascomycete fungi and chlorophyte algae (components of lichens), calibrated for time, finds no support for the hypothesis that lichens predated the vascular plants. ### Other interpretations Several classifications have been used to accommodate the Ediacaran biota at some point, from algae, to protozoans, to fungi to bacterial or microbial colonies, to hypothetical intermediates between plants and animals. A new extant genus discovered in 2014, Dendrogramma, which at the time of discovery appeared to be a basal metazoan but of unknown taxonomic placement, had been noted to have similarities with the Ediacaran fauna. It has since been found to be a siphonophore, possibly even sections of a more complex species. ## Origin It took almost 4 billion years from the formation of the Earth for Ediacaran fossils to first appear, 655 million years ago. While putative fossils are reported from , the first uncontroversial evidence for life is found , and cells with nuclei certainly existed by . It could be that no special explanation is required: the slow process of evolution simply required 4 billion years to accumulate the necessary adaptations. Indeed, there does seem to be a slow increase in the maximum level of complexity seen over this time, with more and more complex forms of life evolving as time progresses, with traces of earlier semi-complex life such as Nimbia, found in the Twitya formation, and older rocks dating to in Kazakhstan. On the early Earth, reactive elements, such as iron and uranium, existed in a reduced form that would react with any free oxygen produced by photosynthesising organisms. Oxygen would not be able to build up in the atmosphere until all the iron had rusted (producing banded iron formations), and all the other reactive elements had been oxidised. Donald Canfield detected records of the first significant quantities of atmospheric oxygen just before the first Ediacaran fossils appeared – and the presence of atmospheric oxygen was soon heralded as a possible trigger for the Ediacaran radiation. Oxygen seems to have accumulated in two pulses; the rise of small, sessile (stationary) organisms seems to correlate with an early oxygenation event, with larger and mobile organisms appearing around the second pulse of oxygenation. However, the assumptions underlying the reconstruction of atmospheric composition have attracted some criticism, with widespread anoxia having little effect on life where it occurs in the Early Cambrian and the Cretaceous. Periods of intense cold have also been suggested as a barrier to the evolution of multicellular life. The earliest known embryos, from China's Doushantuo Formation, appear just a million years after the Earth emerged from a global glaciation, suggesting that ice cover and cold oceans may have prevented the emergence of multicellular life. In early 2008, a team analysed the range of basic body structures ("disparity") of Ediacaran organisms from three different fossil beds: Avalon in Canada, to ; White Sea in Russia, to ; and Nama in Namibia, to , immediately before the start of the Cambrian. They found that, while the White Sea assemblage had the most species, there was no significant difference in disparity between the three groups, and concluded that before the beginning of the Avalon timespan these organisms must have gone through their own evolutionary "explosion", which may have been similar to the famous Cambrian explosion. ### Preservation bias The paucity of Ediacaran fossils after the Cambrian could simply be due to conditions that no longer favoured the fossilisation of Ediacaran organisms, which may have continued to thrive unpreserved. However, if they were common, more than the occasional specimen might be expected in exceptionally preserved fossil assemblages (Konservat-Lagerstätten) such as the Burgess Shale and Chengjiang. Although no reports of Ediacara-type organisms in the Cambrian period are widely accepted at present, a few disputed reports have been made, as well as unpublished observations of 'vendobiont' fossils from 535 Ma Orsten-type deposits in China. ### Predation and grazing It has been suggested that by the Early Cambrian, organisms higher in the food chain caused the microbial mats to largely disappear. If these grazers first appeared as the Ediacaran biota started to decline, then it may suggest that they destabilised the microbial mats in a "Cambrian substrate revolution", leading to displacement or detachment of the biota; or that the destruction of the microbial substrate destabilized the ecosystem, causing extinctions. Alternatively, skeletonized animals could have fed directly on the relatively undefended Ediacaran biota. However, if the interpretation of the Ediacaran age Kimberella as a grazer is correct then this suggests that the biota had already had limited exposure to "predation". ### Competition Increased competition due to the evolution of key innovations among other groups, perhaps as a response to predation, may have driven the Ediacaran biota from their niches. However, the supposed "competitive exclusion" of brachiopods by bivalve molluscs was eventually deemed to be a coincidental result of two unrelated trends. ### Change in environmental conditions Great changes were happening at the end of the Precambrian and the start of the Early Cambrian. The breakup of the supercontinents, rising sea levels (creating shallow, "life-friendly" seas), a nutrient crisis, fluctuations in atmospheric composition, including oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, and changes in ocean chemistry (promoting biomineralisation) could all have played a part. ## Assemblages Ediacaran-type fossils are recognised globally in 25 localities and a variety of depositional conditions, and are commonly grouped into three main types, known as assemblages and named after typical localities. Each assemblage tends to occupy its own region of morphospace, and after an initial burst of diversification changes little for the rest of its existence. ### Avalon-type assemblage The Avalon-type assemblage is defined at Mistaken Point in Canada, the oldest locality with a large quantity of Ediacaran fossils. The assemblage is easily dated because it contains many fine ash-beds, which are a good source of zircons used in the uranium-lead method of radiometric dating. These fine-grained ash beds also preserve exquisite detail. Constituents of this biota appear to survive through until the extinction of all Ediacarans at the base of the Cambrian. One interpretation of the biota is as deep-sea-dwelling rangeomorphs such as Charnia, all of which share a fractal growth pattern. They were probably preserved in situ (without post-mortem transportation), although this point is not universally accepted. The assemblage, while less diverse than the Ediacara- or Nama-types, resembles Carboniferous suspension-feeding communities, which may suggest filter feeding – by most interpretations, the assemblage is found in water too deep for photosynthesis. The low diversity may reflect the depth of water – which would restrict speciation opportunities – or it may just be too young for a rich biota to have evolved. Opinion is currently divided between these conflicting hypotheses. ### Ediacara-type assemblage The Ediacara-type assemblage is named after Australia's Ediacara Hills, and consists of fossils preserved in facies of coastal lagoons and rivers. They are typically found in red gypsiferous and calcareous paleosols formed on loess and flood deposits in an arid cool temperate paleoclimate. Most fossils are preserved as imprints in microbial earths, but a few are preserved within sandy units. ### Nama-type assemblage The Nama assemblage is best represented in Namibia. Three-dimensional preservation is most common, with organisms preserved in sandy beds containing internal bedding. Dima Grazhdankin believes that these fossils represent burrowing organisms, while Guy Narbonne maintains they were surface dwellers. These beds are sandwiched between units comprising interbedded sandstones, siltstones and shales – with microbial mats, where present, usually containing the fossils. The environment is interpreted as sand bars formed at the mouth of a delta's distributaries. Mattress-like vendobionts (Ernietta, Pteridinium, Rangea) in these sandstones form a very different assemblage from vermiform fossils (Cloudina, Namacalathus) of Ediacaran "wormworld" in marine dolomite of Namibia. ### Significance of assemblages In the White Sea region of Russia, all three assemblage types have been found in close proximity. This, and the faunas' considerable temporal overlap, makes it unlikely that they represent evolutionary stages or temporally distinct communities. Since they are globally distributed – described on all continents except Antarctica – geographical boundaries do not appear to be a factor; the same fossils are found at all palaeolatitudes (the latitude where the fossil was created, accounting for continental drift - an application of paleomagnetism) and in separate sedimentary basins. It is most likely that the three assemblages mark organisms adapted to survival in different environments, and that any apparent patterns in diversity or age are in fact an artefact of the few samples that have been discovered – the timeline (right) demonstrates the paucity of Ediacaran fossil-bearing assemblages. An analysis of one of the White Sea fossil beds, where the layers cycle from continental seabed to inter-tidal to estuarine and back again a few times, found that a specific set of Ediacaran organisms was associated with each environment. As the Ediacaran biota represent an early stage in multicellular life's history, it is unsurprising that not all possible modes of life are occupied. It has been estimated that of 92 potentially possible modes of life – combinations of feeding style, tiering and motility — no more than a dozen are occupied by the end of the Ediacaran. Just four are represented in the Avalon assemblage. ## See also - Cambrian explosion - Large ornamented Ediacaran microfossil - List of Ediacaran genera - Abiogenesis - Huainan biota - Doushantuo Formation - Francevillian biota, another, much earlier Precambrian possibly pluricellular biota.
11,372,268	Phạm Ngọc Thảo	1,171,498,077	20th-century leader in South Vietnam	[ "1922 births", "1965 deaths", "Assassinated military personnel", "Military personnel killed in the Vietnam War", "People sentenced to death in absentia", "South Vietnamese military personnel of the Vietnam War", "South Vietnamese spies for North Vietnam", "Viet Minh members", "Vietnamese Roman Catholics", "Vietnamese communists", "Vietnamese nationalists" ]	Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo (IPA: , ), also known as Albert Thảo (14 February 1922 – 17 July 1965), was a communist sleeper agent of the Việt Minh (and, later, of the Vietnam People's Army) who infiltrated the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and also became a major provincial leader in South Vietnam. In 1962, he was made overseer of Ngô Đình Nhu's Strategic Hamlet Program in South Vietnam and deliberately forced it forward at an unsustainable speed, causing the production of poorly equipped and poorly defended villages and the growth of rural resentment toward the regime of President Ngô Đình Diệm, Nhu's elder brother. In light of the failed land reform efforts in North Vietnam, the Hanoi government welcomed Thao's efforts to undermine Diem. During the First Indochina War, Thảo was a communist officer in the Việt Minh and helped oversee various operations in the Mekong Delta in the far south, at one point commanding his future enemy Nguyễn Khánh, who briefly served the communist cause. After the French withdrawal and the partition of Vietnam, Thảo stayed in the south and made a show of renouncing communism. He became part of the military establishment in the anti-communist southern regime and quickly rose through the ranks. Nominally Catholic, Thảo befriended Diệm's elder brother, Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục—the devoutly Roman Catholic Ngô family strongly favored co-religionists and had great trust in Thảo, unaware that he was still loyal to the communists. He went on to serve as the chief of Bến Tre Province, and gained fame after the area—traditionally a communist stronghold—suddenly became peaceful and prosperous. Vietnamese and US officials, as well as journalists hostile to or supportive of Saigon, misinterpreted this as a testament to Thảo's great ability, and he was promoted to a more powerful position where he could further his sabotage. Thảo and the communists in the local area had simply stopped fighting, so that the communists could quietly recuperate, while Thảo would appear to be very skillful and be given a more important job where he could do more damage. Through intrigue, Thảo also helped destabilise and ultimately unseat two South Vietnamese regimes—Diem's and the military junta of Khánh. As the Diệm regime began to unravel in 1963, Thảo was one of the officers planning a coup. His plot was ultimately integrated into the successful plot and his activities promoted infighting which weakened the government and distracted the military from fighting the Viet Cong insurgency. Throughout 1964 and 1965, as South Vietnam was struggling to establish a stable state after the ouster of Diệm, Thảo was involved in several intrigues and coup plots which diverted the government from implementing its programs. In 1965, he went into hiding after a failed attempt to seize power from Khánh and was sentenced to death in absentia. Although this coup also failed, the subsequent chaos forced Khánh's junta to collapse. Thảo died the same year he was forced into hiding; it is believed that he was murdered after a bounty was placed on his head. Phạm Ngọc Thảo' real identity as a sleeper agent of Vietnam People's Army was kept secret after the end of Vietnam War. One of the reasons was to protect Thảo's family, which at that time had members living in the United States. His secret identity was eventually revealed and the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam posthumously awarded him the title Hero of the People's Armed Forces in 1995. The main protagonist in the film Cards on the Table was based on Phạm Ngọc Thảo. ## Early Việt Minh years Born Phạm Ngọc Thuần, Thảo was one of eleven children of a Vietnamese Roman Catholic family. At the time, Vietnam was a French colony. The family held French citizenship but opposed French colonialism. His father, an engineer, once headed an underground communist organisation in Paris, which assisted the Việt Minh's anti-French pro-independence activities outside Vietnam. After attending French schools in Saigon, Thuần changed his name to Thảo and renounced his French citizenship. In his high school years at the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat, Thảo met Trương Như Tảng, who later became a high-ranking member of the Viet Cong, a communist guerrilla organisation in South Vietnam. Tảng described Thảo as "my dearest friend" and recalled that they had "spent endless hours talking about everything under the sun. We were closer than brothers." Thảo spent his teenage years obsessed with his motorcycle. Despite being educated at an upper-class school that served children of French colonial administrators and privileged Vietnamese—French was the medium of instruction and Gallic culture and history a major part of the curriculum—Thảo was attracted to nationalist politics. He participated in Hồ Chí Minh's revolutionary campaigns for Vietnamese independence and joined the Việt Minh. In September 1945, Hồ declared independence under the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) following the withdrawal of Imperial Japan, which had seized control of the country from France during the Second World War. At the time, there was a power vacuum, as both Japan and France had been decimated by the war. There was an outbreak of nationalist fervour in Vietnam; Tảng and Thảo joined the Vanguard Youth, an impromptu independence militia. Tảng was assigned to be the leader of the local unit, but he left the movement soon after, leaving Thảo in command. During this period, Saigon was regularly engulfed in riots. In 1946, France attempted to reassert control over its colony and conventional military fighting broke out. Thảo served with the Việt Minh in the Mekong Delta in the far south of Vietnam during the war against French rule from 1946 to 1954. He almost met his end before he had started; he was apprehended by the local communists in Mỹ Tho, who saw his French-style dress and mistook him for a colonial agent. They tied him up and chained him to a block of stone before throwing him into a river to drown. However, Thảo broke free of the weight and swam to safety. Thảo proceeded further south and deeper into the Mekong Delta to the town of Vĩnh Long, where he was again arrested by the local Việt Minh. Just as Thảo was about to be executed by drowning, one of the communists realised he was a brother of one of their comrades. Thảo was released and rejoined his family, who lived in the region. As a leader of the resistance, Thảo was allocated the responsibility of indoctrinating the 1947 batch of recruits with Việt Minh ideology. One of Thảo's students was his future enemy, South Vietnamese General and President Nguyễn Khánh. This group became the 410th Battalion and went on to fight near Cà Mau, the southernmost part of Vietnam. By 1949, Thảo was in charge of the Việt Minh espionage apparatus around Saigon and organised the guerrilla companies in the countryside. Thảo was also involved in procuring arms. Filipino traders brought arms into southern Vietnam in return for rice, shrimp, pork, gold and banknotes. Following the French defeat in 1954 at Điện Biên Phủ, Thảo helped evacuate communist fighters from South Vietnam and Cambodia in accordance with the terms of the Geneva Conference. Under these Accords, Vietnam was to be temporarily divided at the 17th parallel pending national elections to reunify the country in 1956, and military personnel were to be evacuated to their respective sides of the border. In the meantime, Hồ Chí Minh's Việt Minh controlled the north under the DRV while the south was under the French-sponsored State of Vietnam. Thảo remained in the anti-communist south when Vietnam was partitioned and made a show of renouncing communism. He became a schoolteacher and later worked in a bank, as well as the Department of Transport. He consistently refused to turn in the names of his former comrades, claiming that they were merely patriots fighting against the French and were not communists. At the same time, one of Thảo's brothers had been appointed as North Vietnam's ambassador to East Germany, having served as vice chairman of the Việt Minh's Resistance Committee for the South during the war against the French. In October 1955, Prime Minister Diệm ousted Emperor Bảo Đại in a referendum to determine the form of government of the State of Vietnam. "Republic" received almost 99% of the vote and "monarchy" received a little over 1%. Diệm declared himself president of the newly proclaimed Republic of Vietnam. He scrapped the national elections, citing the fact that South Vietnam was not a signatory to the Accords of the Geneva Conference. ## Undercover communist in the South Vietnamese army The U.S.-backed Diệm was passionately anti-communist. In 1957, he initiated an "Anti-Communist Denunciation Campaign" to root out Việt Minh members and their sympathisers. Thousands of people were killed or jailed, and in time Diệm's campaigns created more sympathy for the Việt Minh. Before 1960, various small-scale pro-Communist uprisings were taking place in the countryside. Thảo went on the run and hid in Vĩnh Long, worried that Diệm's men were after him. In December 1960, North Vietnam's Politburo authorised the creation of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, popularly known as the Viet Cong. The Vietcong were dominated by communists, but portrayed itself as a nationalist militant organisation, stating its aim to be the "reunification of the fatherland" with the overthrow of the "disguised colonial regime of the U.S. imperialists and the dictatorial Ngo Dinh Diem administration". The creation of the Vietcong marked an escalation in the scale and organisation of the insurgency that developed into the Vietnam War. Thảo's Catholic background helped him to avoid detection as a communist. He and his brother were the only members of the family who were not anti-communist. The remainder of the relatives were followers of Diệm's brother, Archbishop Thục, who had been Bishop of Vĩnh Long during the war against France. Thảo was known to have a face that revealed nothing of his inner feelings. Thục's intervention helped Thảo rise in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Thục put Thảo in touch with Trần Kim Tuyến, who was in charge of intelligence operations under Diệm's younger brother Nhu, who was the head of the secret police and controlled the ARVN Special Forces. Thảo began as a propagandist for various units of the army and for the secret Catholic Cần lao Party, whose system of informants and secret cells helped create the atmosphere of a police state and maintained the Ngô family's grip on power. Tảng believed that Thục "undoubtedly considered that Thảo's Catholic and family loyalties were stronger and more durable than his youthful enthusiasm for revolution". He felt that Thảo had tricked Thục into believing that he was no longer a communist, and that his inside knowledge would be useful to the Ngô family. Thảo started by training the Civil Guard. As a result of his family's Catholic connections, Thảo rose steadily in the ARVN, since Diệm's regime had always promoted officers primarily on religious preference and loyalty. Nhu sent him to Malaysia to study counterinsurgency techniques, and upon his return, Thảo became a vital part of Nhu's efforts to purge the army of disloyal officers. As Thảo kept a close watch on those who commanded troops, lest they use their personnel in a coup, the leading officers were keen to maintain a good relationship with him, which increased his effectiveness as a spy. Thảo rose even further when the troops he commanded helped put down the November 1960 coup attempt against Diệm. Thảo assisted Khánh and Trần Thiện Khiêm to put down the revolt. All three were promoted, with the latter pair gaining the leadership of the ARVN and of the combined forces, respectively. This cemented the trio's close ties. Thảo was promoted to the post of chief of Bến Tre Province. He covertly worked with the cadres of Nguyễn Thị Định, a Vietcong leader who later became the highest ranking female communist in post-war reunified Vietnam. The area was a traditional communist stronghold, and anti-government attacks had increased in recent times, but it suddenly became peaceful when Thảo arrived. There were rumours that Thảo and the communists had decided to cease fighting for their mutual benefit; the guerrillas could quietly strengthen themselves, while Thảo would appear to be successful and he would be promoted to a more powerful position where he could cause more damage to Diệm. The lack of fighting between Thảo's forces and the Vietcong proved to be beneficial to the communist cause. In a three-month period in 1963, the Vietcong were able to recruit 2,000 men in Bến Tre and formed two more battalions. Thảo was praised by the Ngô family and U.S. military advisors, unaware of his ruse. He received another promotion, and with it, more influence and contacts among the officer corps. The US ambassador, Elbridge Durbrow, described Bến Tre Province as an "agricultural showplace" and advised journalists to travel there to see Thảo's successful administration. The influential American journalist Joe Alsop changed his plans so that he could spend more time in Bến Tre, saying that the province "particularly inspires hope". In one operation by Thảo's ARVN forces, American field journalists covering the battle saw their hours-long attempt to box in a Vietcong battalion yield only one farmer who lived in a hut with antigovernment slogans. Despite this, the American journalists and Vietnamese officers remained unaware that Thảo was a double agent. In fact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam misinterpreted the lack of attacks in Bến Tre, while other provinces were being ravaged, as proof that Thảo was one of the few capable government officials in the Mekong Delta. Journalist Robert Shaplen wrote: "In all respects, Thao is one of the most remarkable Vietnamese around, being a conspiratorial revolutionary figure straight out of a Malraux novel and, at the same time, a highly sophisticated and astute man, whose talents, if only they were properly channeled, could profitably be used right now." As Thảo was a former leader of the Việt Minh, outsiders thought that his apparent success was due his first-hand knowledge of communist tactics. During his period as the province chief, Thảo set up the Council of Elders, a consultative body of 20–200 men and women, who were allowed to criticise local officials. He advocated the creation of the Council of Patrons, a philanthropic body to raise money for community projects. ## Strategic Hamlet Program In 1962, Nhu began work on the ambitious Strategic Hamlet Program, an attempt to build fortified villages that would be secure zones for rural Vietnamese. The objective was to lock the Vietcong out so that they could not operate among the villagers. Thảo supervised these efforts, and when told that the peasants resented being forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and put into forts that they were forced to build, he advised Nhu and Tuyến that it was imperative to build as many hamlets as fast as possible. This pleased the Vietcong, who felt that Thảo's efforts were turning the rural populace against Saigon. Thảo specifically had villages built in areas that he knew had a strong Vietcong presence. This increased the number of communist sympathisers who were placed inside the hamlets and given identification cards. As a result, the Vietcong were able to more effectively penetrate the villages to access supplies and personnel. Later in 1962, United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara visited South Vietnam and was taken on an inspection tour of the country, accompanied by Diệm and Thảo. Perhaps because Thảo divulged the tour details to Vietcong guerrillas, each of McNamara's stopovers was punctuated by bloody attacks on nearby ARVN installations. For example, when McNamara was in Bình Dương Province, five government soldiers were killed. As he flew from Đà Lạt north to Đà Nẵng near the Demilitarized Zone, he was greeted by a Vietcong bombing of a southbound troop train, which killed 27 and wounded 30 Civil Guard members. ## Fall of Diệm In 1963, the Diệm regime began to lose its tight control over the country as civil unrest spread as a result of the Buddhist crisis. Large scale demonstrations by the Buddhist majority erupted in response to the government shootings of nine Buddhists in Huế who were protesting against a ban on the flying of the Buddhist flag during Vesak, the birthday of Gautama Buddha. With Diệm remaining intransigent in the face of Buddhist demands for religious equality, sections of society began calling for his removal from power. Thảo was part of the many plots that engulfed Saigon, destabilising the regime. Aiming for a 15 July coup, Tuyến consulted with Thảo regarding his plans, but Tuyến was too closely associated with Nhu to recruit the necessary military aid and he was subsequently exiled by Nhu. Tuyen's group ended up being led by Thảo but his initial coup plans were shelved when American CIA officer Lucien Conein instructed Thảo's superior, General Khiêm, to stop the coup on the grounds that it was premature. Thảo's motivation for involvement in the plotting is generally attributed to communist instructions for him to cause infighting within the ARVN whenever possible. He resumed plotting, intending to stage the coup on 24 October. He had recruited various infantry, marine and paratroop units for his scheme, totalling 3,000 men. Thảo's group did not carry out the coup after senior generals persuaded him to integrate his forces into their larger group, which was more likely to succeed. Thảo reasoned that aligning himself with a group of officers that were likely to successful would yield more influence in the resulting junta. The coup was successfully executed on 1 November 1963 under the leadership of Generals Dương Văn Minh and Trần Văn Đôn. Thảo commanded around two dozen tanks, which formed a column in the streets surrounding the Presidential Palace at midnight, and helped launch the full-scale attack at 03:30 on 2 November. The rebels eventually gained control of the building, and at daybreak Thảo's forces stormed the palace, but found it empty; Diệm and Nhu had escaped. A captured officer of the Presidential Guard revealed the brothers' hiding place and under the orders of Khiêm, Thảo went after them. Khiêm ordered Thảo to ensure the brothers were not physically harmed. Thảo arrived at the house in Cholon where the brothers were purportedly hiding and phoned the rebels back at the palace. Diệm and Nhu were apparently listening in on an extension in another room and escaped. The brothers subsequently surrendered to an ARVN convoy led by General Mai Hữu Xuân at a nearby Catholic church and were executed en route to military headquarters despite being promised safe exile. The US media's links to Thảo have been the source of historical debate. The journalists' reporting of Diệm's authoritarian rule, military failures, and attacks on Buddhists shifted American public opinion and put pressure on Washington to withdraw support for the Ngô family and seek a change of leadership. William Prochnau felt that the fall of Diệm was the biggest influence of the media on American foreign policy in over six decades. Thảo and Phạm Xuân Ẩn had been the source of much of the media's information. Conservative revisionist historians have accused the media of bringing down Diệm by publishing reports that, according to them, were based on false data disseminated by communist propagandists to unfairly malign Diệm's rule, which they claim was effective and fair towards the Buddhist majority. ## Participation in military junta After the fall of the Diệm regime, Thảo was designated by the head of state Minh and the civilian Prime Minister Nguyễn Ngọc Thơ to create the nucleus of a group called the Council of Notables, and promote it to the public. which, as an interim body of prominent civilians, would advise the military junta before it handed over power to an elected legislature under civilian rule. The Council of 60 people, 58 men and 2 women, held its first meeting on 1 January 1964 in Saigon. The council was composed almost entirely of well-known professionals and academics and, as such, was hardly representative of South Vietnamese society; there were no delegates from the agricultural or labour sectors of the economy. It gained a reputation for being a forum of debate, rather than a means of enacting policy change and government programs for the populace. Thơ and Minh assigned Thảo with the task of encouraging a transition to democracy by facilitating the formation of a few political parties. This was ineffective, as many political parties with only a handful of members sprang up and squabbled. Within 45 days of the coup, 62 parties had formed but nothing meaningful resulted. In the end, these efforts proved to be irrelevant as Minh's junta and the accompanying Council of Notables were overthrown before the end of the month. During this period, Thảo served as the head of military security and played a role in replacing Colonel Đỗ Khắc Mai with Nguyễn Cao Kỳ as the head of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force. In the aftermath of the coup, Vietcong attacks increased markedly amid infighting among the Saigon leadership, which Thảo had helped to stir up. The generals sent Thảo to Fort Leavenworth in the United States for six months to learn conventional warfare tactics. He also spent a month in England before returning to Vietnam. By this time, Minh's junta had been replaced in a 1964 January coup by Khánh. It is suspected that one of the generals' motives for deploying Thảo overseas was his continual involvement in plotting. Khánh appointed Thảo as his press officer as well as an unofficial political adviser. Later that same year, Khánh became involved in a power struggle with his deputy Khiêm as well as Minh, who had been retained as the titular head of state. Thảo was a close friend of Khiêm, so when Khánh prevailed in the power struggle, Khánh despatched Khiêm to Washington as the ambassador with Thảo was his press attaché. In August 1964, Khánh's leadership became increasingly troubled after he tried to augment his powers by declaring a state of emergency. This only provoked large-scale protests and riots calling for an end to military rule, with Buddhist activists at the forefront. Fearful of losing power, Khánh began making concessions to the protesters and promised democracy in the near future, which encouraged more groups to demand changes, and Khánh demoted certain Catholic pro-Diệm supporters. On 13 September, a Catholic-dominated group led by Generals Lâm Văn Phát and Dương Văn Đức, both of whom had been demoted, moved troops into Saigon but then withdrew after it became obvious they did not have the numbers to remove Khánh. Khiêm and Thảo were implicated in helping to plot Phát and Đức's attempted putsch; both were sent abroad by Khánh. ## 1965 attempted coup In late December 1964, Thảo was summoned back to Saigon by Khánh, who correctly suspected him and Khiêm of plotting together with Washington. Thảo suspected Khánh was attempting to have him killed, so he went underground upon returning to Saigon, and began plotting in earnest, having been threatened with being charged for desertion. He sheltered in a house belonging to a friend of Trương Như Tảng. The ruling junta appealed to Thảo in newspaper advertisements and broadcasts to follow orders to report, but he ignored them. In mid-January 1965, the regime called for him to report to his superiors in the ARVN, warning that he would be "considered guilty of abandoning his post with all the consequences of such a situation" if he failed to do so. Due to his Catholic background, Thảo was able to recruit Diệm loyalists such as Phát. With Khánh's grip on power shaky, an anonymous source said that Thảo was worried about how he would be treated if someone else took over: "Thao acted first, out of fear that if he did not, the other generals would overthrow Khanh and get rid of him as well. He knew that if the others overthrew Khanh his fate would be worse than Khanh's." During this time, Thảo kept in touch with elements of the CIA in an attempt to get American backing. Meanwhile, Khiêm had been putting pressure on Khánh for over two months by charging him and the Buddhists of seeking a "neutralist solution" and "negotiating with the communists". At the same time, Khánh's relationship with the Americans—particularly Ambassador and retired General Maxwell Taylor—had broken down over a series of policy disputes and personal arguments, and the Americans were trying to encourage Khánh's colleagues to overthrow him so that more hawkish policies could be enacted. The other generals wanted to overthrow Khánh and were aware that Thảo—who was widely distrusted—was planning to make a move. They anticipated trouble in trying to keep their subordinates, who were becoming impatient with Khánh's ongoing tenure, from joining Thảo. Between January and February, Thảo continued to finalize the details of his own counter-coup, using the contacts he had cultivated over the past decades. Phát and other pro-Diệm officers opposed the Buddhist influence being exerted on Khánh. Thảo consulted Kỳ—who wanted to seize power for himself—before the plot, and exhorted him to join the coup, but the air force chief claimed that he was remaining neutral. Thảo thus believed Kỳ would not intervene against him, but Kỳ was strongly opposed to Thảo and Phát. American intelligence analysts had believed that General Don was involved in the coup with Phát and Thảo, but this was proven false when the action started. Eight months after the coup was over, Don told the American historian George McTurnan Kahin that he had been plotting with Thảo, who had planned for him to become Defense Minister and Chief of Staff of the military, but that the Đại Việt and Thảo's Catholic civilian allies had insisted on installing Khiêm, a Catholic. A month before the coup, American intelligence analysts had believed that Thảo was planning to replace Khánh as commander-in-chief with Don. Shortly before noon on 19 February, he used around fifty tanks, their crew and a mixture of infantry battalions to seize control of the military headquarters, the post office and the radio station of Saigon. He surrounded the home of General Khánh and Gia Long Palace, the residence of head of state Phan Khắc Sửu. The tanks were led by Colonel Dương Hiếu Nghĩa, a Catholic member of the Đại Việt. The country was still trying to find stability, with Phan Huy Quát being appointed prime minister just three days earlier. Khánh managed to escape and flee to Vũng Tàu. His plane lifted off from Tan Son Nhut Air Base, the country's military headquarters, just as rebel tanks were rolling in, attempting to block the runway. Thảo's men tried to capture the Saigon base of the Republic of Vietnam Navy, and its commander, Admiral Chung Tấn Cang, but were foiled, but they did capture a number of junta members at Tan Son Nhut. Thảo made a radio announcement stating that the sole objective of his military operation was to get rid of Khánh, whom he described as a "dictator". He said that he intended to recall Khiêm to Saigon to lead the Armed Forces Council in place of Khánh, but would retain the civilian cabinet that answered to the generals. In doing so, he caught Khiêm off guard, asleep in his Maryland home. When informed of what was happening, Khiêm sent a cable in which he pledged "total support" to the plot. The coup group made pro-Diệm announcements, claiming then-U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. "was wrong in encouraging the coup against Diem rather than correcting mistakes". A Catholic rebel officer made a speech extolling Diệm, and mourning his loss. This gave the impression that the coup plotters wanted to roll back the country to a Diệm-era position and punish those who had been involved in Diệm's overthrow and execution. Thảo's group also promised to aggressively fight the Vietcong and cooperate with the United States. Throughout the day, a series of anti-Khánh speeches were broadcast on radio, and the rebels claimed to have the support of four divisions, something that was regarded as dubious. U.S. government analysts concluded that the rebellion was "primarily a move by die-hard neo-Diemists and Catholic military militants, disturbed at the rise of Buddhist influence, opposed to Gen. Khánh and—in a vague, ill-thought-out way—desirous of turning back the clock and undoing some of the results of the November 1963 ouster of Diem." Among the civilians linked to Thảo's plot were Catholic academics and a militant priest. As Diệm had strongly discriminated along religious lines, the rebels' comments caused a negative response among the Buddhist majority. The Buddhist activist monk Thich Tam Chau called on Buddhists to support the incumbent junta. The pro-Diệm speeches also alarmed pro-Buddhist and anti-Diệm generals, such as Nguyễn Chánh Thi and Nguyễn Hữu Có, who had been part of the failed 1960 and successful 1963 coups against Diệm respectively. They thought that Thảo and Phat might seek revenge, driving many anti-Diệm officers who may have otherwise been neutral or sympathetic to the coup, to swing more towards Khánh. Although Taylor and US military commander General William Westmoreland wanted Khánh out, the pro-Diệm political ideology expressed by Thảo's supporters alienated them, as they feared that the coup plotters would destabilize and polarize the country if they took power. The Americans worried that Phat and Thảo could galvanize support for Khánh through their extreme views, which had the potential to provoke large-scale sectarian divisions, playing into the hands of the communists and hindering wider American objectives. They were also worried by Thảo's intention to remove Quát and the civilian government, whom he saw was "too susceptible to Buddhist peacemongering". The U.S. saw civilian participation in governance as a necessity. They worried that a Khánh victory would enhance his prestige, so they wanted to see some third force emerge and defeat both the Thảo and Khánh factions. Westmoreland and Taylor decided to work for the failure of both Thảo and Khánh, and helped organize US advisers for the purpose. Phat was supposed to seize the Bien Hoa Air Base to prevent air force chief Kỳ from mobilising air power against them, but he failed to reach the airfield before Kỳ, who circled Tan Son Nhut and threatened to bomb the rebels. Most of the forces of the III and IV Corps surrounding the capital disliked both Khánh and the rebels, and took no action. However, as night came, senior military opinion began to turn against Thảo and Phát, although it was not clear at this stage whether the anti-Thảo forces being organised and led by Thi were hostile to Khánh as well. At 20:00, Phát and Thảo met with Kỳ, and insisted that Khánh be removed from power. The coup collapsed when, between midnight and dawn, anti-Thảo forces swept into the city from the south along with some components of the 7th Airborne Brigade loyal to Kỳ from Biên Hòa in the north. Whether the rebels were genuinely defeated by the overwhelming show of strength or whether a deal was struck with Kỳ to end the revolt in exchange for Khánh's removal is disputed, although a large majority support the latter. According to the latter version, Phát and Thảo agreed to free the members of the Armed Forces Council that they had arrested and withdraw in exchange for Khánh's complete removal from power. Possibly as a means of saving face, Phát and Thảo were given an appointment with the figurehead chief of state Sửu, who was under close control by the junta, to "order" him to sign a decree stripping Khánh of his military leadership, and organizing a meeting of the junta and Prime Minister Quát's civilian cabinet. During the early morning, while the radio station was still in the hands of Thảo's men, a message attributed to Sửu was read out; it claimed that the chief of state had sacked Khánh. However, the authenticity of the announcement was put into doubt when loyalists took control of the station and Sửu spoke in person, claiming otherwise. There were no injuries or deaths in the coup. Before fleeing, Thảo broadcast a premature message claiming the coup had been effective in removing Khánh, and the Armed Forces Council later adopted a vote of no confidence in Khánh later that day, and forced him into exile. Later in the morning, while on the run, Thảo made a broadcast using a military radio system to call for Khanh's departure and defend his actions, which he described as being in the best interest of the nation. Phat and Thảo were stripped of their ranks, but nothing was initially done as far as prosecuting or sentencing them for their involvement in the coup. ## Hiding and death While in hiding in Catholic villages, Thảo expressed his willingness to surrender and cooperate with Quát's government, if he and approximately 50 officers involved in the coup were granted amnesty. He also offered to go into exile in the United States, where his family had moved when he was sent there for training in 1964. In May 1965, a military tribunal sentenced both Thảo and Phát to death in absentia. The death sentence was attributed to the influence of Thi, who had assigned hit squads to look for him. After the conclusion of the trial, it was announced that the Armed Forces Council would disband and give the civilians more control in running the government. Thi was believed to have agreed to the transfer of power to a civilian government in return for Thảo's death. As a result, Thảo had little choice but to attempt to seize power in order to save himself and he and Thi began to manoeuvre against one another. On 20 May, a half dozen officers and around forty civilians, most or all of whom were Catholic, were arrested on charges of attempting to assassinate Quát and kidnap Thi and Kỳ. Several of the arrested were known supporters of Thảo and believed to be abetting him in evading the authorities. Despite this, Thảo himself managed to escape, even as a US\$30,000 bounty was put on him by the junta. On 16 July 1965, he was reported dead in unclear circumstances; an official report claimed that he died of injuries while on a helicopter en route to Saigon, after being captured north of the city. However, it is generally assumed that he was murdered or tortured to death on the orders of some military officials. One report holds that a Catholic priest betrayed Thảo, while another claims General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu caught him. In his memoirs, Kỳ claimed Thảo had been captured by police in Saigon and "died in jail a few weeks later, probably from a beating". After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, a conspiracy theory emerged, maintaining that Thảo went underground and worked in counterintelligence for the communist Central Office of South Vietnam, helping to hunt down Vietcong cadres who had defected to Saigon. ## Legacy Although Thảo's last plot failed, his activities in 1965 and the resultant infighting led to a series of internal purges within the ARVN. Amid the instability, the Vietcong made strong gains across the country throughout the year. In response to the deteriorating military situation, the Americans began to deploy combat troops to South Vietnam in large numbers. Thảo was posthumously promoted by the ARVN to the rank of one–star general and awarded the title of martyr (Vietnamese: Liệt sĩ). After the Fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, the communist government awarded him the same title and paid war pensions to his family, claiming him as one of their own. In 1981, the communists had his body exhumed and reburied in the "Patriots' cemetery" in Ho Chi Minh City (previously Saigon). Tảng believed Thảo "was a man who throughout his life fought single-mindedly for Vietnam's independence". Tảng, who later abandoned communism, said that Thảo "was a nationalist, not an ideologue", and credited him with turning the military tide towards the communists by helping to bring down Diệm and fomenting chronic instability and infighting for 18 months. Hồ Chí Minh had reacted to Diệm's death by saying "I can scarcely believe that the Americans would be so stupid". A communist report written in March 1965, soon after Thảo's revolt had caused Khánh to depart, stated that "The balance of force ... has changed very rapidly in our favor. ... The bulk of the enemy's armed forces ... have disintegrated, and what is left continues to disintegrate". Phạm Ngọc Thảo was the prototype of Nguyễn Thành Luân, who was the main protagonist of the novel called Cards on the Table, which was written by Trần Bạch Đằng (under the pen name Nguyễn Trương Thiên Lý), and the 8-episode telefilm adaptation of the same name directed by Lê Hoàng Hoa.
79,491	Willamette River	1,168,664,499	187-mile Columbia River tributary in northwest Oregon, US	[ "American Heritage Rivers", "Ferries of Oregon", "Oregon placenames of Native American origin", "Rivers of Benton County, Oregon", "Rivers of Clackamas County, Oregon", "Rivers of Columbia County, Oregon", "Rivers of Lane County, Oregon", "Rivers of Linn County, Oregon", "Rivers of Marion County, Oregon", "Rivers of Multnomah County, Oregon", "Rivers of Oregon", "Rivers of Washington County, Oregon", "Rivers of Yamhill County, Oregon", "Tributaries of the Columbia River", "Willamette River", "Willamette Valley" ]	The Willamette River (/wɪˈlæmɪt/ wil-AM-it) is a major tributary of the Columbia River, accounting for 12 to 15 percent of the Columbia's flow. The Willamette's main stem is 187 miles (301 km) long, lying entirely in northwestern Oregon in the United States. Flowing northward between the Oregon Coast Range and the Cascade Range, the river and its tributaries form the Willamette Valley, a basin that contains two-thirds of Oregon's population, including the state capital, Salem, and the state's largest city, Portland, which surrounds the Willamette's mouth at the Columbia. Originally created by plate tectonics about 35 million years ago and subsequently altered by volcanism and erosion, the river's drainage basin was significantly modified by the Missoula Floods at the end of the most recent ice age. Humans began living in the watershed over 10,000 years ago. There were once many tribal villages along the lower river and in the area around its mouth on the Columbia. Indigenous peoples lived throughout the upper reaches of the basin as well. Rich with sediments deposited by flooding and fed by prolific rainfall on the western side of the Cascades, the Willamette Valley is one of the most fertile agricultural regions in North America, and it was thus the destination of many 19th-century pioneers traveling west along the Oregon Trail. The river was an important transportation route in the 19th century, although Willamette Falls, just upstream from Portland, was a major barrier to boat traffic. In the 21st century, major highways follow the river, and roads cross the main stem on approximately 30 different bridges. More than half a dozen bridges not open to motorized vehicles provide separate crossings for bicycles and pedestrians, mostly in the Eugene area, and several others are exclusively for rail traffic. There are also ferries that convey cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians across the river for a fare and provided river conditions permit. They are the Buena Vista Ferry between Marion County and Polk County south of Independence and Salem, the Wheatland Ferry between Marion County and Polk County north of Salem and Keizer, and Canby Ferry in Clackamas County north of Canby. Since 1900, more than 15 large dams and many smaller ones have been built in the Willamette's drainage basin, 13 of which are operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). The dams are used primarily to produce hydroelectricity, to maintain reservoirs for recreation, and to prevent flooding. The river and its tributaries support 60 fish species, including many species of salmon and trout; this is despite the dams, other alterations, and pollution (especially on the river's lower reaches). Part of the Willamette Floodplain was established as a National Natural Landmark in 1987, and the river was named as one of 14 American Heritage Rivers in 1998. ## Course The upper tributaries of the Willamette originate in the mountains south and southeast of Eugene, Oregon. Formed by the confluence of the Middle Fork Willamette River and the Coast Fork Willamette River near Springfield, the main stem Willamette meanders generally north for 187 miles (301 km) to the Columbia River. The river's two most significant course deviations occur at Newberg, where it turns sharply east, and about 18 miles (29 km) downstream from Newberg, where it turns north again. Near its mouth north of downtown Portland, the river splits into two channels that flow around Sauvie Island. Used for navigation purposes, these channels are managed by the U.S. federal government. The main channel, which is the primary navigational conduit for Portland's harbor and riverside industrial areas, is 40 feet (12 m) deep and varies in width from 600 to 1,900 feet (180 to 580 m), although the river broadens to 2,000 feet (610 m) in some of its lower reaches. This channel enters the Columbia about 101 miles (163 km) from the Columbia's mouth on the Pacific Ocean. The smaller Multnomah Channel, a distributary, is 21 miles (34 km) long, about 600 feet (180 m) wide, and 40 feet (12 m) deep. It ends about 14.5 miles (23.3 km) farther downstream on the Columbia, near St. Helens in Columbia County. Proposals have been made for deepening the Multnomah Channel to 43 feet (13 m) in conjunction with roughly 103.5 miles (166.6 km) of tandem-maintained navigation on the Columbia River. Between the 1850s and the 1960s, channel-straightening and flood control projects, as well as agricultural and urban encroachment, cut the length of the river between the McKenzie River confluence and Harrisburg by 65 percent. Similarly, the river was shortened by 40 percent in the stretch between Harrisburg and Albany. Interstate 5 and three branches of Oregon Route 99 are the two major highways that follow the river for its entire length. Communities along the main stem include Springfield and Eugene in Lane County; Harrisburg in Linn County; Corvallis in Benton County; Albany in Linn and Benton counties; Independence in Polk County; Salem in Marion County; Newberg in Yamhill County; Oregon City, West Linn, Milwaukie, and Lake Oswego in Clackamas County; and Portland in Multnomah and Washington counties. Significant tributaries from source to mouth include the Middle and Coast forks and the McKenzie, Long Tom, Marys, Calapooia, Santiam, Luckiamute, Yamhill, Molalla, Tualatin, and Clackamas rivers. Beginning at 438 feet (134 m) above sea level, the main stem descends 428 feet (130 m) between source and mouth, or about 2.3 feet per mile (0.4 m per km). The gradient is slightly steeper from the source to Albany than it is from Albany to Oregon City. At Willamette Falls, between West Linn and Oregon City, the river plunges about 40 feet (12 m). For the rest of its course, the river is extremely low-gradient and is affected by Pacific Ocean tidal effects from the Columbia. The main stem of the Willamette varies in width from about 330 to 660 feet (100 to 200 m). ### Discharge With an average flow at the mouth of about 37,400 cubic feet per second (1,060 m<sup>3</sup>/s), the Willamette ranks 19th in volume among rivers in the United States and contributes 12 to 15 percent of the total flow of the Columbia River. The Willamette's flow varies considerably season to season, averaging about 8,200 cubic feet per second (230 m<sup>3</sup>/s) in August to more than 79,000 cubic feet per second (2,200 m<sup>3</sup>/s) in December. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) operates five stream gauges along the river, at Harrisburg, Corvallis, Albany, Salem, and Portland. The average discharge at the lowermost gauge, near the Morrison Bridge in Portland, was 33,220 cubic feet per second (941 m<sup>3</sup>/s) between 1972 and 2013. Located at river mile (RM) 12.8 or river kilometer (RK) 20.6, the gauge measures the flow from an area of 11,200 square miles (29,000 km<sup>2</sup>), roughly 97 percent of the Willamette basin. The highest flow recorded at this station was 420,000 cubic feet per second (11,893 m<sup>3</sup>/s) on February 9, 1996, during the Willamette Valley Flood of 1996, and the minimum was 4,200 cubic feet per second (120 m<sup>3</sup>/s) on July 10, 1978. The highest recorded flow of 635,000 cubic feet per second (18,000 m<sup>3</sup>/s) for the Willamette at a different gauge in Portland occurred during a flood in 1861. This and many other large flows preceded the Flood Control Act of 1936 and dam construction on the Willamette's major tributaries. The river below Willamette Falls, 26.5 miles (42.6 km) from the mouth, is affected by semidiurnal tides, and gauges have detected reverse flows (backwards river flows) below Ross Island at RM 15 (RK 24). The National Weather Service issues tide forecasts for the river at the Morrison Bridge. ## Geology The Willamette River basin was created primarily by plate tectonics and volcanism and was altered by erosion and sedimentation, including deposits from enormous glacial floods as recent as 13,000 years ago. The oldest rocks beneath the Willamette Valley are the Siletz River Volcanics. About 35 million years ago, these rocks were subducted by the Farallon Plate beneath the North American Plate, creating the forearc basin that would later become the Willamette Valley. The valley was initially part of the continental shelf, rather than a separate inland sea. Many layers of marine deposits formed in the forearc basin and cover the older Siletz River Volcanics. About 20 to 16 million years ago, uplift formed the Coast Range and separated the basin from the Pacific Ocean. Basalts of the Columbia River Basalt Group, from eruptions primarily in eastern Oregon, flowed across large parts of the northern half of the basin about 15 million years ago. They covered the Tualatin Mountains (West Hills), most of the Tualatin Valley, and the slopes of hills farther south, with up to 1,000 feet (300 m) of lava. Later deposits covered the basalt with up to 1,000 feet (300 m) of silt in the Portland and Tualatin basins. During the Pleistocene, beginning roughly 2.5 million years ago, volcanic activity in the Cascades combined with a cool, moist climate to produce further heavy sedimentation across the basin, and braided rivers created alluvial fans spreading down from the east. Between about 15,500 and 13,000 years ago, the Missoula Floods—a series of large outpourings originating at Glacial Lake Missoula in Montana—swept down the Columbia River and backfilled the Willamette watershed. Each flood produced "discharges that exceeded the annual discharge of all the present-day rivers of the world combined". Filling the Willamette basin to depths of 400 feet (120 m) in the Portland region, each flood created a temporary lake, Lake Allison, that stretched from Lake Oswego to near Eugene. The ancestral Tualatin Valley, part of the Willamette basin, flooded as well; water depths ranged from 200 feet (61 m) at Lake Oswego to 100 feet (30 m) as far upstream (west) as Forest Grove. Flood deposits of silt and clay, ranging in thickness from 115 feet (35 m) in the north to about 15 feet (4.6 m) in the south, settled from this muddy water to form today's valley floor. The floods carried Montana icebergs well into the basin, where they melted and dropped glacial erratics onto the land surface. These rocks, composed of granite and other materials common to central Montana but not to the Willamette Valley, include more than 40 boulders, each at least 3 feet (0.9 m) in diameter. Before being partly chipped away and removed, the largest of these originally weighed about 160 short tons (150 t). The northern part of the watershed is underlain by a network of faults capable of producing earthquakes at any time, and many small quakes have been recorded in the basin since the mid-19th century. In 1993, the Scotts Mills earthquake—the largest recent earthquake in the valley, measuring 5.6 on the Richter scale—was centered near Scotts Mills, about 34 miles (55 km) south of Portland. It caused \$30 million in damage, including harm to the Oregon State Capitol in Salem. Evidence suggests that massive quakes of 8 or more on the Richter scale have occurred historically in the Cascadia subduction zone off the Oregon coast, most recently in 1700 CE, and that others as strong as 9 on the Richter scale occur every 500 to 800 years. The basin's high population density, its nearness to this subduction zone, and its loose soils, which tend to amplify shaking, make the Willamette Valley especially vulnerable to damage from strong earthquakes. ## Watershed The Willamette River drains a region of 11,478 square miles (29,730 km<sup>2</sup>), which is 12 percent of the total area of Oregon. Bounded by the Coast Range to the west and the Cascade Range to the east, the river basin is about 180 miles (290 km) long and 100 miles (160 km) wide. Elevations within the watershed range from 10,495 feet (3,199 m) at Mount Jefferson in the Cascade Range to 10 feet (3.0 m) at the mouth on the Columbia River. Watersheds bordering the Willamette River basin are those of the Little Deschutes River to the southeast, the Deschutes River to the east, and the Sandy River to the northeast; the North Umpqua and Umpqua rivers to the south; coastal rivers including (from south to north) the Siuslaw, the Alsea, the Yaquina, the Siletz, the Nestucca, the Trask, and the Wilson to the west; the Nehalem and the Clatskanie to the northwest, and the Columbia River to the north. About 2.5 million people lived in the Willamette River basin as of 2010, about 65 percent of the population of Oregon. As of 2009, the basin contained 20 of the 25 most populous cities in Oregon. These cities include Springfield, Eugene, Corvallis, Albany, Salem, Keizer, Newberg, Oregon City, West Linn, Milwaukie, Lake Oswego, and Portland. The largest is Portland, with more than 500,000 residents. Not all of these cities draw water in part or exclusively from the Willamette for their municipal water supply. Other cities in the watershed (but not on the main-stem river) with populations of 20,000 or more are Gresham, Hillsboro, Beaverton, Tigard, McMinnville, Tualatin, Woodburn, and Forest Grove. Sixty-four percent of the watershed is privately owned, while 36 percent is publicly owned. The U.S. Forest Service manages 30 percent of the watershed, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management 5 percent, and the State of Oregon 1 percent. Sixty-eight percent of the watershed is forested; agriculture, concentrated in the Willamette Valley, makes up 19 percent, and urban areas cover 5 percent. More than 81,000 miles (130,000 km) of roads criss-cross the watershed. In 1987, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior designated 713 acres (289 ha) of the watershed in Benton County as a National Natural Landmark. This area is the Willamette Floodplain, the largest remaining unplowed native grassland in the North Pacific geologic province, which encompasses most of the Pacific Northwest coast. ## History ### First inhabitants For at least 10,000 years, a variety of indigenous peoples populated the Willamette Valley. These included the Kalapuya, the Chinook, and the Clackamas. The territory of the Clackamas encompassed the northeastern portion of the basin, including the Clackamas River (with which their name is shared). Although it is unclear exactly when, the territory of the Chinook once extended across the northern part of the watershed, through the Columbia River valley. Indigenous peoples of the Willamette Valley were further divided into groups including the Kalapuyan-speaking Yamhill and Atfalati (Tualatin) (both Northern Kalapuya), Central Kalapuya like the Santiam, Muddy Creek (Chemapho), Long Tom (Chelamela), Calapooia (Tsankupi), Marys River (Chepenafa) and Luckiamute, and the Yoncalla or Southern Kalapuya, as well other tribes such as the Chuchsney-Tufti, Siuslaw and Molala. The name Willamette is of indigenous origin, deriving from the French pronunciation of the name of a Clackamas Native American village. However, Native American languages in Oregon were very similar, so the name may also be derived from Kalapuya dialects. Around the year 1850, the Kalapuya numbered between 2,000 and 3,000 and were distributed among several groups. These figures are only speculative; there may have been as few as eight subgroups or as many as 16. In that time period, the Clackamas' tribal population was roughly 1,800. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that the Chinook population was nearly 5,000, though not all of the Chinook lived on the Willamette. The Chinook territory encompassed the lower Columbia River valley and significant stretches of the Pacific coast on both the north and the south side of the Columbia's mouth. At times, however, the Chinook territory extended even farther south in the Willamette Valley. The total native population was estimated at 15,000. The indigenous peoples of the Willamette River practiced a variety of life ways. Those on the lower river, slightly closer to the coast, often relied on fishing as their primary economic mainstay. Salmon was the most important fish to Willamette River tribes as well as to the Native Americans of the Columbia River, where white traders traded fish with the Native Americans. Upper-river tribes caught steelhead and salmon, often by building weirs across tributary streams. Tribes of the northern Willamette Valley practiced a generally settled lifestyle. The Chinooks lived in great wooden lodges, practiced slavery, and had a well-defined caste system. People of the south were more nomadic, traveling from place to place with the seasons. They were known for the controlled burning of woodlands to create meadows for hunting and plant gathering (especially camas). ### 18th-century The Willamette River first appeared in written records in 1792, when it was observed by British Lieutenant William Robert Broughton of the Vancouver Expedition, led by George Vancouver. ### 19th-century The 1805-1806 Lewis and Clark Expedition originally missed the mouth of the Willamette. On their return journey, only after receiving directions from natives along the Sandy River did the explorers learn about their oversight. William Clark returned down the Columbia and entered the Willamette River in April 1806. Fur trappers originally working for the Pacific Fur Company (PFC)) and subsequently for the North West Company (NWC) were next to visit the Willamette River and various tributaries. The Siskiyou Trail (or California-Oregon Trail) originally developed by Indigenous people, was used to reach farther south. This trail, over 600 miles (970 km) long, stretched from the mouth of the Willamette River near present-day Portland south through the Willamette Valley, crossing the Siskiyou Mountains, and south through the Sacramento Valley to San Francisco. In 1812, William Henry and Alfred Seton paddled up from Fort Astoria (PFC) on the Columbia River into the mouth of the Willamette, continued on until the falls portage (present-day Oregon City) and finished their journey at a flattening of both banks, the later site of Champoeg. A first trading post was established. By early 1813, William Wallace and John C. Halsey established a second outpost, Wallace House, farther south, north of present-day Salem. By the end the War of 1812, the NWC acquired the PFC. Free trappers Registre Bellaire, John Day and Alexander Carson hunted and traded furs during the winter of 1813-14 along the Willamette. About thirty NWC employees were stationed at the Champoeg post, now called the Willamette Trading Post, along with freemen housed in two huts and Kalapuya nearby. Nez Perce and Cayuse warned the NWC to stay out of the Willamette Valley hunting grounds. Skirmishes went on for several years over fishing and hunting grounds contended by several groups. By the winter of 1818-19, Thomas McKay led a hunting brigade farther south towards the sources of the Willamette River and reached the upper Umpqua River. More violent skirmishes were fought. Most brigade members returned to Fort George (formerly called Fort Astoria). Louis LaBonté, Joseph Gervais, Étienne Lucier, Louis Kanota, and Louis Pichette (dit DuPré) remained in the Willamette Valley as free trappers. Meanwhile, in 1821 the HBC merged with the NWC. In 1825 a new Fort Vancouver headquarters was built on the north shore of the Columbia closer to the Willamette, and Fort George was closed. Alexander Roderick McLeod traveled up the Willamette in 1826 and 1827, to the Umpqua and the Rogue rivers. In 1829 Lucier established a land claim near the Champoeg trading post and started to settle, soon joined by Gervais (1831), Pierre Belleque (1833) and 77 French Canadian settlers by 1836. By 1843, approximately 100 newcomer families lived in the vicinity of the Willamette on a section referred to as French Prairie. By 1841, members of the United States Exploring Expedition came through the Siskiyou Trail. They noted extensive salmon fishing by natives at Willamette Falls, much like that at Celilo Falls on the Columbia River. In the middle part of the 19th century the Willamette Valley's fertile soils, pleasant climate, and abundant water attracted thousands of settlers from the eastern United States, mainly the Upland South borderlands of Missouri, Iowa, and the Ohio Valley. Many of these emigrants followed the Oregon Trail, a 2,170-mile (3,490 km) trail across western North America that began at Independence, Missouri, and ended at various locations near the mouth of the Willamette River. Although people had been traveling to Oregon since 1836, large-scale migration did not begin until 1843, when nearly 1,000 pioneers headed westward. Over the next 25 years, some 500,000 settlers traveled the Oregon Trail, to reach the Willamette Valley. Starting in the 1830s, Oregon City developed near Willamette Falls. It was incorporated in 1844, becoming the first city west of the Rocky Mountains to have that distinction. John McLoughlin, the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) superintendent of the Columbia District, was one of the major contributors to the founding of the town in 1829. McLoughlin attempted to persuade the HBC (which still held sway over the area) to allow American settlers to live on the land, and provided significant help to American colonization of the area, all against the HBC's orders. Oregon City prospered because of the lumber and grist mills that were run by the water power of Willamette Falls, but the falls formed an impassable barrier to river navigation. Linn City (originally Robins Nest) was established across the Willamette from Oregon City. After Portland was incorporated in 1851, quickly growing into Oregon's largest city, Oregon City gradually lost its importance as the economic and political center of the Willamette Valley. Beginning in the 1850s, steamboats began to ply the Willamette, despite the fact that they could not pass Willamette Falls. As a result, navigation on the Willamette River was divided into two stretches: the 27-mile (43 km) lower stretch from Portland to Oregon City—which allowed connection with the rest of the Columbia River system—and the upper reach, which encompassed most of the Willamette's length. Any boats whose owners found it absolutely necessary to get past the falls had to be portaged. This led to competition for business among steam portage companies. In 1873, the construction of the Willamette Falls Locks bypassed the falls and allowed easy navigation between the upper and lower river. Each lock chamber measured 210 feet (64 m) long and 40 feet (12 m) wide, and the canal was originally operated manually before it switched to electrical power. Usage of the locks peaked in the 1940s, and by the early 21st century, the lock system was little used. Since 2011, the Willamette Falls Locks have been inactive. As commerce and industry flourished on the lower river, most of the original settlers acquired farms in the upper Willamette Valley. By the late 1850s, farmers had begun to grow crops on most of the available fertile land. The settlers increasingly encroached on Native American lands. Skirmishes between natives and settlers in the Umpqua and Rogue valleys to the southwest of the Willamette River led the Oregon state government to remove the natives by military force. They were first led off their traditional lands to the Willamette Valley, but soon were marched to the Coast Indian Reservation. In 1855, Joel Palmer, an Oregon legislator, negotiated a treaty with the Willamette Valley tribes, who, although unhappy with the treaty, ceded their lands to non-natives. The natives were then relocated by the government to a part of the Coast Reservation that later became the Grande Ronde Reservation. Between 1879 and 1885, the Willamette River was charted by Cleveland S. Rockwell, a topographical engineer and cartographer for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Rockwell surveyed the lower Willamette from the foot of Ross Island through Portland to the Columbia River and then downstream on the Columbia to Bachelor Island. Rockwell's survey was extremely detailed, including 17,782 hydrographic soundings. His work helped open the port of Portland to commerce. In the second half of the 19th century, the USACE dredged channels and built locks and levees in the Willamette's watershed. Although products such as lumber were often transported on an existing network of railroads in Oregon, these advances in navigation helped businesses deliver more goods to Portland, feeding the city's growing economy. Trade goods from the Columbia basin north of Portland could also be transported southward on the Willamette due to the deeper channels made at the Willamette's mouth. ### 20th and 21st centuries By the early 20th century, major river-control projects had begun to take place. Levees were constructed along the river in most urban areas, and Portland built concrete walls to protect its downtown sector. In the following decades, many large dams were built on Cascade Range tributaries of the Willamette. The Army Corps of Engineers operates 13 such dams, which affect flows from about 40 percent of the basin. Most of them do not have fish ladders. With development in and near the river came increased pollution. By the late 1930s, efforts to stem the pollution led to formation of a state sanitary board to oversee modest cleanup efforts. In the 1960s, Oregon Governor Tom McCall led a push for stronger pollution controls on the Willamette. In this, he was encouraged by Robert (Bob) Straub—the state treasurer and future Oregon governor (1975)—who first proposed a Willamette Greenway program during his 1966 gubernatorial campaign against McCall. The Oregon State Legislature established the program in 1967. Through it, state and local governments cooperated in creating or improving a system of parks, trails, and wildlife refuges along the river. In 1998, the Willamette became one of 14 rivers designated an American Heritage River by U.S. President Bill Clinton. By 2007 the Greenway had grown to include more than 170 separate land parcels, including 10 state parks. Public uses of the river and land along its shores include camping, swimming, fishing, boating, hiking, bicycling, and wildlife viewing. In 2008, government agencies and the non-profit Willamette Riverkeeper organization designated the full length of the river as the Willamette River Water Trail. Four years later, the National Park Service added the Willamette water trail—expanded to 217 miles (349 km) to include some of the major tributaries—to its list of national water trails. The water trail system is meant to protect and restore waterways in the United States and enhance recreation on and near them. A 1991 agreement between the City of Portland and the State of Oregon to dramatically reduce combined sewer overflows (CSOs) led to Portland's Big Pipe Project. The project, part of a related series of Portland CSO projects completed in late 2011 at a cost of \$1.44 billion, separates the city's sanitary sewer lines from storm-water inputs that sometimes overwhelmed the combined system during heavy rains. When that occurred, some of the raw sewage in the system flowed into the river instead of into the city's wastewater treatment plant. The Big Pipe project and related work reduces CSO volume on the lower river by about 94 percent. In June 2014, Dean Hall became the first person to swim the entire length of the Willamette River. He swam 184 miles (296 km) from Eugene to the river mouth in 25 days. ## Dams and bridges ### Dams There are more than 20 major dams on the Willamette's tributaries, as well as a complex series of levees and channels to control the river's flow. The only dam on the Willamette's main stem is the Willamette Falls Dam, a low weir-type structure at Willamette Falls that diverts water into the headraces of the adjacent mills and a power plant. The locks at Willamette Falls were completed in 1873. Elsewhere on the main stem, numerous minor flow-regulation structures force the river into a narrower and deeper channel to facilitate navigation and flood control. The dams on the Willamette's major tributaries are primarily large flood-control, water-storage, and power-generating dams. Thirteen of these dams were built from the 1940s through the 1960s and are operated by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Of those 13, 11 produce hydropower. Flood-control dams operated by the USACE are estimated to hold up to 27 percent of the Willamette's runoff. They are used to regulate river flows so as to cut peaks off floods and increase low flows in late summer and autumn, and to divert water into deeper, narrower channels to prevent flooding. A relatively small of amount of the water stored in the reservoirs is used for irrigation. Cougar Dam on the South Fork McKenzie River and Detroit Dam on the North Santiam River are the two tallest dams in the Willamette River basin. Detroit Dam is 463 feet (141 m) high and stores 455,000 acre-feet (561,000,000 m<sup>3</sup>) of water. Lookout Point Dam on the Middle Fork Willamette River, forming Lookout Point Lake, has the largest water storage capacity, at 477,700 acre-feet (589,200,000 m<sup>3</sup>). The other 11 dams are Big Cliff on the North Santiam River; Green Peter and Foster on the Santiam River; Cougar on the South Fork McKenzie River; Blue River on the Blue River; Fern Ridge on the Long Tom River; Hills Creek and Dexter on the Middle Fork Willamette River; Fall Creek on Fall Creek; Cottage Grove on the Coast Fork Willamette River, and Dorena on the Row River. Due to these tall dams, Chinook salmon and steelhead are blocked from roughly half of their historic habitat and spawning grounds on the Willamette's major tributaries. Unable to live and reproduce as they once did, they have been "brought to the brink of extinction". Endangered species listings and a subsequent lawsuit by Willamette Riverkeeper led to a plan to improve fish passage and take other actions to help native fish recover in 2008. Since then, work has proceeded slowly, and the Corps of Engineers, citing engineering difficulties and cost, may not meet the original agreed-upon deadline of 2023 for a system of effective remedies. Other major dams in the Willamette watershed are owned by other interests; for example, several hydroelectric facilities on the Clackamas River are owned by Portland General Electric. These include the River Mill Hydroelectric Project, the Oak Grove project, and the dam at Timothy Lake. ### Bridges The 50 or so crossings of the Willamette River include many historic structures, such as the Van Buren Street Bridge, a swing bridge. Built in 1913, it carries Oregon Route 34 (Corvallis–Lebanon Highway) over the river upstream of RM 131 (RK 211) in Corvallis. The machinery to operate the swing span was removed in the 1950s. The Oregon City Bridge, built in 1922, replaced a suspension span constructed at the site in 1888. It carries Oregon Route 43 over the river at about RM 26 (RK 42) between Oregon City and West Linn. The Ross Island Bridge carries U.S. Route 26 (Mount Hood Highway) over the river at RM 14 (RK 23). It is one of 10 highway bridges crossing the river in Portland. The 3,700-foot (1,100 m) bridge is the only cantilevered deck truss in Oregon. Tilikum Crossing is a 1,720-foot (520 m) cable-stayed bridge that carries public transit, bicycles, and pedestrians, but no cars or trucks, over the river. It opened for general use on September 12, 2015, becoming the first new bridge built across the river in the Portland metropolitan area since 1973. Farther downstream is the oldest remaining highway structure over the Willamette, the Hawthorne Bridge, built in 1910. It is the oldest vertical-lift bridge in operation in the United States and the oldest highway bridge in Portland. It is also the busiest bicycle and transit bridge in Oregon, with over 8,000 cyclists and 800 TriMet buses (carrying about 17,400 riders) daily. Another historic structure, the Steel Bridge, farther downstream, was "the largest telescoping bridge in the world at the time of its opening" in 1912. It carries trains on its lower deck, MAX (Metropolitan Area Express) light-rail trains and motorized vehicles on its upper deck, and foot and bicycle traffic on a cantilevered walkway attached to the lower deck. When small ships must pass under the bridge, its double vertical-lift span can raise a lower railway deck without disturbing traffic on the upper deck. Operators can raise both decks as high as 163 feet (50 m) above the water. The Steel Bridge is "believed to be the world's only double-lift span that can raise its lower deck independently of the upper deck." The Broadway Bridge, slightly downstream of the Steel Bridge, was the world's longest double-leaf bascule drawbridge at the time of its construction in 1913. Farther downstream, the St. Johns Bridge, a steel suspension bridge built in 1931, replaced the last of the Willamette River ferries in Portland. At about RM 6 (RK 10), it carries the U.S. Route 30 Bypass. The bridge has two Gothic towers supporting the span. The adjacent park and neighborhood of Cathedral Park are named after the Gothic Cathedral-like appearance of the bridge towers. It is the tallest bridge in Portland, with 400-foot (120 m) tall towers and a 205-foot (62 m) navigational clearance. ## Flooding Due to the volume and seasonality of precipitation in western Oregon, the Willamette River has often flooded. Heavy rains and mountain snows are common in winter, and snowpack in the Cascade Range can rapidly melt during warmer winter storms. The greatest Willamette River flood in recorded history began in 1861, well before the construction of dams in the watershed. Rainstorms and warm temperatures in December 1861 combined with a well-above-average snowpack in the Cascades created the largest Willamette River flood in recorded history. An observer of the flood wrote, "The whole Willamette valley was a sheet of water". From Eugene to Portland, thousands of acres of farmland were washed away, and many towns in the valley were damaged or destroyed. The "Great Flood", as it is sometimes called, was massively destructive to human development because most of that development was located on the river's floodplain, which provided rich soils and ready access to water transportation. The 1861 flood peaked at 635,000 cubic feet per second (18,000 m<sup>3</sup>/s)—more than the Mississippi River usually discharges in the 21st century—and inundated some 353,000 acres (1,430 km<sup>2</sup>) of land. This flood destroyed the town of Linn City. When the flood ended on December 14, only three homes remained standing in Linn City. No one died in the Linn City flood, but the destruction was too significant for the town to recover, and it was abandoned. Today the city of West Linn stands about where Linn City once was. Significant flooding recurred in the winter of early 1890. Portland's main street was completely submerged, communication over the Cascades was cut off, and many rail lines were forced to shut down. Another major flood occurred on the Willamette in 1894, and although it too caused much damage, it was not as large as that of 1861. Throughout the 1940s the Willamette continued to flood its valley. It washed out five bridges in Lane County in December 1942, caused seven deaths in Portland and evacuations in Eugene in January 1943, flooded Corvallis in November 1946, contributed to the destruction of Vanport City and the death of about 15 of its residents in May 1948, and nearly flooded parts of Salem in December 1948. Although the Willamette was, by the mid-20th century, heavily engineered and controlled by a complex system of dams, channels, and barriers, it experienced severe floods through the end of the century. Storms caused a major flood that swelled the Willamette and other rivers in the Pacific Northwest from December 1964 through January 1965, submerging nearly 153,000 acres (620 km<sup>2</sup>) of land. Before dawn on December 21, 1964, the Willamette reached 29.4 feet (9.0 m), which was higher than the seawall on its banks in Portland. By this time, about 15 people had died as a result of the flooding, and about 8,000 had been forced to evacuate their homes. On December 24, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered federal aid for the flooded areas as the Willamette continued to rise. In the next couple of days, the river receded, but on December 27, it was at 29.8 feet (9.1 m), which was still nearly 12 feet (3.7 m) above the flood stage. The river continued to pose flood threats through January 1965, and more stormy weather occurred along the Pacific Coast. In February 1996, heavy warm rains driven by a subtropical jet stream fell on a deep snowpack in the Willamette watershed. These conditions, similar to those that caused the 1861 flood, caused some of the costliest flooding in the river's recorded history. An Associated Press journalist reported, "The river crested at one town after another—at Corvallis 31⁄2 feet above flood stage, Oregon City 18 feet above, Portland 10.5 feet above—much like a meal moving through a boa constrictor." The flood was serious enough to interrupt the progress of Oregon's growing economy, but the inundated acreage was smaller than in 1964—only about 117,000 acres (470 km<sup>2</sup>). About 450 concrete flood-protection walls in Portland that had been constructed during the February flood, each weighing about 5,500 pounds (2,500 kg), were removed in April 1996. In October, they were replaced by a larger steel wall that cost the city about \$300,000. The new wall had 0.25-inch (6.4 mm) removable steel plates designed to better prevent future flooding. ## Pollution Since as early as 1869, with the introduction of a federally funded "snag puller" designed to keep the waterway clear, human habitation has affected the ecology of the river basin. Domestic and industrial waste from the cities built up along the river "essentially [turned] the main-stem river into an open sewer by the 1920s." The construction of large federal dams on the Willamette's tributaries between 1941 and 1969 damaged the spawning grounds for spring Chinook salmon and steelhead. A 1927 City Club of Portland report labeled the waterway "filthy and ugly" and identified the City of Portland as the worst offender. The Oregon Anti-Stream Pollution League brought a pollution-abatement measure before the 39th Oregon Legislative Assembly in 1937. The bill passed, but Governor Charles Martin vetoed it. The Izaak Walton League and the Oregon affiliate of the National Wildlife Federation countered the governor's veto with a ballot initiative, which passed in November 1938. Governor Tom McCall, shortly after he was elected in 1966, ordered water quality tests on the Willamette, conducted his own research on the water quality, and became head of the Oregon State Sanitary Authority. McCall learned that the river was heavily polluted in Portland. In a television documentary, Pollution in Paradise, he said, "The Willamette River was actually cleaner when the Oregon Sanitary Authority was created in 1938 than it was in 1962." He then discouraged tourism in the state and made it harder for companies to qualify for a permit to operate near the river. He also regulated how much those companies could pollute and closed plants that did not meet state pollution standards. Despite earlier cleanup efforts, state studies in the 1990s identified a wide variety of pollutants in the river bottom, including heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and pesticides along the lower 12 miles (19 km) of the river, in Portland. As a result, this section of the river was designated a Superfund site in 2000, involving the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in cleanup of the river bottom. The area to be addressed stretches from the Fremont Bridge almost to the Columbia – spanning nearly 11 river miles. Reducing risk from the pollutants in this stretch will involve removing contaminated sediment from the river bottom and efforts to contain contaminated sediment by placing clean sediment on top (known as "capping"). Pollution has been exacerbated by combined sewer overflows, which the city has greatly reduced through its Big Pipe Project. Farther upstream, the pressing environmental issues have mainly been variations in pH and dissolved oxygen. The Willamette is nevertheless clean enough to be used by cities such as Corvallis and Wilsonville for drinking water. Since pollution concerns are primarily along the lower river, the Willamette in general scores relatively high on the Oregon Water Quality Index (OWQI), which is compiled by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). The DEQ considers index scores of less than 60 to be very poor; the other categories are 60–79 (poor); 80–84 (fair); 85–89 (good), and 90–100 (excellent). The Willamette River's water quality is rated excellent near the source, though it gradually declines to fair near the mouth. Between 1998 and 2007, the average score for the upper Willamette at Springfield (RM 185, RK 298) was 93. At Salem (RM 84, RK 135), the score was 89, and good scores continued down to the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland (RM 13, RK 21) at 85. Scores were in the "fair" category farther downstream; the least favorable reading was 81 at the Swan Island Channel midpoint (RM 0.5, RK 0.8). By comparison, sites on the Winchuck River, the Clackamas, and the North Santiam all scored 95, and a site at a pump station on Klamath Strait Drain between Upper Klamath Lake and Lower Klamath Lake recorded the lowest score in Oregon at 19. ## Flora and fauna Over the past 150 years, a significant change for the Willamette River has been the loss of its floodplain forests, which covered an estimated 89 percent of a 400-foot (120 m) band along each river bank in 1850. By 1990, only 37 percent of this zone was forested; the rest had been converted to farm fields or cleared for urban or suburban uses. The remaining forests close to the river include stands of black cottonwood, Oregon ash, willow, and bigleaf maple. The central valley—a former perennial grass prairie interspersed with oak, Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, and other trees—is devoted almost entirely to farming. Douglas fir, western hemlock, and western red cedar dominate the forest on the Coast Range side of the basin. Forests to the east in the Cascade Range are predominantly Douglas fir, Pacific silver fir, western hemlock, and western red cedar. Fish in the Willamette basin include 31 native species, among them cutthroat, bull, and rainbow trout, several species of salmon, sucker, minnow, sculpin, and lamprey, as well as sturgeon, stickleback, and others. Among the 29 non-native species in the basin, there are brook, brown, and lake trout, largemouth and smallmouth bass, walleye, carp, bluegill, and others. In addition to fish, the basin supports 18 species of amphibians, such as the Pacific giant salamander. Beaver and river otter are among 69 mammal species living in the watershed, also frequented by 154 bird species, such as the American dipper, osprey, and harlequin duck. Garter snakes are among the 15 species of reptiles found in the basin. Species diversity is greatest along the lower river and its tributaries. Threatened, endangered, or sensitive species include spring Chinook salmon, winter steelhead, chum salmon, Coho salmon and Oregon chub. In the central valley, several projects have been done to restore and protect wetlands in order to provide habitat for bald eagles, Fender's blue butterfly, Oregon chub, Bradshaw's desert parsley, a variety of Willamette fleabane, and Kincaid's lupine. In the early 21st century, osprey populations are increasing along the river, possibly because of a ban on the pesticide DDT and on the birds' ability to use power poles for nesting. Beaver populations, presumed to be much lower than historic levels, are increasing throughout the basin. ## See also - List of crossings of the Willamette River - List of longest streams of Oregon - List of rivers of Oregon - Steamboats of the Willamette River
64,598	Alan Bush	1,167,813,869	British composer, pianist, conductor, teacher and political activist (1900–1995)	[ "1900 births", "1995 deaths", "20th-century British male musicians", "20th-century English composers", "20th-century classical composers", "20th-century classical pianists", "Academics of the Royal Academy of Music", "Alumni of the Royal Academy of Music", "British Army personnel of World War II", "British male pianists", "English classical pianists", "English communists", "English male classical composers", "English opera composers", "Fellows of the Royal Academy of Music", "Male classical pianists", "Male opera composers", "Musicians from London", "People educated at Highgate School", "People from Dulwich", "Pupils of Artur Schnabel", "Royal Army Medical Corps soldiers" ]	Alan Dudley Bush (22 December 1900 – 31 October 1995) was a British composer, pianist, conductor, teacher and political activist. A committed communist, his uncompromising political beliefs were often reflected in his music. He composed prolifically across a range of genres, but struggled through his lifetime for recognition from the British musical establishment, which largely ignored his works. Bush, from a prosperous middle-class background, enjoyed considerable success as a student at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in the early 1920s, and spent much of that decade furthering his compositional and piano-playing skills under distinguished tutors. A two-year period in Berlin in 1929 to 1931, early in the Nazi Party's rise to power, cemented Bush's political convictions and moved him from the mainstream Labour Party to the Communist Party of Great Britain which he joined in 1935. He wrote several large-scale works in the 1930s, and was heavily involved with workers' choirs for whom he composed pageants, choruses and songs. His pro-Soviet stance led to a temporary ban on his music by the BBC in the early years of the Second World War, and his refusal to modify his position in the postwar Cold War era led to a more prolonged semi-ostracism of his music. As a result, the four major operas he wrote between 1950 and 1970 were all premiered in East Germany. In his prewar works, Bush's style retained what commentators have described as an essential Englishness, but was also influenced by the avant-garde European idioms of the inter-war years. During and after the war he began to simplify this style, in line with his Marxism-inspired belief that music should be accessible to the mass of the people. Despite the difficulties he encountered in getting his works performed in the West he continued to compose until well into his eighties. He taught composition at the RAM for more than 50 years, published two books, was the founder and long-time president of the Workers' Music Association, and served as chairman and later vice-president of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain. His contribution to musical life was slowly recognised, in the form of doctorates from two universities and numerous tribute concerts towards the end of his life. Since his death aged 94 in 1995, his musical legacy has been nurtured by the Alan Bush Music Trust, established in 1997. ## Life and career ### Family background and early life Bush was born in Dulwich, South London, on 22 December 1900, the third and youngest son of Alfred Walter Bush and Alice Maud, née Brinsley. The Bushes were a prosperous middle-class family, their wealth deriving from the firm of industrial chemists founded by the composer's great-grandfather, W. J. Bush. As a child Alan's health was delicate, and he was initially educated at home. When he was eleven he began at Highgate School as a day pupil, and remained there until 1918. Both of his elder brothers served as officers in the First World War; one of them, Alfred junior, was killed on the Western Front in 1917. The other, Hamilton Brinsley Bush, went into the family business and ran twice as Liberal candidate for Watford in the 1950s. The end of the war in November 1918 meant that Alan narrowly avoided being called up for military service; meantime, having determined on a musical career, he had applied to and been accepted by the RAM, where he began his studies in the spring of 1918. ### Royal Academy and after At the RAM, Bush studied composition under Frederick Corder and piano with Tobias Matthay. He made rapid progress, and won various scholarships and awards, including the Thalberg Scholarship, the Phillimore piano prize, and a Carnegie award for composition. He produced the first compositions of his formal canon: Three Pieces for Two Pianos, Op. 1, and Piano Sonata in B minor, Op. 2, and also made his first attempt to write opera – a scene from Bulwer Lytton's novel The Last Days of Pompeii, with a libretto by his brother Brinsley. The work, with Bush at the piano, received a single private performance with family members and friends forming the cast. The manuscript was later destroyed by Bush. Among Bush's fellow students was Michael Head. The two became friends, as a result of which Bush met Head's 14-year-old sister Nancy. In 1931, ten years after their first meeting, Bush and Nancy would marry and begin a lifelong artistic partnership in which she became Bush's principal librettist, as well as providing the texts for many of his other vocal works. In 1922 Bush graduated from the RAM, but continued to study composition privately under John Ireland, with whom he formed an enduring friendship. In 1925 Bush was appointed to a teaching post at the RAM, as a professor of harmony and composition, under terms that gave him scope to continue with his studies and to travel. He took further piano study from two pupils of Leschetizky, Benno Moiseiwitsch and Mabel Lander, from whom he learned the Leschetizky method. In 1926 he made his first of numerous visits to Berlin, where with the violinist Florence Lockwood he gave two concerts of contemporary, mainly British, music which included his own Phantasy in C minor, Op. 3. The skill of the performers was admired by the critics more than the quality of the music. In 1928 Bush returned to Berlin, to perform with the Brosa Quartet at the Bechstein Hall, in a concert of his own music which included the premieres of the chamber work Five Pieces, Op. 6 and the piano solo Relinquishment, Op. 11. Critical opinion was broadly favourable, the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag correspondent noting "nothing extravagant but much of promise". Among the works composed by Bush during this period were the Quartet for piano, violin, viola and cello, Op. 5; Prelude and Fugue for piano, Op. 9; settings of poems by Walter de la Mare, Harold Monro and W. B. Yeats; and his first venture into orchestral music, the Symphonic Impressions of 1926–27, Op. 8. In early 1929 he completed one of his best-known early chamber works, the string quartet Dialectic, Op. 15, which helped to establish Bush's reputation abroad when it was performed at a Prague festival in the 1930s. ### Music and politics Bush had begun to develop an interest in politics during the war years. In 1924, rejecting his parents' conservatism, he joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP). The following year he joined the London Labour Choral Union (LLCU), a group of largely London-based choirs that had been organised by the socialist composer Rutland Boughton, with Labour Party support, to "develop the musical instincts of the people and to render service to the Labour movement". Bush was soon appointed as Boughton's assistant, and two years later, he succeeded Boughton as the LLCU's chief musical adviser, remaining in this post until the body disbanded in 1940. Through his LLCU work, Bush met Michael Tippett, five years his junior, who shared Bush's left-wing political perspective. In his memoirs Tippett records his first impressions of Bush: "I learned much from him. His music at the time seemed so adventurous and vigorous". Tippett's biographer Ian Kemp writes: "Apart from Sibelius, the contemporary composer who taught Tippett as much as anyone else was his own contemporary Alan Bush". After his 1928 concert tour in Berlin, Bush returned to the city to study piano under Artur Schnabel. He left the ILP in 1929, and joined the Labour Party proper, before taking extended leave from the RAM to begin a two-year course in philosophy and musicology at Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelm University. Here, his tutors included Max Dessoir and Friedrich Blume. Bush's years in Berlin profoundly affected his political beliefs, and had direct influence on the subsequent character of his music. Michael Jones, writing in British Music after Bush's death, records Bush's concern at the rise of fascism and antisemitism in Germany. His association with like-minded musicians such as Hanns Eisler and Ernst Hermann Meyer, and writers such as Bertold Brecht, helped to develop his growing political awareness into a lifelong commitment to Marxism and communism. Bush's conversion to full-blown communism was not immediate, but in 1935 he finally abandoned Labour and joined the British Communist Party. Notwithstanding the uncompromising nature of his politics, Bush in his writings tended to express his views in restrained terms, "much more like a reforming patrician Whig than a proletarian revolutionary" according to Michael Oliver in a 1995 Gramophone article. Bush's Grove Music Online biographers also observe that in the politicisation of his music, his folk idioms have more in common with the English traditions of Ralph Vaughan Williams than with the continental radicalism of Kurt Weill. ### 1930s: emergent composer In March 1931 Bush and Nancy were married in London, before returning to Germany where Bush continued his studies. In April a BBC broadcast performance of his Dance Overture for Military Band, Op. 12a, received a mixed reception. Nancy Bush quotes two listeners' comments that appeared in the Radio Times on 8 May 1931. One thought that "such a medley of fearful discords could never be called music", while another opined that "[we] should not cry for more Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven if modern composers would all give us sheer beauty like this". At the end of summer 1931 the couple returned permanently to England, and settled in the village of Radlett, in Hertfordshire. In the following years three daughters were born. Bush resumed his RAM and LLCU duties, and in 1932 accepted a new appointment, as an examiner for the Associated Board of London's Royal Schools of Music, a post which involved extensive overseas travel. These new domestic and professional responsibilities limited Bush's composing activity, but he provided the music for the 1934 Pageant of Labour, organised for the London Trades Council and held at the Crystal Palace during October. Tippett, who co-conducted the event, later described it as a "high water mark" in Bush's drive to provide workers' choirs with settings for left-wing texts. In 1936 Bush was one of the founders of the Workers' Musical Association (WMA), and became its first chairman. In 1935 Bush began work on a piano concerto which, completed in 1937, included the unusual feature of a mixed chorus and baritone soloist in the finale, singing a radical text by Randall Swingler. Bush played the piano part when the work was premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Adrian Boult on 4 March 1938. The largely left-wing audience responded to the work enthusiastically; Tippett observed that "to counter the radical tendencies of the finale ... Boult forced the applause to end by unexpectedly performing the National Anthem". A performance of the concerto a year later, at the 1939 "Festival of Music for the People", drew caustic comments from Neville Cardus in The Manchester Guardian. Cardus saw little direction and no humour in the music: "Why don't these people laugh at themselves now and then? Just for fun." Bush provided much of the music, and also acted as general director, for the London Co-operative Societies' pageant "Towards Tomorrow", held at Wembley Stadium on 2 July 1938. In the autumn of that year he visited both the Soviet Union and the United States. Back home in early 1939 he was closely involved in founding and conducting the London String Orchestra, which operated successfully until 1941 and again in the immediate postwar years. He also began to write a major orchestral work, his Symphony No. 1 in C. Amid this busy life Bush was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music. ### Second World War When war broke out in September 1939, Bush registered for military service under the National Service (Armed Forces) Act of 1939. He was not called up immediately, and continued his musical life, helping to form the WMA Singers to replace the now-defunct LLCU, and founding the William Morris Music Society. In April 1940 he conducted a Queen's Hall concert of music by Soviet composers which included the British premieres of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, and Khatchaturian's Piano Concerto. William Glock in The Observer was disdainful, dismissing the Khatachurian concerto as "sixth-rate", and criticising the inordinate length, as he saw it, of the symphony. Bush was among many musicians, artists and writers who in January 1941 signed up to the communist-led People's Convention, which promoted a six-point radical anti-war programme that included friendship with the Soviet Union and "a people's peace". The BBC advised him that because of his association with this movement, he and his music would no longer be broadcast. This action drew strong protests from, among others, E. M. Forster and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The ban was opposed by the prime minister, Winston Churchill, in the House of Commons, and proved short-lived; it was annulled following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. In November 1941 Bush was conscripted into the army, and after initial training was assigned to the Royal Army Medical Corps. Based in London, he was given leave to perform in concerts, which enabled him to conduct the premiere of his First Symphony at a BBC Promenade Concert in the Royal Albert Hall on 24 July 1942. He also performed regularly with the London String Orchestra, and in 1944 was the piano soloist in the British premiere of Shostakovich's Piano Quintet. His wartime compositions were few; among them were the "Festal Day" Overture, Op. 23, written for Vaughan Williams's 70th birthday in 1942, and several songs and choruses including "Freedom on the March", written for a British-Soviet Unity Demonstration at the Albert Hall on 27 June 1943. Bush's relatively calm war was marred by the death, in 1944, of his seven-year-old daughter Alice in a road accident. As the war in Europe drew to its end, Bush was posted to the Far East despite being well over the normal age limit for overseas service. The matter was raised in Parliament by the Independent Labour member D. N. Pritt, who enquired whether political factors were behind the decision. The posting was withdrawn; and Bush remained in London until his discharge in December 1945. ### Post-war: struggle for recognition and performance #### Persona non grata Bush's return to composing after the war led to what Richard Stoker, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, calls "his best period". However, Bush's attempts to secure a place in the concert repertoire were frustrated. A contributory factor may have been what the critic Dominic Daula calls Bush's "intriguingly unique compositional voice" that challenged critics and audiences alike. But the composer's refusal to modify his pro-Soviet stance following the onset of the Cold War alienated both the public and the music establishment, a factor which Bush acknowledged 20 years later: "People who were in a position to promote my works were afraid to do so. They were afraid of being labelled". Stoker comments that "in a less tolerant country he would certainly have been imprisoned, or worse. But he was merely ignored, both politically, and, which is a pity, as a composer". Nancy Bush writes that the BBC considered him persona non grata, and imposed an almost complete though unofficial broadcast ban that lasted for some 15 years after the war. As well as resuming his teaching routines, Bush embarked on a busy schedule of travel, mainly in Eastern Europe with the WMA choir. While in Czechoslovakia in August 1947, he and the WMA performed his unaccompanied chorus Lidice at the site of the village of that name, which had been destroyed by the Nazis in 1942 in a reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Among Bush's earliest postwar works was the English Suite, performed by the revived London String Orchestra at the Wigmore Hall on 9 February 1946. The orchestra had suspended its operations in 1941; after the war, Bush's failure to secure funding for it led to its closure, despite considerable artistic success. Critics noted in the work a change of idiom, away from the European avant-garde character of much of his prewar music and towards a simpler popular style. This change was acknowledged by Bush as he responded to the 1948 decree issued by Stalin's director of cultural policy, Andrei Zhdanov, against formalism and dissonance in modern music – although the process of simplification had probably begun during the war years. In 1948 Bush accepted a commission from the Nottingham Co-operative Society to write a symphony as part of the city's quincentennial celebrations in 1949. According to Foreman, "by any standards this is one of Bush's most approachable scores", yet since its Nottingham premiere on 27 June 1949 and its London debut on 11 December 1952 under Boult and the London Philharmonic, the work has been rarely heard in Britain. His Violin Concerto, Op. 32, received its premiere on 25 August 1949, with Max Rostal as soloist. In this work Bush explained that "the soloist represents the individual, the orchestra world society, and the work [represents] the individual's struggles and of his final absorption into society". The Daily Telegraph's critic observed that "it was the orchestra, i.e. society, that after a strenuous opening gave up the struggle". In 1947 Bush became chairman of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain for 1947–48. He also produced a full-length textbook, Strict Counterpoint in the Palestrina Style (Joseph Williams, London, 1948). On 15 December 1950 the WMA marked Bush's 50th birthday with a special concert of his music at the Conway Hall. #### Opera ventures Since his youthful Last Days of Pompeii, Bush had not attempted to write opera, but he took up the genre in 1946 with a short operetta for children, The Press Gang (or the Escap'd Apprentice), for which Nancy supplied the libretto. This was performed by pupils at St Christopher School, Letchworth, on 7 March 1947. The following year he began a more ambitious venture, a full-length grand opera recounting the story of Wat Tyler, who led the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Wat Tyler, again to Nancy's libretto, was submitted in 1950 to the Arts Council's Festival of Britain opera competition, and was one of four prizewinners – Bush received £400. The opera was not taken up by any of the British opera houses, and was first staged at Leipzig Opera in 1953. It was well received, retained for the season and ran again in the following year; there was a further performance in Rostock in 1955. Wat Tyler did not receive its full British premiere until 19 June 1974, when it was produced at Sadler's Wells; as of 2017, this remains the only professional staging of a Bush opera in Britain. Bush's second opera, Men of Blackmoor, composed in 1954–55 to Nancy's libretto, is a story of Northumbrian miners in the early 19th century; Bush went down a mine as part of his research. It received its premiere at the German National Theatre, Weimar on 18 November 1956. Like Wat Tyler in Leipzig, the opera was successful; after the Weimar season there were further East German productions in Jena (1957), Leipzig (1959) and Zwickau (1960). In Britain there were student performances at Oxford in 1960, and Bristol in 1974. In December 1960 David Drew in the New Statesman wrote: "The chief virtue of Men of Blackmoor, and the reason why it particularly deserves a [professional] performance at this historical point, is its unfailing honesty ... it is never cheap, and at its best achieves a genuine dignity." For his third opera, Bush chose a contemporary theme – the struggle against colonial rule. He intended to collect appropriate musical material from British Guiana, but an attempt to visit the colony in 1957 was thwarted when its government refused him entry. The ban was rescinded the following year, and in 1959 Bush was able to gather and record a great deal of authentic music from the local African and Indian populations. The eventual result was The Sugar Reapers, premiered at Leipzig on 11 December 1966. The Times correspondent, praising the performance, wrote: "One can only hope that London will soon see a production of its own". With Nancy, Bush wrote two more operettas for children: The Spell Unbound (1953) and The Ferryman's Daughter (1961). His final opera, written in 1965–67, was Joe Hill, based on the life story of Joe Hill, an American union activist and songwriter who was controversially convicted of murder and executed in 1915. The opera, to a libretto by Barrie Stavis, was premiered at the German Berlin State Opera on 29 September 1970, and in 1979 was broadcast by the BBC. ### 1953–1975 During his involvement with opera, Bush continued to compose in other genres. His 1953 cantata Voice of the Prophets, Op. 41, was commissioned by the tenor Peter Pears and sung by Pears at its premiere on 22 May 1953. In 1959–60 he produced two major orchestral works: the Dorian Passacaglia and Fugue, Op. 52, and the Third Symphony, Op. 53, known as the "Byron" since it depicts musically scenes from the life of the poet. The symphony, a commission from East German Radio, was first performed at Leipzig on 20 March 1962. Colin Mason, writing in The Guardian, thought the work had a stronger socialist programme than the Nottingham symphony of 1949. The ending of the second movement, a long tune representing Byron's speech against the extension of the death penalty was, Mason wrote, "a splendid piece". The symphony was awarded that year's Händel Prize in the city of Halle. At the end of the 1960s Bush wrote, among other works, Time Remembered, Op. 67, for chamber orchestra, and Scherzo for Wind Orchestra and Percussion, Op. 68, based on an original Guyanese theme. In 1969 he produced the first of three song cycles, The Freight of Harvest, Op. 69 – Life's Span and Woman's Life would follow in 1974 and 1977. In the 1970s, while maintaining his teaching commitment to the RAM, he continued to perform in the concert hall as conductor and pianist. Bush was slowly being recognised for his achievements, even by those who had long cold-shouldered him. In 1968 he was awarded a Doctor of Music degree by the University of London, and two years later received an honorary doctorate from the University of Durham. On 6 December 1970, just before Bush's 70th birthday, BBC Television broadcast a programme about his life and works, and on 16 February 1971 the RAM hosted a special (late) birthday concert, in which he and Pears performed songs from Voices of the Prophets. Bush featured in a further television programme, broadcast on 25 October 1975, in a series entitled "Born in 1900". ### Final years In old age, Bush continued to lead an active and productive life, punctuated by periodic commemorations of his life and works. In November 1975 his 50 years' professorship at the RAM was marked in a concert there, and in January 1976 the WMA gave a concert to honour his recent 75th birthday. In 1977 he produced his last major piano work, the Twenty-four Preludes, Op. 84, of which he gave the first performance at the Wigmore Hall on 30 October 1977. A later reviewer described this piece as "music I'd like to have playing beside me as I sprawled on the grass beneath the trees with an ice-cream, watching a county cricket match on a golden afternoon". In 1978 Bush retired from the RAM after 52 years' service. His 80th birthday in December 1980 was celebrated at concerts in London, Birmingham and East Germany, and the BBC broadcast a special birthday musical tribute. In the same year he published In My Eighth Decade and Other Essays, in which he stated his personal creed that "as a musician and as a man, Marxism is a guide to action", enabling him to express through music the "struggle to create a condition of social organisation in which science and art will be the possession of all". In 1982 Bush visited the Lascaux caves in south-western France, and was inspired by the prehistoric cave paintings to write his fourth and final symphony, Op. 94, subtitled the "Lascaux". This, his last major orchestral work, was premiered by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, under Edward Downes in Manchester, on 25 March 1986. In the late 1980s Bush was increasingly hampered by failing eyesight. His last formal compositions appeared in 1988: "Spring Woodland and Summer Garden" for solo piano, Op. 124, and Summer Valley for cello and piano, Op. 125, although he continued to compose privately and play the piano. Nancy's health meanwhile deteriorated, and she died on 12 October 1991. Bush lived on quietly at Radlett for another four years, able to recall the events of his youth but with no memory of the last fifty years and unaware of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He died in Watford General hospital on 31 October 1995, after a short illness, at the age of 94. ## Music ### General character Despite undergoing various changes of emphasis, Bush's music retained a voice distinct from that of any of his contemporaries. One critic describes the typical Bush sound as "Mild dominant discords, of consonant effect, used with great originality in uncommon progressions alive with swift, purposeful harmonic movement ... except in [Benjamin] Britten they are nowhere used with more telling expression, colour and sense of movement than in Bush". John Ireland, Bush's early mentor, instilled "the sophisticated and restrained craftsmanship which marked Bush's music from the beginning", introducing him to folksong and Palestrina, both important building blocks in the development of Bush's mature style. Daula comments that "Bush's music does not [merely] imitate the sound-world of his Renaissance predecessors", but creates his unique fingerprint by "[juxtaposing] 16th century modal counterpoint with late- and post-romantic harmony". Bush's music, at least from the mid-1930s, often carried political overtones. His obituarist Rupert Christiansen writes that, as a principled Marxist, Bush "put the requirements of the revolutionary proletariat at the head of the composer's responsibilities", a choice which others, such as Tippett, chose not to make. However, Vaughan Williams thought that, despite Bush's oft-declared theories of the purposes of art and music, "when the inspiration comes over him he forgets all about this and remembers only the one eternal rule for all artists, 'To thine own self be true'." ### To 1945 <div class="quotebox pullquote floatleft " style=" width:300px; ; background-color: #E0E6F8; "> > Bush's First Symphony: > > "In this Symphony, the composer's intention is to evoke the feelings of the men and women of Britain during the 1930s. There is no programme of events depicted; the three main movements are more in the nature of mood pictures, each an expression of the prevailing mental and emotional atmosphere of the social movement of the time." <cite class="left-aligned" style="">Bush, Alan: Programme notes for first performance 24 July 1942.</cite> </div> According to Duncan Hall's account of the music culture of the Labour Movement in the inter-war years, Bush's youthful music, composed before his Berlin sojourn, already demonstrated its essential character. His Dialectic for String Quartet (1929), Op. 15, created a strong impression when first heard in 1935, as "a musical discourse of driving intensity and virile incident". Christiansen highlights its "tightness and austerity" in contrast to the more fashionable lyricism then prevalent in English music. Bush's years in Berlin brought into his music the advanced Central European idioms that characterise his major orchestral compositions of the period: the Piano Concerto (1935–37), and the First Symphony (1939–40). Nancy Bush describes the Piano Concerto as Bush's first attempt to fuse his musical and political ideas. The symphony was even more overtly political, representing in its three movements greed (of the bourgeoisie), frustration (of the proletariat) and the final liberation of the latter, but not, according to Christiansen, "in an idiom calculated to appeal to the masses". Aside from these large-scale works, much of Bush's compositional activity in the 1930s was devoted to pageants, songs and choruses written for his choirs, work undertaken with the utmost seriousness. In his introduction to a 1938 socialist song book, Bush wrote that "socialists must sing what we mean and sing it like we mean it". Under Bush's influence the "music of the workers" moved from the high aesthetic represented by, for example, Arthur Bourchier's mid-1920s pamphlet Art and Culture in Relation to Socialism, towards an expression with broader popular appeal. ### Postwar and beyond Although Bush accepted Zhdanov's 1948 diktat without demur and acted accordingly, his postwar simplifications had begun earlier and would continue as part of a gradual process. Bush first outlined the basis of his new method of composition in an article, "The Crisis of Modern Music", which appeared in WMA's Keynote magazine in spring 1946. The method, in which every note has thematic significance, has drawn comparison by critics with Schoenberg's twelve-note system, although Bush rejected this equation. Many of Bush's best-known works were written in the immediate postwar years. Anthony Payne described the Three Concert Studies for Piano Trio (Op. 31) of 1947 as exceeding Britten in its inventiveness, "a high-water mark in Bush's mature art". The Violin Concerto (Op. 32, 1948) has been cited as "a work as beautiful and refined as any in the genre since Walton's". Foreman considers the concerto, which uses twelve-tone themes, to be the epitome of Bush's thematic theory of composition, although Bush's contemporary, Edmund Rubbra, thought it too intellectual for general audiences. The Dorian Passacaglia and Fugue for timpani, percussion and strings, (Op. 52, 1959), involves eight variations in the Dorian mode, followed by eight in other modes culminating in a final quadruple fugue in six parts. Musical Opinion's critic praised the composer's "wonderful control and splendid craftsmanship" in this piece, and predicted that it could become the most popular of all Bush's orchestral works. The postwar period also saw the beginning of Bush's 20-year involvement with grand opera, a genre in which, although he achieved little commercial recognition, he was retrospectively hailed by critics as a master of British opera second only to Britten. His first venture, Wat Tyler, was written in a form which Bush thought acceptable to the general British public; it was not his choice, he wrote, that the opera and its successors all found their initial audiences in East Germany. When eventually staged in Britain in 1974 the opera, although well received at Sadler's Wells, seemed somewhat old-fashioned; Philip Hope-Wallace in The Guardian thought the ending degenerated into "a choral union cantata", and found the music pleasant but not especially memorable. Bush's three other major operas were all characterised by their use of "local" music: Northumbrian folk-song in the case of Men of Blackmoor, Guyanese songs and dances in The Sugar Reapers, and American folk music in Joe Hill – the last-named used in a manner reminiscent of Kurt Weill and the German opera with which Bush had become familiar in the early 1930s. The extent to which Bush's music changed substantially after the war was addressed by Meirion Bowen, reviewing a Bush concert in the 1980s. Bowen noted a distinct contrast between early and late works, the former showing primarily the influences of Ireland and of Bush's European contacts, while in the later pieces the idiom was "often overtly folklike and Vaughan Williams-ish". In general Bush's late works continued to show all the hallmarks of his postwar oeuvre: vigour, clarity of tone and masterful use of counterpoint. The Lascaux symphony, written when he was 83, is the composer's final major orchestral statement, and addresses deep philosophical issues relating to the origins and destiny of mankind. ### Assessment In the 1920s it appeared that Bush might emerge as Britain's foremost pianist, after his studies under the leading teachers of the day, but he turned to composition as his principal musical activity. In Foreman's summary he is "a major figure who really straddles the century as almost no other composer does". He remained a pianist of consequence, with a strong and reliable, if heavy, touch. Joanna Bullivant, writing in Music and Letters'', maintains that in his music Bush subordinated all ideas of personal expression to the ideology of Marxism. The critic Hugo Cole thought that, as a composer, Bush came close to Paul Hindemith's ideal: "one for whom music is felt as a moral and social force, and only incidentally as a means of personal expression". The composer Wilfrid Mellers credits Bush with more than ideological correctness; while remaining faithful to his creed even when it was entirely out of fashion, he "attempt[ed] to re-establish an English tradition meaningful to his country's past, present and future". Hall describes Bush as "a key figure in the democratisation of art in Britain, achieving far more in this regard than his pedagogic, utopian patrons and peers, the labour romantics." The music critic Colin Mason described Bush's music thus: > His range is wide, the quality of his music consistently excellent. He has the intellectual concentration of Tippett, the easy command and expansiveness of Walton, the nervous intensity of Rawsthorne, the serene leisureliness of Rubbra ... He is surpassed only in melody, as are the others, by Walton, but not even by him in harmonic richness, nor by Tippett in contrapuntal originality and the expressive power of rather austere musical thought, nor by Rawsthorne in concise, compelling utterance and telling invention, nor by Rubbra in handling large forms well. ## Legacy Bush's long career as a teacher influenced generations of English composers and performers. Tippett was never a formal pupil, but he acknowledged a deep debt to Bush. Herbert Murrill, a pupil of Bush's at the RAM in the 1920s, wrote in 1950 of his tutor: "[T]here is humility in his makeup, and I believe that no man can achieve greatness in the arts without humility ... To Alan Bush I owe much, not least the artistic strength and right to differ from him". Among postwar Bush students are the composers Timothy Bowers, Edward Gregson, David Gow, Roger Steptoe, E. Florence Whitlock, and Michael Nyman, and the pianists John Bingham and Graham Johnson. Through his sponsorship of the London String Quartet Bush helped launch the careers of string players such as Norbert Brainin and Emanuel Hurwitz, both of whom later achieved international recognition. Bush's music was under-represented in the concert repertoire in his lifetime, and virtually disappeared after his death. The 2000 centenary of his birth was markedly low key; the Prom season ignored him, although there was a memorial concert at the Wigmore Hall on 1 November, and a BBC broadcast of the Piano Concerto on 19 December. The centenary, albeit quietly observed, helped to introduce the name and music of Bush to a new generation of music lovers, and generated an increase in both performance and recordings. The centenary also heralded an awakening of scholarly interest in Bush, whose life and works were the subject of numerous PhD theses in the early 20th century. Scholars such as Paul Harper-Scott and Joanna Bullivant have obtained access to new material, including documents released since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Bush's MI5 file. This, says Bullivant, enables a more informed assessment of the interrelationships within Bush's music and his communism, and of the inherent conflicting priorities. In October 1997 family members and friends founded The Alan Bush Music Trust "to promote the education and appreciation by the public in and of music and, in particular, the works of the British composer Alan Bush". The trust provides a newsletter, features news stories, promotes performances and recordings of Bush's works, and through its website reproduces wide-ranging critical and biographical material. It continues to monitor concert performances of Bush's works, and other Bush-related events, at home and abroad. At the time of Bush's centenary, Martin Anderson, writing in the British Music Information Centre's newsletter, summarised Bush's compositional career: > Bush was not a natural melodist à la Dvorák, though he could produce an appealing tune when he set his mind to it. But he was a first-rate contrapuntist, and his harmonic world can glow with a rare internal warmth. It would be foolish to claim that everything he wrote was a masterpiece – and equally idiotic to turn our backs on the many outstanding scores still awaiting assiduous attention. ## Recordings Before Bush's centenary year, 2000, the few available recordings of his music included none of the major works. In the 21st century much has been added, including recordings of Symphonies 1, 2 and 4, the Piano and Violin Concertos, many of the main vocal works, the Twenty-Four Preludes, and the complete organ works.
3,798,521	Japanese battleship Yashima	1,167,963,363	Japanese Fuji-class battleship	[ "1896 ships", "Fuji-class battleships", "Russo-Japanese War battleships of Japan", "Ships built by Armstrong Whitworth", "Ships built on the River Tyne", "Ships sunk by mines", "Shipwrecks in the Yellow Sea", "Shipwrecks of the Russo-Japanese War" ]	Yashima (八島, Yashima) was a Fuji-class pre-dreadnought battleship built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the 1890s. As Japan lacked the industrial capacity to construct such vessels, the ship was designed and built in the United Kingdom. She participated in the early stages of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, including the Battle of Port Arthur on the second day of the war. Yashima was involved in subsequent operations until she struck two mines off Port Arthur in May 1904. The ship did not sink immediately, but capsized while under tow later that day. The Japanese were able to keep her loss a secret from the Russians for over a year. As a result, the Russians were unable to take advantage of the ship's loss. ## Background and description The two Fuji-class ships were the IJN's first battleships, ordered from Britain in response to two new German-built Chinese ironclad warships. At this time, Japan lacked the technology and capability to construct its own battleships and they had to be built abroad. The ships were designed by Philip Watts as smaller versions of the British Royal Sovereign class, although they were slightly faster and had a better type of armour. The ships were 412 feet (125.6 m) long overall and had a beam of 73 feet 6 inches (22.4 m) and a draught of 26 feet 3 inches (8 m) at deep load. They normally displaced 12,230 long tons (12,430 t) and had a crew of 650 officers and ratings. Unlike her sister ship Fuji, Yashima was fitted as an admiral's flagship. The ship was powered by two vertical triple-expansion steam engines, each driving one shaft, using steam generated by ten cylindrical boilers. The engines were rated at 13,500 indicated horsepower (10,100 kW) using forced draught and were designed to reach a top speed of 18.25 knots (34 km/h; 21 mph), though Yashima reached a top speed of 19.5 knots (36.1 km/h; 22.4 mph) from 14,075 ihp (10,496 kW) on her sea trials. The sisters carried enough coal to allow them to steam for 4,000 nautical miles (7,400 km; 4,600 mi) at a speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph). The main battery of the Fuji-class ships consisted of four 12-inch (305 mm) guns mounted in two twin-gun turrets, one each fore and aft of the superstructure. Their secondary armament consisted of ten quick-firing (QF) 6-inch (152 mm) guns, four mounted in casemates on the sides of the hull and six mounted on the upper deck, protected by gun shields. Smaller guns were carried for defence against torpedo boats. These included fourteen QF 3-pounder (47-millimetre (1.9 in)) guns and ten 2.5-pounder Hotchkiss guns of the same calibre, all of which were in single mounts. The ships were also armed with five 18-inch (450 mm) torpedo tubes, one above water in the bow and a submerged pair on each broadside. The Fuji class had a waterline armour belt that consisted of Harvey armour 14–18 inches (356–457 mm) thick. Their gun turrets were protected by 6-inch armour plates and their decks were 2.5 inches (64 mm) thick. In 1901, the ships exchanged 16 of their 47 mm guns for an equal number of QF 12-pounder (3 in (76 mm)) 12 cwt guns. This raised the number of crewmen to 652 and later to 741. ## Construction and career Given a classical name for Japan, Yashima was ordered as part of the 1894 Naval Programme and the ship was laid down by Armstrong Whitworth at their Elswick shipyard on 6 December 1894 as yard number 625. The ship was launched on 28 February 1896 and completed on 9 September 1897, at a total cost of ¥10,500,000. She conducted her sea trials during the following month. Yashima departed the UK on 15 September and arrived at Yokosuka, Japan, on 30 November. She was initially assigned to the Standing Fleet, the IJN's primary combat fleet, but was reduced to reserve on 20 November. The ship was reclassified as a first-class battleship on 21 March 1898 and reassigned to the Standing Fleet. Two years later, Yashima was again placed in reserve where she remained until reactivated on 28 December 1903 and assigned to the 1st Division of the 1st Fleet of the Combined Fleet. At the start of the Russo-Japanese War, Yashima, commanded by Captain Hajime Sakamoto, participated in the Battle of Port Arthur on 9 February 1904 when Vice-Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō led his battleships and cruisers in an attack on the Russian ships of the Pacific Squadron anchored just outside Port Arthur. Tōgō had expected the preceding surprise night attack by his destroyers to be much more successful than it was, anticipating that the Russians would be badly disorganised and weakened, but they had recovered from their surprise and were ready for the attack of the battleships and cruisers. The Japanese ships were spotted by the protected cruiser Boyarin, which was patrolling offshore and alerted the Russian defences. Tōgō chose to attack the Russian coastal defences with his main armament and engage the ships with his secondary guns. Splitting his fire proved to be a poor decision as the Japanese eight-inch (203 mm) and six-inch guns inflicted little damage on the Russian ships, which concentrated all their fire on the Japanese ships with some effect. Although many ships on both sides were hit, Russian casualties numbered only 17, while the Japanese suffered 60 killed and wounded before Tōgō disengaged. Yashima was not hit during the battle. On 10 March, Yashima and her sister Fuji, under the command of Rear-Admiral Nashiba Tokioki, blindly bombarded the harbour of Port Arthur from Pigeon Bay, on the south west side of the Liaodong Peninsula, at a range of 5.9 miles (9.5 km). They fired 154 twelve-inch shells, but did little damage. When they tried again on 22 March, they were attacked by newly emplaced coast-defence guns that had been transferred there by the new Russian commander, Vice-Admiral Stepan Makarov, and also from several Russian ships in Port Arthur using observers overlooking Pigeon Bay. The Japanese ships disengaged after Fuji was hit by a twelve-inch shell. Yashima participated in the action of 13 April when Tōgō successfully lured out a portion of the Pacific Squadron, including Makarov's flagship, the battleship Petropavlovsk. When Makarov spotted the five battleships of the 1st Division, he turned back for Port Arthur and Petropavlovsk struck a mine laid by the Japanese the previous night. The Russian battleship sank in less than two minutes after one of her magazines exploded and Makarov was one of the 677 killed. Emboldened by his success, Tōgō resumed long-range bombardment missions, which prompted the Russians to lay more minefields. On 14 May, Nashiba put to sea with his flagship Hatsuse and two other battleships, Shikishima, and Yashima, the protected cruiser Kasagi, and the dispatch boat Tatsuta to relieve the Japanese blockading force off Port Arthur. On the following morning, the squadron encountered a minefield laid by the Russian minelayer Amur. Hatsuse struck one mine that disabled her steering around 11:10 and Yashima struck two others when moving to assist Hatsuse. One blew a hole in her starboard aft boiler room and the other detonated on the starboard forward side of her hull, near the underwater torpedo room. After the second detonation the ship had a 9° list to starboard that gradually increased throughout the day. Yashima was towed away from the minefield, north towards the Japanese base in the Elliott Islands. She was still taking on water at an uncontrollable rate, and Sakamoto ordered the ship anchored around 17:00 near Encounter Rock to allow the crew to easily abandon ship. He assembled the crew, which sang the Japanese national anthem, Kimigayo, and then abandoned ship. Kasagi took Yashima in tow, but the battleship's list continued to increase, and she capsized about three hours later, after the cruiser was forced to cast off the tow, roughly at co-ordinates . The Japanese were able to conceal her loss for more than a year as no Russians observed Yashima sink. As part of the deception, the surviving crewmen were assigned to four auxiliary gunboats for the rest of the war that were tasked to guard Port Arthur and addressed their letters as if they were still aboard the battleship.
46,884,172	1951 Philadelphia municipal election	1,161,299,502	1951 municipal election in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States	[ "1950s in Philadelphia", "1951 Pennsylvania elections", "1951 United States local elections", "1951 United States mayoral elections", "City council elections in the United States", "Mayoral elections in Philadelphia", "November 1951 events in the United States" ]	The 1951 Philadelphia municipal election, held on Tuesday, November 6, was the first election under the city's new charter, which had been approved by the voters in April, and the first Democratic victory in the city in more than a half-century. The positions contested were those of mayor and district attorney, and all seventeen city council seats. There was also a referendum on whether to consolidate the city and county governments. Citywide, the Democrats took majorities of over 100,000 votes, breaking a 67-year Republican hold on city government. Joseph S. Clark Jr. and Richardson Dilworth, two of the main movers for the charter reform, were elected mayor and district attorney, respectively. Led by local party chairman James A. Finnegan, the Democrats also took fourteen of seventeen city council seats, and all of the citywide offices on the ballot. A referendum on city-county consolidation passed by a wide margin. The election marked the beginning of Democratic dominance of Philadelphia city politics, which continues today. ## Background In the 1940s, Philadelphia was the last major city in the United States to have nearly all of its political offices occupied by Republicans. Mayor Bernard Samuel and sheriff Austin Meehan led the Republican organization and were supported by many of the city's business interests. In 1947, city voters had elected Republicans to the mayor's office and to every seat on the city council. Over the next few years, cracks in the Republican wall began to emerge as independent voters and reform-minded Republicans began to join with Democrats in opposing what they saw as shortcomings of the Republican political machine. Some in the Democratic coalition objected to making common cause with the reformers, but Democratic City Committee chairman James A. Finnegan saw it as a chance to revitalize his moribund party, saying "good government is good politics." In 1949, that coalition scored a victory in the election for "row offices" (minor citywide offices including treasurer, coroner, and controller), and the reformers used their new platforms to expose corruption in city government. A bipartisan commission of reformers proposed a new city charter in 1950. The new scheme would shift power away from city council to a strong mayor, something they believed would produce a system that would be more efficient and less susceptible to corruption. It also included provisions for civil service reform, requiring that city jobs be filled by merit selection rather than patronage. The higher-ranking executive branch positions in city government would almost all be filled by the mayor directly without council approval, which was intended to encourage the appointment of independent experts instead of distributing jobs as reward for political service. Voters approved the charter overwhelmingly in an April 1951 referendum, setting up a showdown in November for election to the revised city government. ## Mayor Samuel did not run for re-election as mayor, leaving an open seat to be contested by the Republican nominee, Daniel A. Poling, and the Democrat, Joseph S. Clark Jr. Clark was a lawyer and United States Army officer who had served in World War II. Raised in an upper-class Republican family, he switched his party affiliation to the Democrats in 1928. After several unsuccessful attempts at public office in Philadelphia, he served as a Deputy Attorney General of Pennsylvania. Clark was known as a reformer, having been elected city controller two years earlier in 1949 on a platform of cleaning up corruption in the city. Despite being slandered as a communist for his membership in the Americans for Democratic Action, a left-wing group, Clark was victorious. In those two years, Clark probed graft and theft in the Samuel administration and reported his findings to the voters. Many of those accused of crimes were convicted, and several committed suicide. Clark continued his push for reform by urging adoption of the new city charter. He campaigned for mayor with the promise of a "clean sweep of City Hall". He won the support of party Democrats in part by announcing his intention to run whether they backed him or not. In the July primary election, he triumphed easily over former City Solicitor Joseph Sharfsin by an eight-to-one margin. The Republican nominee, Poling, was a Baptist preacher with a national reputation for integrity who GOP leaders hoped would help deflect the corruption charges leveled against the machine. Poling had worked for various charitable organizations and managed the Christian Herald. His son, Clark V. Poling, was one of the Four Chaplains lost aboard the SS Dorchester in World War II, and Poling served as pastor at the chapel erected in their memory. Poling was challenged in the primary by Walter P. Miller, a businessman who had the backing of independent Republicans. The ward leaders swung their support to Poling, who won by a six-to-one margin. As in 1947 and 1949, Clark focused his campaign on the corruption of the Republican organization, calling it "the most corrupt political machine in the United States". Poling admitted that corruption existed, but pledged to root it out himself if elected. Philadelphia's two newspapers, the Inquirer and the Bulletin, had traditionally endorsed Republicans, but in 1951 favored the Democrats. Poling's association with the Republican party bosses clinched the Inquirer's endorsement for Clark; in an editorial, the editors said "the only way Philadelphia can get a change at City Hall is by throwing out the Republican ward-boss clique". Clark and his running mate, district attorney candidate Richardson Dilworth, bought radio time and made street-corner speeches. In one speech, Dilworth called the Republican leadership "political hogs and extremely avaricious gentlemen". In a broadcast, Clark called his non-politician opponent the ignorant tool of corrupt interests, saying "he can know nothing about the subject personally for he has not been in politics in Philadelphia long enough to find out." Poling campaigned vigorously with the full support of his party organization, but the effort fell short. The general election was a landslide for Clark, who won by more than 120,000 votes. With 58% of the vote, the Democrats had gained nearly 215,000 votes over the last election, in which they had been defeated. The Democrats' greatest gains were in the so-called "independent wards", where middle-class voters were more likely to split their tickets in pursuit of good government, and in the majority-black wards in North and West Philadelphia, where Clark's promise of civil service reform gained the confidence of black voters, who had traditionally been left out of the patronage system. As the result became apparent, he told reporters that it was a "great victory for the thinking people of Philadelphia and it ends a long hard fight." This was the first time since 1881 (70 years) that a Democrat won the mayoralty, and the first time since 1911 (40 years) that a Republican nominee lost the mayoralty. It ushered a period of Democratic control of the mayoralty which continues to this day. ## District Attorney Philadelphia elects a district attorney independently of the mayor, in a system that predates the charter change. Since 1957, district attorney elections have followed mayoral and city council elections by two years, but in 1951 both offices were up for election in the same year. As in the mayor's race, the contest for district attorney pitted a Democratic reformer, Richardson Dilworth, against a representative of the Republican machine, Michael A. Foley. Dilworth, like Clark, was a former Republican who had been advocating reform for several years. He had run for mayor unsuccessfully in 1947, with Clark as his campaign manager. In 1949, he was elected City Treasurer. Democratic Party leaders had intended Dilworth to be their candidate for mayor again in 1951, but when Clark announced his candidacy, Dilworth agreed to run for district attorney instead. Foley, an attorney for the Insurance Company of North America, had organization backing in the primary but had no success against the Democratic wave in the general election. Dilworth was unopposed in the primary. In November, Dilworth won by almost as large a margin as Clark, taking just shy of 58% of the vote. He told reporters that the victory had a "sobering effect", adding: "the bigger the victory, the bigger the responsibility". ## City Council Under the new charter, Philadelphians elected a seventeen-member city council in 1951, with ten members representing districts of the city, and the remaining seven being elected at-large. By the rules of the limited voting system for the at-large seats, each political party could nominate five candidates and voters could only vote for five, with the result that the majority party could only take five of the seven seats, leaving two for the minority party. The Democrats' citywide triumph continued into the city council races, as they took nine of ten districts and five of seven at-large seats. Constance Dallas, the first woman to win election to City Council, was elected in a close vote in the 8th district (covering Chestnut Hill, Germantown, and Roxborough) over incumbent councilman Robert S. Hamilton. In the 1st district, which took in South Philadelphia, attorney Thomas I. Guerin defeated Dominic J. Colubiale. In the 2nd, the Republicans' lone district-level victory came as electrical equipment salesman William M. Phillips bested Louis Vignola, a labor union official. In the 3rd district, made up of the southern half of West Philadelphia, incumbent Harry Norwitch defeated another incumbent from the old city council, George Maxman, who had held office since 1936. In the 4th, which covered the northern half of West Philadelphia, state representative Samuel Rose defeated incumbent James G. Clark. In the city's 5th district in North Philadelphia, another incumbent, Eugene J. Sullivan, was defeated by Raymond Pace Alexander, a local attorney and African American civil rights leader. In the 6th district, covering Kensington and Frankford, plumbers' union official Michael J. Towey won over William J. Glowacz. In the 7th, James Tate defeated Joseph A. Ferko, a local Mummers string band leader. Insurance broker Charles M. Finley defeated incumbent councilman William A. Kelley in the 9th district, which covered Oak Lane, Olney, and Logan. In Northeast Philadelphia's 10th district, incumbent Clarence K. Crossan, who had held office since 1925, went down to defeat against real estate broker John F. Byrne Sr. In the at-large races, all five Democrats were elected, including city party chairman James A. Finnegan, former registration commissioner Victor E. Moore, Charter Commission secretary Lewis M. Stevens, attorney (and future district attorney of Philadelphia) Victor H. Blanc, and magistrate Paul D'Ortona. The Republican slate ran more than 100,000 votes behind the Democrats, with incumbent councilman Louis Schwartz and state senator John W. Lord Jr. narrowly edging out labor leader John B. Backhus, assistant district attorney Colbert C. McClain, and clergyman Irwin W. Underhill for the two minority party slots on the council. The Progressive Party, a left-wing party founded in 1948 around Henry A. Wallace's presidential bid, ran two candidates who took less than one percent of the vote. ## City commissioners In the race for city commissioners, each party nominates two candidates and the top three are elected. The office was a county office, a holdover from the time before consolidation of the townships in Philadelphia County into one city. The most important of the remaining duties of the commissioners in Philadelphia was the conduct of the city's elections; they also had responsibility for regulating weights and measures. As in the other races, the Democrats triumphed, electing both Maurice S. Osser and Thomas P. McHenry. McHenry was an incumbent who had served as commissioner since 1945, while Osser was new to the office, having previously worked as a lawyer and as the leader of the 16th ward. The Republican spot on the county commission went to Walter I. Davidson, a sales executive. ## Row offices and judges The Democrats' success continued down the ballot. The incumbent sheriff, Austin Meehan, did not run for re-election, and the race for county sheriff pitted two incumbent city councilmen against each other for the job: Democrat William M. Lennox and Republican Cornelius S. Deegan Jr. The office of sheriff was another holdover county office. The sheriff, whose job differed from that of the chief of police, was the chief law enforcement officer of the court. Lennox came out ahead, and would hold the job for the next twenty years. Democrat Joseph A. Scanlon was elected over Republican Edward W. Furia for clerk of courts, an officer charged with the collection and disbursement of payments ordered by the courts. Scanlon, a former state legislator, served as clerk until 1957, when he died in office. For recorder of deeds, another county administrative office, Democrat Marshall L. Shepard was elected. Shepard was a Baptist minister who had also served as recorder of deeds in Washington, D.C. Two years later, the office was folded into the city government and converted to a civil service position. Most of the common pleas court judges up for re-election were endorsed by both parties, but in the one contested race, Democrat John Morgan Davis defeated incumbent Republican Thomas Bluett. The Democrats also took eight of the fourteen magisterial district judge positions (a local court, the duties of which are now performed by the Philadelphia Municipal Court). ## Referendum A statewide referendum on the ballot that day continued the work begun by the new city charter in asking voters to consolidate the city and county governments in Philadelphia. In 1854, all of the municipalities in Philadelphia County had been consolidated into one city, but many county offices still existed, duplicating the efforts of city officials. The merger would also bring county offices under the civil service protections of the new city charter. Merging the city and county governments had been defeated in a 1937 referendum, but in 1951 the question was overwhelmingly approved. Two other ballot proposals authorized the city to borrow \$17 million for municipal improvements and \$14 million for the gas works; both passed by a five-to-one margin. ## Aftermath The 1951 election was the final blow to Philadelphia's once-dominant Republican machine. After winning some minor offices in 1953, the Republican organization quickly declined again. Since that time, the Democratic Party has dominated the city's politics, with no other party electing a mayor or a majority of the city council. With Republicans no longer playing a significant role in Philadelphia's government, the main battle in city politics came to be between the Democratic Party's reformers and its organization stalwarts. By 1965, with most reformers out of government, the ascendant political culture in the city returned to what the Philadelphia Bulletin called "the old, narrow partisan view, the aroma of inside deals, back-scratching, and City Hall favoritism ... crass political bidding for favor at taxpayers' expense." ## See also - List of members of Philadelphia City Council since 1952
811,484	Spiderland	1,172,516,627	1991 studio album by Slint	[ "1991 albums", "Albums produced by Brian Paulson", "Slint albums", "Touch and Go Records albums" ]	Spiderland is the second and final studio album by the American rock band Slint. It contains six songs played over 40 minutes, and was released by Touch and Go Records on March 27, 1991. Slint's lineup at the time of recording comprised Brian McMahan on vocals and guitar, David Pajo on guitar, Todd Brashear on bass guitar and Britt Walford on drums. Spiderland was engineered by Brian Paulson and recorded over four days in August 1990. The music and vocal melodies were composed throughout the summer of 1990, while lyrics were written in-studio. Forming in 1986 in Louisville, Kentucky, Slint had met as teenagers playing in the Midwestern punk scene but soon diverged sonically from their hardcore roots. By the time they recorded Spiderland in late 1990, the band had developed a complex, idiosyncratic sound characterized by atypical rhythmic meters, harmonic dissonance and irregular song structures. McMahan's vocal delivery on the record alternates between spoken word, singing and shouting. The lyrics are presented in a narrative style and cover themes such as unease, social anxiety, loneliness, and despair. Slint broke up shortly before the album's release due to McMahan's depression. In the US, Spiderland initially attracted little critical attention and sold poorly. However, a warm reception from UK music papers and gradually increasing sales in subsequent years helped it develop a significant cult following. Spiderland is widely regarded as foundational to the 1990s post-rock and math rock movements, and is cited by critics as a milestone of indie and experimental rock, inspiring a myriad of subsequent artists. Slint reunited in 2005 to perform the album in its entirety across three international tours. ## Background Slint formed in 1986 in Louisville, Kentucky, after the dissolution of two local bands: Squirrel Bait and Maurice. The founding members included David Pajo (guitar), Britt Walford (drums) and Ethan Buckler (bass guitar), with Brian McMahan (guitar, vocals) joining soon after their first performance. Their debut album Tweez was recorded by Steve Albini and released in 1989 on the group's self-owned record label Jennifer Hartman Records and Tapes. Buckler left the band out of dissatisfaction with Tweez, and was replaced with Todd Brashear. Their second recording was an untitled extended play (EP) commonly referred to as Slint. Its instrumental rock sound featured on the EP, which would not be released until 1994, reflected both their new direction and increased musical sophistication since writing and recording their debut album. The 1989 studio recordings drew the attention of Corey Rusk, co-founder of Touch and Go Records. He said that the album "was just so radically different than Tweez. ... I remember getting a tape of that and just listening to it over and over, really fucking loud." By early 1990, Rusk had agreed to pay for studio time and committed to a release their next record with Touch and Go. In July 1989, two weeks after the release of Tweez, Slint supported concerts by Crain and King Kong at which they debuted early versions of the songs: "Nosferatu Man", "Breadcrumb Trail", "Good Morning, Captain" and "Washer". That June, they performed nearly finalized instrumental renditions of the Spiderland songs during a concert at the Kentucky Theater. ## Production and recording Throughout the summer of 1990, the band practiced the music for six new songs McMahan and Walford had written for Slint's second album. The songs were recorded in August 1990 with producer Brian Paulson, who was known for his "live" recording style and minimal takes. Paulson later said that the recording "was weird... because I remember sitting there, and I just knew there was something about it. I've never heard anything like this." McMahan and Walford wrote the lyrics at the last minute while in studio, although they had worked out the vocal melodies in advance using recordings of practice sessions and a four-track. The album mostly explored themes of coming of age and anxiety about the approach of adulthood, and McMahan did not want the lyrics or vocal style to be heard by others until the actual recordings. He said: "I did not want to rehearse the vocals...it was a one-shot, cathartic experience." The recording sessions were intense, fraught, and often difficult. According to AllMusic, they were "traumatic...and one more piece of evidence supporting the theory that band members had to be periodically institutionalized during the completion of the album." Rumors circulated that at least one member of Slint had checked into a psychiatric hospital. Walford later said that there was no truth to such claims, although the band was "definitely trying to be serious about things, pretty intense, which made recording the album kinda stressful." The recording was completed in four days. ## Music The album's guitar work is noted for its roomy sound, angular rhythms, dramatically alternating dynamic shifts, and irregular time signatures. McMahan's singing style varies among mumbling, spoken word, strained shouting, and a written-narrative style. Will Hermes of Spin summarized the album's sound as "mid-'70s King Crimson gone emo: screeching guitar chords and gorgeous note-spinning in odd-metered instrumentals speckled with words both spoken and sung". Melody Maker described the music as "structurally and in tone", saying that the band "recall[s] Television circa Marquee Moon and Crazy Horse, whose simplicity they echo and whose style they most certainly do not". The lyrics are usually narrative in style, and have been described as "eerie" and having "peculiar syntax". Both the vocal melodies and words were written by McMahan and Walford after the basic tracks had been recorded during practice sessions, and often were not heard by Pajo and Brashear until their final recording in studio. The vocal additions often pulled the songs in new directions, with examples being "Good Morning, Captain" and "Washer". McMahan was never comfortable taking the role of vocalist and only did so because nobody else in the band would. He considerably increases his range on "Spiderland", incorporating both his earlier whispered and shouting approaches with what Tennent describes as conventional, "actual singing". The opening track, "Breadcrumb Trail", describes a day at a carnival with a fortune-teller. The song is built from complex guitar arrangement with sharp transitions, during which the guitar fluctuates between a clean-sounding riff with harmonics in the verse to heavy and high pitched distortion in the chorus. "Nosferatu Man" is the second track and was inspired by the 1922 German Expressionist silent film Nosferatu. Its verse includes a dissonant guitar riff which uses high-pitched notes similar to those in "Breadcrumb Trail" and a drumbeat centered on snare and toms. The chorus, featuring "jagged" distorted guitar and a beat with "thrashing cymbals with quick drum fills", segues into an extended jam before the song ends with 30 seconds of feedback. Walford sings and plays lead guitar on "Don, Aman", a deliberate anagram of Madonna. Delivered in a hushed tone, the song's ambiguous lyrics depict the thoughts of an "isolated soul" before, during, and after an evening at a bar. The tempo quickens as the song develops, becoming loud and distorted at its peak, before slowing back to the original speed. "Washer" is the album's longest track, and features a low volume intro with guitar and cymbals before the rest of the band joins in the recording. The song builds until the final verse, when the tension is broken by loud distortion, followed by a lengthy outro. Pajo has said he is particularly proud of the song's one-note guitar solo, admitting that "at that point in my life, if someone asked me to do a solo, I would do the exact opposite of what a solo usually is. Instead of playing a bunch of notes, I would just play one, though I did some decorative stuff around it there. There’re some cool, weird things in that song". The instrumental "For Dinner..." begins with a quiet section of "brooding chords throb[bing] with the occasional rumble of muted toms and bass drum", the song cycles through sections of building and releasing tension. Unlike other tracks on the album, the guitars employ standard tuning, and does not use effects pedals. The closing song, "Good Morning, Captain", has been described as a tribute to the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner but the band have denied this. The song, which Pajo says is his favorite from the album, is built from a two-chord guitar structure, described as a "spindly, tight riff", and a "jerky" drumbeat. During the recording of the final chorus, McMahan became physically sick due to the strain of yelling over the guitars. David Peschek of The Guardian compared "Good Morning, Captain" to Led Zeppelin for its epic scope, though not its bleak mood, writing: "the extraordinary [song] is [Slint's] "Stairway to Heaven", if it's possible to imagine Stairway to Heaven bleached of all bombast." ## Title and packaging The title originates from McMahan's younger brother, who thought the record sounded "spidery". Its black-and-white cover photograph depicts the members of the band treading water in the lake of an abandoned quarry at lake in Utica, Indiana. The photograph was taken by the musician Will Oldham, who was friends with the band and whose father had taken the photograph on the cover of Tweez. The Stranger credits the image as responsible for the later mystique surrounding the publicity-shy band, and notes how "most people only had seen Slint as four heads floating in a Kentucky quarry on Spiderland's cover. Listeners pondered the band's sparsely adorned black-and-white covers as if they were ruins bearing secrets." Chris Gaerig of the Michigan Daily wrote that the album cover "captures the joyous fear and violence of the album so precisely it shakes souls. The group—submerged in a lake to their chins with deranged smiles—seems to be stalking you, hovering out of the black-and-white façade." Several other promotional images have been taken from the same photo session with Oldham. The photograph on the back cover is of a dead wolf spider, taken by Noel Saltzman, who also took the uncredited cover photo for their untitled 1994 EP. Saltzman found the spider in a shed while working his summer job. As it would not remain still enough to be photographed, Saltzman killed, froze, and repositioned it with tweezers to take the shot. The inside sleeve contains the message "interested female vocalists write 1864 douglas blvd. louisville, ky. 40205". The words "this recording is meant to be listened to on vinyl" is printed on some CD issues, indicating Slint's preference for analog audio devices. ## Reception The band had broken up by the time Touch and Go were preparing for the album's release. As a result, a planned tour of Europe was canceled and the album received minimal promotion. It thus failed to attract an audience, make an impression on college radio, or chart in either the US or the UK. The album went virtually unnoticed by the American music press or zines. Maximumrocknroll described it as "genius", but only during a passing mention midway through a column on the Kentucky scene. The writer for Flipside was unable to review the album as he had received a damaged copy from the label, and did not ask to have it replaced. McMahan admits that while the band did not seek to engage with journalists, "there wasn't really a huge infrastructure for getting information out on a broad scale. We definitely avoided it." The UK music press were the first to report on the album. Edwin Pouncey reviewed it in the March 23, 1991 issue of NME, finding its sound indebted to Sonic Youth but concluding that "something original squirms at the core of Slint. Perhaps next time they'll reveal all." Albini, who produced Tweez, wrote a review for Melody Maker published the following week. He praised the music's originality and emotional intensity, as well as the clarity and immediacy of Paulson's production. He claimed that Tweez—which he produced—only "hints at their genius" but had little of the "staying power" manifested on Spiderland. He awarded the album "ten fucking stars" and predicted that it would rise in stature, writing "It's an amazing record ... and no one still capable of being moved by rock music should miss it. In 10 years it will be a landmark and you'll have to scramble to buy a copy then." The album sold only a few thousand copies within the first year. Even a few years later it was estimated to have sold fewer than 5,000 copies. Slint remained an obscure local act in the period leading up to the album's release. By the time it came out, the band had already broken up and its members had moved on to new projects, believing that Slint would be "just another blip". In the February issue of Select, reviewer Mike Noon praised its "creeping success", but cautioned that the band's sound would take time to fully appreciate. In September 1992, Ben Thompson reviewed both Spiderland and Tweez for The Wire, and while the band's reputation had grown by that time, wrote that bands "like Pavement" were "hailing them as guiding lights for a new obliqueness". "It's not surprising these records confused people on first release", he wrote, in part because listeners had been primed to expect straightforward noise rock—a "total red herring" that concealed the band's "alarmingly introverted" sound. Although Thompson found Spiderland more accessible than Tweez, he wrote that it "still demands that you push your head up right close to the speakers (or buy some headphones) if you want to find out what is being said and sung. But you do want to find out." According to biographer Scott Tennent, the laudatory review of the Melody Maker failed to attract commercial interest, but over the years succeeded in rescuing the album from an otherwise-assured relegation to obscurity. ## Legacy Spiderland is considered a major influence on the post-rock bands Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Isis and Explosions in the Sky. Lou Barlow of Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh said the album was "quiet-to-loud" while still sounding like nothing before, as if "a new kind of music", while PJ Harvey included it in her 1992 "Ten For Today" list of records. Bob Nastanovich of Pavement ranked it as among his favorite albums. Its cover was recreated by The Shins in the music video for "New Slang". The album is regarded as essential to "the fabric of math-rock genre". Peschek described it as "the ur-text for what became known as post-rock, a fractured, almost geometric reimagining of rock music stripped of its dionysiac impulse." Rachel Devine of The List called Spiderland "arguably the most disproportionately influential [album] in music history". Pitchfork's Stuart Berman noted how the album "motivated a cluster of semi-popular bands in the late-90s and early 2000s to adopt its whisper-to-scream schematic. It's the boundless inspiration it perpetually provides for all the bands that have yet to emerge from the basement." In 2015, Gigwise named the album in their list of "The 11 most vicious post-hardcore albums ever." In the 2010s AllMusic's Mark Deming described it as one of the most singular and important albums of the '90s, and in 2003, Pitchfork named it the twelfth best album of the 1990s. Writing in 2000, Robert Christgau was less enthusiastic, and said that despite their "sad-sack affect", Slint are actually "art-rockers without the courage of their pretensions", and noted that the lyrics were not to his liking. In The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, journalist Mac Randall felt even though it is more accessible than Tweez, "[t]he absence of anything resembling a tune continues to nag". Touch and Go founder Corey Rusk observed how Spiderland is "like an icon now. But when it came out, nobody cared! The band had broken up by the time the album came out, and it really didn't sell particularly well or get written about all that much in the year it was released. But it was a revolutionary, groundbreaking record, and it's one of the few instances where people catch up to it later on." ### Reunions After Slint's break-up in November 1990, the members went on to play in other projects, notably Tortoise, The Breeders, Palace and The For Carnation. They reunited briefly in 2005 for an eighteen-date tour. Pajo said that they didn't "want to be a reunion band that keeps reuniting. ... I know that this is going to be it." Their 2007 performance of the album at All Tomorrow's Parties' "Don't Look Back" concert series celebrating classic albums lead to a tour that included an appearance at the 2007 Pitchfork Music Festival and Primavera Sound festival. Critics differed in their assessment of the reunion. Some viewed the band's studio-based music as fundamentally unsuited to a live setting. Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that although "fans greeted [Slint's performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival] as manna from heaven. [...] the musicians' fragile, intertwining guitar lines, mumbled attempts at poetry and uninspiring shoegazer personas were poor matches for the setting and the occasion." Both DeRogatis and The A.V. Club noted that the band's performance was plagued by sound problems. According to Vulture reviewer Nick Catucci, their "deeply brooding, fussily-executed album finally sounded, sixteen years later...like the existential, cosmos-annihilating shrug it was envisioned as. Which is to say: It sounded fucking great." ## Remastered box set In 2014, Touch and Go reissued Tweez and a version of Spiderland remastered by Bob Weston from the original analog master-tapes. The bonus tracks were selected by the band and include demos, outtakes and a live performance. The transitional songs (written after Tweez, but before the bulk of the Spiderland tracks) "Pam" and "Glenn" (whose recording is described as containing one the best drum sounds Albini ever achieved) were recorded during the Spiderland sessions but failed to make the album. ## Track listing All music written by Slint. Actual music composers listed below. Lyrics by Brian McMahan and Britt Walford. ## Personnel The album packaging omitted the band members' names. The lineup credits below are adapted from The Great Alternative & Indie Discography (1999) by Martin C. Strong. Walford performed vocals and guitar on "Don, Aman", accompanied by Pajo on guitar. Slint - Todd Brashear – bass guitar (tracks 1–2, 4–6) - David Pajo – guitar (tracks 1–6) - Brian McMahan – vocals (tracks 1–4, 6); guitar (tracks 1–2, 4–6) - Britt Walford – drums (tracks 1–2, 4–6); vocals (tracks 2, 3, 6), guitar (track 3) Other personnel - Will Oldham – photography ("band photo") - Brian Paulson – engineering - Noel Saltzman – photography ("spider photo") ## Release history ## Accolades
9,279	Elephant	1,172,113,029	Largest living land animals	[ "Articles containing video clips", "Elephants", "Herbivorous mammals", "Mammal common names", "Pliocene first appearances", "Tool-using mammals" ]	Elephants are the largest living land animals. Three living species are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. They are the only surviving members of the family Elephantidae and the order Proboscidea; extinct relatives include mammoths and mastodons. Distinctive features of elephants include a long proboscis called a trunk, tusks, large ear flaps, pillar-like legs, and tough but sensitive grey skin. The trunk is prehensile, bringing food and water to the mouth and grasping objects. Tusks, which are derived from the incisor teeth, serve both as weapons and as tools for moving objects and digging. The large ear flaps assist in maintaining a constant body temperature as well as in communication. African elephants have larger ears and concave backs, whereas Asian elephants have smaller ears and convex or level backs. Elephants are scattered throughout sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and are found in different habitats, including savannahs, forests, deserts, and marshes. They are herbivorous, and they stay near water when it is accessible. They are considered to be keystone species, due to their impact on their environments. Elephants have a fission–fusion society, in which multiple family groups come together to socialise. Females (cows) tend to live in family groups, which can consist of one female with her calves or several related females with offspring. The leader of a female group, usually the oldest cow, is known as the matriarch. Males (bulls) leave their family groups when they reach puberty and may live alone or with other males. Adult bulls mostly interact with family groups when looking for a mate. They enter a state of increased testosterone and aggression known as musth, which helps them gain dominance over other males as well as reproductive success. Calves are the centre of attention in their family groups and rely on their mothers for as long as three years. Elephants can live up to 70 years in the wild. They communicate by touch, sight, smell, and sound; elephants use infrasound and seismic communication over long distances. Elephant intelligence has been compared with that of primates and cetaceans. They appear to have self-awareness, and possibly show concern for dying and dead individuals of their kind. African bush elephants and Asian elephants are listed as endangered and African forest elephants as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). One of the biggest threats to elephant populations is the ivory trade, as the animals are poached for their ivory tusks. Other threats to wild elephants include habitat destruction and conflicts with local people. Elephants are used as working animals in Asia. In the past, they were used in war; today, they are often controversially put on display in zoos, or employed for entertainment in circuses. Elephants have an iconic status in human culture and have been featured in art, folklore, religion, literature, and popular culture. ## Etymology The word elephant is based on the Latin elephas (genitive elephantis) , which is the Latinised form of the ancient Greek ἐλέφας (elephas) (genitive ἐλέφαντος (elephantos)), probably from a non-Indo-European language, likely Phoenician. It is attested in Mycenaean Greek as e-re-pa (genitive e-re-pa-to) in Linear B syllabic script. As in Mycenaean Greek, Homer used the Greek word to mean ivory, but after the time of Herodotus, it also referred to the animal. The word elephant appears in Middle English as olyfaunt (c. 1300) and was borrowed from Old French oliphant (12th century). ## Taxonomy Elephants belong to the family Elephantidae, the sole remaining family within the order Proboscidea. Their closest extant relatives are the sirenians (dugongs and manatees) and the hyraxes, with which they share the clade Paenungulata within the superorder Afrotheria. Elephants and sirenians are further grouped in the clade Tethytheria. Three species of living elephants are recognised; the African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana), forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) and Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). African elephants were traditionally considered a single species, Loxodonta africana, but molecular studies have affirmed their status as separate species. Mammoths (Mammuthus) are nested within living elephants as they are more closely related to Asian elephants than to African elephants. Another extinct genus of elephant, Palaeoloxodon, is also recognised, which appears to have close affinities with and to have hybridised with African elephants. ### Evolution Over 180 extinct members of order Proboscidea have been described. The earliest proboscideans, the African Eritherium and Phosphatherium are known from the late Paleocene. The Eocene included Numidotherium, Moeritherium and Barytherium from Africa. These animals were relatively small and, some, like Moeritherium and Barytherium were probably amphibious. Later on, genera such as Phiomia and Palaeomastodon arose; the latter likely inhabited more forested areas. Proboscidean diversification changed little during the Oligocene. One notable species of this epoch was Eritreum melakeghebrekristosi of the Horn of Africa, which may have been an ancestor to several later species. A major event in proboscidean evolution was the collision of Afro-Arabia with Eurasia, during the Early Miocene, around 18–19 million years ago, allowing proboscideans to disperse from their African homeland across Eurasia and later, around 16–15 million years ago into North America across the Bering Land Bridge. Proboscidean groups prominent during the Miocene include the deinotheres, along with the more advanced elephantimorphs, including mammutids (mastodons), gomphotheres, amebelodontids (which includes the "shovel tuskers" like Platybelodon), choerolophodontids and stegodontids. Around 10 million years ago, the earliest members of the family Elephantidae emerged in Africa, having originated from gomphotheres. Elephantids are distinguished from earlier proboscideans by a major shift in the molar morphology to parallel lophs rather than the cusps of earlier proboscideans, allowing them to become higher-crowned (hypsodont) and more efficient in consuming grass. The Late Miocene saw major climactic changes, which resulted in the decline and extinction of many proboscidean groups. The earliest members of the modern genera of Elephantidae appeared during the latest Miocene–early Pliocene around 5 million years ago. The elephantid genera Elephas (which includes the living Asian elephant) and Mammuthus (mammoths) migrated out of Africa during the late Pliocene, around 3.6 to 3.2 million years ago. Over the course of the Early Pleistocene, all non-elephantid probobscidean genera outside of the Americas became extinct with the exception of Stegodon, with gomphotheres dispersing into South America as part of the Great American interchange, and mammoths migrating into North America around 1.5 million years ago. At the end of the Early Pleistocene, around 800,000 years ago the elephantid genus Palaeoloxodon dispersed outside of Africa, becoming widely distributed in Eurasia. Proboscideans underwent a dramatic decline during the Late Pleistocene, with all remaining non-elephantid proboscideans (including Stegodon, mastodons, and the gomphotheres Cuvieronius and Notiomastodon) and Palaeoloxodon becoming extinct, with mammoths only surviving in relict populations on islands around the Bering Strait into the Holocene, with their latest survival being on Wrangel Island around 4,000 years ago. Over the course of their evolution, probobscideans grew in size. With that came longer limbs and wider feet with a more digitigrade stance, along with a larger head and shorter neck. The trunk evolved and grew longer to provide reach. The number of premolars, incisors, and canines decreased, and the cheek teeth (molars and premolars) became longer and more specialised. The incisors developed into tusks of different shapes and sizes. Several species of proboscideans became isolated on islands and experienced insular dwarfism, some dramatically reducing in body size, such as the 1 metre (3.3 ft) tall dwarf elephant species Palaeoloxodon falconeri. ### Living species ## Anatomy Elephants are the largest living terrestrial animals. The skeleton is made up of 326–351 bones. The vertebrae are connected by tight joints, which limit the backbone's flexibility. African elephants have 21 pairs of ribs, while Asian elephants have 19 or 20 pairs. The skull contains air cavities (sinuses) that reduce the weight of the skull while maintaining overall strength. These cavities give the inside of the skull a honeycomb-like appearance. By contrast, the lower jaw is dense. The cranium is particularly large and provides enough room for the attachment of muscles to support the entire head. The skull is built to withstand great stress, particularly when fighting or using the tusks. The brain is surrounded by arches in the skull, which serve as protection. Because of the size of the head, the neck is relatively short to provide better support. Elephants are homeotherms and maintain their average body temperature at \~ 36 °C (97 °F), with a minimum of 35.2 °C (95.4 °F) during the cool season, and a maximum of 38.0 °C (100.4 °F) during the hot dry season. ### Ears and eyes Elephant ear flaps, or pinnae, are 1–2 mm (0.039–0.079 in) thick in the middle with a thinner tip and supported by a thicker base. They contain numerous blood vessels called capillaries. Warm blood flows into the capillaries, releasing excess heat into the environment. This effect is increased by flapping the ears back and forth. Larger ear surfaces contain more capillaries, and more heat can be released. Of all the elephants, African bush elephants live in the hottest climates and have the largest ear flaps. The ossicles are adapted for hearing low frequencies, being most sensitive at 1 kHz. Lacking a lacrimal apparatus (tear duct), the eye relies on the harderian gland in the orbit to keep it moist. A durable nictitating membrane shields the globe. The animal's field of vision is compromised by the location and limited mobility of the eyes. Elephants are considered dichromats and they can see well in dim light but not in bright light. ### Trunk The elongated and prehensile trunk, or proboscis, consists of both the nose and upper lip, which fuse in early fetal development. This versatile appendage contains up to 150,000 separate muscle fascicles, with no bone and little fat. These paired muscles consist of two major types: superficial (surface) and internal. The former are divided into dorsal, ventral, and lateral muscles, while the latter are divided into transverse and radiating muscles. The muscles of the trunk connect to a bony opening in the skull. The nasal septum consists of small elastic muscles between the nostrils, which are divided by cartilage at the base. A unique proboscis nerve – a combination of the maxillary and facial nerves – lines each side of the appendage. As a muscular hydrostat, the trunk moves through finely controlled muscle contractions, working both with and against each other. Using three basic movements: bending, twisting, and longitudinal stretching or retracting, the trunk has near unlimited flexibility. Objects grasped by the end of the trunk can be moved to the mouth by curving the appendage inward. The trunk can also bend at different points by creating stiffened "pseudo-joints". The tip can be moved in a way similar to the human hand. The skin is more elastic on the dorsal side of the elephant trunk than underneath; allowing the animal to stretch and coil while maintaining a strong grasp. The African elephants have two finger-like extensions at the tip of the trunk that allow them to pluck small food. The Asian elephant has only one and relies more on wrapping around a food item. Asian elephant trunks have better motor coordination. The trunk's extreme flexibility allows it to forage and wrestle other elephants with it. It is powerful enough to lift up to 350 kg (770 lb), but it also has the precision to crack a peanut shell without breaking the seed. With its trunk, an elephant can reach items up to 7 m (23 ft) high and dig for water in the mud or sand below. It also uses it to clean itself. Individuals may show lateral preference when grasping with their trunks: some prefer to twist them to the left, others to the right. Elephant trunks are capable of powerful siphoning. They can expand their nostrils by 30%, leading to a 64% greater nasal volume, and can breathe in almost 30 times faster than a human sneeze, at over 150 m/s (490 ft/s). They suck up water, which is squirted into the mouth or over the body. The trunk of an adult Asian elephant is capable of retaining 8.5 L (2.2 US gal) of water. They will also sprinkle dust or grass on themselves. When underwater, the elephant uses its trunk as a snorkel. The trunk also acts as a sense organ. Its sense of smell may be four times greater than a bloodhound's nose. The infraorbital nerve, which makes the trunk sensitive to touch, is thicker than both the optic and auditory nerves. Whiskers grow all along the trunk, and are particularly packed at the tip, where they contribute to its tactile sensitivity. Unlike those of many mammals, such as cats and rats, elephant whiskers do not move independently ("whisk") to sense the environment; the trunk itself must move to bring the whiskers into contact with nearby objects. Whiskers grow in rows along each side on the ventral surface of the trunk, which is thought to be essential in helping elephants balance objects there, whereas they are more evenly arranged on the dorsal surface. The number and patterns of whiskers are distinctly different between species. Damaging the trunk would be detrimental to an elephant's survival, although in rare cases, individuals have survived with shortened ones. One trunkless elephant has been observed to graze using its lips with its hind legs in the air and balancing on its front knees. Floppy trunk syndrome is a condition of trunk paralysis recorded in African bush elephants and involves the degeneration of the peripheral nerves and muscles. The disorder has been linked to lead poisoning. ### Teeth Elephants usually have 26 teeth: the incisors, known as the tusks; 12 deciduous premolars; and 12 molars. Unlike most mammals, teeth are not replaced by new ones emerging from the jaws vertically. Instead, new teeth start at the back of the mouth and push out the old ones. The first chewing tooth on each side of the jaw falls out when the elephant is two to three years old. This is followed by four more tooth replacements at the ages of four to six, 9–15, 18–28, and finally in their early 40s. The final (usually sixth) set must last the elephant the rest of its life. Elephant teeth have loop-shaped dental ridges, which are more diamond-shaped in African elephants. #### Tusks The tusks of an elephant have modified second incisors in the upper jaw. They replace deciduous milk teeth at 6–12 months of age and keep growing at about 17 cm (7 in) a year. As the tusk develops, it is topped with smooth, cone-shaped enamel that eventually wanes. The dentine is known as ivory and has a cross-section of intersecting lines, known as "engine turning", which create diamond-shaped patterns. Being living tissue, tusks are fairly soft and about as dense as the mineral calcite. The tusk protrudes from a socket in the skull, and most of it is external. At least one-third of the tusk contains the pulp, and some have nerves that stretch even further. Thus, it would be difficult to remove it without harming the animal. When removed, ivory will dry up and crack if not kept cool and wet. Tusks function in digging, debarking, marking, moving objects, and fighting. Elephants are usually right- or left-tusked, similar to humans, who are typically right- or left-handed. The dominant, or "master" tusk, is typically more worn down, as it is shorter and blunter. For African elephants, tusks are present in both males and females, and are around the same length in both sexes, reaching up to 300 cm (9 ft 10 in), but those of males tend to be more massive. In the Asian species, only the males have large tusks. Female Asians have very small tusks, or none at all. Tuskless males exist and are particularly common among Sri Lankan elephants. Asian males can have tusks as long as Africans', but they are usually slimmer and lighter; the largest recorded was 302 cm (9 ft 11 in) long and weighed 39 kg (86 lb). Hunting for elephant ivory in Africa and Asia has led to natural selection for shorter tusks and tusklessness. ### Skin An elephant's skin is generally very tough, at 2.5 cm (1 in) thick on the back and parts of the head. The skin around the mouth, anus, and inside of the ear is considerably thinner. Elephants are typically grey, but African elephants look brown or reddish after rolling in coloured mud. Asian elephants have some patches of depigmentation, particularly on the head. Calves have brownish or reddish hair, with the head and back being particularly hairy. As elephants mature, their hair darkens and becomes sparser, but dense concentrations of hair and bristles remain on the tip of the tail and parts of the head and genitals. Normally, the skin of an Asian elephant is covered with more hair than its African counterpart. Their hair is thought to help them lose heat in their hot environments. Although tough, an elephant's skin is very sensitive and requires mud baths to maintain moisture and protect it from burning and insect bites. After bathing, the elephant will usually use its trunk to blow dust onto its body, which dries into a protective crust. Elephants have difficulty releasing heat through the skin because of their low surface-area-to-volume ratio, which is many times smaller than that of a human. They have even been observed lifting up their legs to expose their soles to the air. Elephants only have sweat glands between the toes, but the skin allows water to disperse and evaporate, cooling the animal. In addition, cracks in the skin may reduce dehydration and allow for increased thermal regulation in the long term. ### Legs, locomotion, and posture To support the animal's weight, an elephant's limbs are positioned more vertically under the body than in most other mammals. The long bones of the limbs have cancellous bones in place of medullary cavities. This strengthens the bones while still allowing haematopoiesis (blood cell creation). Both the front and hind limbs can support an elephant's weight, although 60% is borne by the front. The position of the limbs and leg bones allows an elephant to stand still for extended periods of time without tiring. Elephants are incapable of turning their manus as the ulna and radius of the front legs are secured in pronation. Elephants may also lack the pronator quadratus and pronator teres muscles or have very small ones. The circular feet of an elephant have soft tissues, or "cushion pads" beneath the manus or pes, which allow them to bear the animal's great mass. They appear to have a sesamoid, an extra "toe" similar in placement to a giant panda's extra "thumb", that also helps in weight distribution. As many as five toenails can be found on both the front and hind feet. Elephants can move both forward and backward, but are incapable of trotting, jumping, or galloping. They can move on land only by walking or ambling: a faster gait similar to running. In walking, the legs act as pendulums, with the hips and shoulders moving up and down while the foot is planted on the ground. The fast gait does not meet all the criteria of running, since there is no point where all the feet are off the ground, although the elephant uses its legs much like other running animals, and can move faster by quickening its stride. Fast-moving elephants appear to 'run' with their front legs, but 'walk' with their hind legs and can reach a top speed of 25 km/h (16 mph). At this speed, most other quadrupeds are well into a gallop, even accounting for leg length. Spring-like kinetics could explain the difference between the motion of elephants and other animals. The cushion pads expand and contract, and reduce both the pain and noise that would come from a very heavy animal moving. Elephants are capable swimmers: they can swim for up to six hours while staying at the surface, moving at 2.1 km/h (1 mph) and traversing up to 48 km (30 mi) continuously. ### Internal systems The brain of an elephant weighs 4.5–5.5 kg (10–12 lb) compared to 1.6 kg (4 lb) for a human brain. It is the largest of all terrestrial mammals. While the elephant brain is larger overall, it is proportionally smaller than the human brain. At birth, an elephant's brain already weighs 30–40% of its adult weight. The cerebrum and cerebellum are well developed, and the temporal lobes are so large that they bulge out laterally. Their temporal lobes are proportionally larger than those of other animals, including humans. The throat of an elephant appears to contain a pouch where it can store water for later use. The larynx of the elephant is the largest known among mammals. The vocal folds are anchored close to the epiglottis base. When comparing an elephant's vocal folds to those of a human, an elephant's are proportionally longer, thicker, with a greater cross-sectional area. In addition, they are located further up the vocal tract with an acute slope. The heart of an elephant weighs 12–21 kg (26–46 lb). Its apex has two pointed ends, an unusual trait among mammals. In addition, the ventricles of the heart split towards the top, a trait also found in sirenians. When upright, the elephant's heart beats around 28 beats per minute and actually speeds up to 35 beats when it lies down. The blood vessels are thick and wide and can hold up under high blood pressure. The lungs are attached to the diaphragm, and breathing relies less on the expanding of the ribcage. Connective tissue exists in place of the pleural cavity. This may allow the animal to deal with the pressure differences when its body is underwater and its trunk is breaking the surface for air. Elephants breathe mostly with the trunk but also with the mouth. They have a hindgut fermentation system, and their large and small intestines together reach 35 m (115 ft) in length. Less than half of an elephant's food intake gets digested, despite the process lasting a day. ### Sex organs A male elephant's testes are located internally near the kidneys. The penis can be as long as 100 cm (39 in) with a 16 cm (6 in) wide base. It curves to an 'S' when fully erect and has an orifice shaped like a Y. The female's clitoris may be 40 cm (16 in). The vulva is found lower than in other herbivores, between the hind legs instead of under the tail. Determining pregnancy status can be difficult due to the animal's large belly. The female's mammary glands occupy the space between the front legs, which puts the suckling calf within reach of the female's trunk. Elephants have a unique organ, the temporal gland, located on both sides of the head. This organ is associated with sexual behaviour, and males secrete a fluid from it when in musth. Females have also been observed with these secretions. ## Behaviour and ecology Elephants are herbivorous and will eat leaves, twigs, fruit, bark, grass, and roots. African elephants mostly browse, while Asian elephants mainly graze. They can eat as much as 300 kg (660 lb) of food and drink 40 L (11 US gal) of water in a day. Elephants tend to stay near water sources. They have morning, afternoon, and nighttime feeding sessions. At midday, elephants rest under trees and may doze off while standing. Sleeping occurs at night while the animal is lying down. Elephants average 3–4 hours of sleep per day. Both males and family groups typically move no more than 20 km (12 mi) a day, but distances as far as 180 km (112 mi) have been recorded in the Etosha region of Namibia. Elephants go on seasonal migrations in response to changes in environmental conditions. In northern Botswana, they travel 325 km (202 mi) to the Chobe River after the local waterholes dry up in late August. Because of their large size, elephants have a huge impact on their environments and are considered keystone species. Their habit of uprooting trees and undergrowth can transform savannah into grasslands; smaller herbivores can access trees mowed down by elephants. When they dig for water during droughts, they create waterholes that can be used by other animals. When they use waterholes, they end up making them bigger. At Mount Elgon, elephants dig through caves and pave the way for ungulates, hyraxes, bats, birds and insects. Elephants are important seed dispersers; African forest elephants consume and deposit many seeds over great distances, with either no effect or a positive effect on germination. In Asian forests, large seeds require giant herbivores like elephants and rhinoceros for transport and dispersal. This ecological niche cannot be filled by the smaller Malayan tapir. Because most of the food elephants eat goes undigested, their dung can provide food for other animals, such as dung beetles and monkeys. Elephants can have a negative impact on ecosystems. At Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda, elephant numbers have threatened several species of small birds that depend on woodlands. Their weight causes the soil to compress, leading to runoff and erosion. Elephants typically coexist peacefully with other herbivores, which will usually stay out of their way. Some aggressive interactions between elephants and rhinoceros have been recorded. The size of adult elephants makes them nearly invulnerable to predators. Calves may be preyed on by lions, spotted hyenas, and wild dogs in Africa and tigers in Asia. The lions of Savuti, Botswana, have adapted to hunting elephants, mostly calves, juveniles or even sub-adults. There are rare reports of adult Asian elephants falling prey to tigers. Elephants tend to have high numbers of parasites, particularly nematodes, compared to many other mammals. This is due to them being largely immune to predators, which would otherwise kill off many of the individuals with significant parasite loads. ### Social organisation Elephants are generally gregarious animals. African bush elephants in particular have a complex, stratified social structure. Female elephants spend their entire lives in tight-knit matrilineal family groups. They are led by the matriarch, who is often the eldest female. She remains leader of the group until death or if she no longer has the energy for the role; a study on zoo elephants found that the death of the matriarch led to greater stress in the surviving elephants. When her tenure is over, the matriarch's eldest daughter takes her place instead of her sister (if present). One study found that younger matriarchs take potential threats less seriously. Large family groups may split if they cannot be supported by local resources. At Amboseli National Park, Kenya, female groups may consist of around ten members, including four adults and their dependent offspring. Here, a cow's life involves interaction with those outside her group. Two separate families may associate and bond with each other, forming what are known as bond groups. During the dry season, elephant families may aggregate into clans. These may number around nine groups, in which clans do not form strong bonds but defend their dry-season ranges against other clans. The Amboseli elephant population is further divided into the "central" and "peripheral" subpopulations. Female Asian elephants tend to have more fluid social associations. In Sri Lanka, there appear to be stable family units or "herds" and larger, looser "groups". They have been observed to have "nursing units" and "juvenile-care units". In southern India, elephant populations may contain family groups, bond groups and possibly clans. Family groups tend to be small, with only one or two adult females and their offspring. A group containing more than two cows and their offspring is known as a "joint family". Malay elephant populations have even smaller family units and do not reach levels above a bond group. Groups of African forest elephants typically consist of one cow with one to three offspring. These groups appear to interact with each other, especially at forest clearings. Adult males live separate lives. As he matures, a bull associates more with outside males or even other families. At Amboseli, young males may be away from their families 80% of the time by 14–15 years of age. When males permanently leave, they either live alone or with other males. The former is typical of bulls in dense forests. A dominance hierarchy exists among males, whether they are social or solitary. Dominance depends on age, size, and sexual condition. Male elephants can be quite sociable when not competing for mates and form vast and fluid social networks. Older bulls act as the leaders of these groups. The presence of older males appears to subdue the aggression and "deviant" behaviour of younger ones. The largest all-male groups can reach close to 150 individuals. Adult males and females come together to breed. Bulls will accompany family groups if a cow is in oestrous. ### Sexual behaviour #### Musth Adult males enter a state of increased testosterone known as musth. In a population in southern India, males first enter musth at 15 years old, but it is not very intense until they are older than 25. At Amboseli, no bulls under 24 were found to be in musth, while half of those aged 25–35 and all those over 35 were. In some areas, there may be seasonal influences on the timing of musths. The main characteristic of a bull's musth is a fluid discharged from the temporal gland that runs down the side of his face. Behaviours associated with musth include walking with a high and swinging head, nonsynchronous ear flapping, picking at the ground with the tusks, marking, rumbling, and urinating in the sheath. The length of this varies between males of different ages and conditions, lasting from days to months. Males become extremely aggressive during musth. Size is the determining factor in agonistic encounters when the individuals have the same condition. In contests between musth and non-musth individuals, musth bulls win the majority of the time, even when the non-musth bull is larger. A male may stop showing signs of musth when he encounters a musth male of higher rank. Those of equal rank tend to avoid each other. Agonistic encounters typically consist of threat displays, chases, and minor sparring. Rarely do they full-on fight. #### Mating Elephants are polygynous breeders, and most copulations occur during rainfall. An oestrus cow uses pheromones in her urine and vaginal secretions to signal her readiness to mate. A bull will follow a potential mate and assess her condition with the flehmen response, which requires him to collect a chemical sample with his trunk and taste it with the vomeronasal organ at the roof of the mouth. The oestrous cycle of a cow lasts 14–16 weeks, with the follicular phase lasting 4–6 weeks and the luteal phase lasting 8–10 weeks. While most mammals have one surge of luteinizing hormone during the follicular phase, elephants have two. The first (or anovulatory) surge, appears to change the female's scent, signaling to males that she is in heat, but ovulation does not occur until the second (or ovulatory) surge. Cows over 45–50 years of age are less fertile. Bulls engage in a behaviour known as mate-guarding, where they follow oestrous females and defend them from other males. Most mate-guarding is done by musth males, and females seek them out, particularly older ones. Musth appears to signal to females the condition of the male, as weak or injured males do not have normal musths. For young females, the approach of an older bull can be intimidating, so her relatives stay nearby for comfort. During copulation, the male rests his trunk on the female. The penis is mobile enough to move without the pelvis. Before mounting, it curves forward and upward. Copulation lasts about 45 seconds and does not involve pelvic thrusting or an ejaculatory pause. Homosexual behaviour is frequent in both sexes. As in heterosexual interactions, this involves mounting. Male elephants sometimes stimulate each other by playfighting, and "championships" may form between old bulls and younger males. Female same-sex behaviours have been documented only in captivity, where they engage in mutual masturbation with their trunks. ### Birth and development Gestation in elephants typically lasts between one and a half and two years and the female will not give birth again for at least four years. The relatively long pregnancy is supported by several corpus luteums and gives the foetus more time to develop, particularly the brain and trunk. Births tend to take place during the wet season. Typically, only a single young is born, but twins sometimes occur. Calves are born roughly 85 cm (33 in) tall and with a weight of around 120 kg (260 lb). They are precocial and quickly stand and walk to follow their mother and family herd. A newborn calf will attract the attention of all the herd members. Adults and most of the other young will gather around the newborn, touching and caressing it with their trunks. For the first few days, the mother limits access to her young. Alloparenting – where a calf is cared for by someone other than its mother – takes place in some family groups. Allomothers are typically aged two to twelve years. For the first few days, the newborn is unsteady on its feet and needs its mother's help. It relies on touch, smell, and hearing, as its eyesight is less developed. With little coordination in its trunk, it can only flop it around which may cause it to trip. When it reaches its second week, the calf can walk with more balance and has more control over its trunk. After its first month, the trunk can grab and hold objects, but still lacks sucking abilities, and the calf must bend down to drink. It continues to stay near its mother as it is still reliant on her. For its first three months, a calf relies entirely on its mother's milk, after which it begins to forage for vegetation and can use its trunk to collect water. At the same time, there is progress in lip and leg movements. By nine months, mouth, trunk and foot coordination are mastered. Suckling bouts tend to last 2–4 min/hr for a calf younger than a year. After a year, a calf is fully capable of grooming, drinking, and feeding itself. It still needs its mother's milk and protection until it is at least two years old. Suckling after two years may improve growth, health and fertility. Play behaviour in calves differs between the sexes; females run or chase each other while males play-fight. The former are sexually mature by the age of nine years while the latter become mature around 14–15 years. Adulthood starts at about 18 years of age in both sexes. Elephants have long lifespans, reaching 60–70 years of age. Lin Wang, a captive male Asian elephant, lived for 86 years. ### Communication Elephants communicate in various ways. Individuals greet one another by touching each other on the mouth, temporal glands and genitals. This allows them to pick up chemical cues. Older elephants use trunk-slaps, kicks, and shoves to control younger ones. Touching is especially important for mother–calf communication. When moving, elephant mothers will touch their calves with their trunks or feet when side-by-side or with their tails if the calf is behind them. A calf will press against its mother's front legs to signal it wants to rest and will touch her breast or leg when it wants to suckle. Visual displays mostly occur in agonistic situations. Elephants will try to appear more threatening by raising their heads and spreading their ears. They may add to the display by shaking their heads and snapping their ears, as well as tossing around dust and vegetation. They are usually bluffing when performing these actions. Excited elephants also raise their heads and spread their ears but additionally may raise their trunks. Submissive elephants will lower their heads and trunks, as well as flatten their ears against their necks, while those that are ready to fight will bend their ears in a V shape. Elephants produce several vocalisations—some of which pass though the trunk—for both short and long range communication. This includes trumpeting, bellowing, roaring, growling, barking, snorting, and rumbling. Elephants can produce infrasonic rumbles. For Asian elephants, these calls have a frequency of 14–24 Hz, with sound pressure levels of 85–90 dB and last 10–15 seconds. For African elephants, calls range from 15 to 35 Hz with sound pressure levels as high as 117 dB, allowing communication for many kilometres, possibly over 10 km (6 mi). Elephants are known to communicate with seismics, vibrations produced by impacts on the earth's surface or acoustical waves that travel through it. An individual foot stomping or mock charging can create seismic signals that can be heard at travel distances of up to 32 km (20 mi). Seismic waveforms produced by rumbles travel 16 km (10 mi). ### Intelligence and cognition Elephants are among the most intelligent animals. They exhibit mirror self-recognition, an indication of self-awareness and cognition that has also been demonstrated in some apes and dolphins. One study of a captive female Asian elephant suggested the animal was capable of learning and distinguishing between several visual and some acoustic discrimination pairs. This individual was even able to score a high accuracy rating when re-tested with the same visual pairs a year later. Elephants are among the species known to use tools. An Asian elephant has been observed fine-tuning branches for use as flyswatters. Tool modification by these animals is not as advanced as that of chimpanzees. Elephants are popularly thought of as having an excellent memory. This could have a factual basis; they possibly have cognitive maps which give them long lasting memories of their environment on a wide scale. Individuals may be able to remember where their family members are located. Scientists debate the extent to which elephants feel emotion. They are attracted to the bones of their own kind, regardless of whether they are related. As with chimpanzees and dolphins, a dying or dead elephant may elicit attention and aid from others, including those from other groups. This has been interpreted as expressing "concern"; however, the Oxford Companion to Animal Behaviour (1987) said that "one is well advised to study the behaviour rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion". ## Conservation ### Status African bush elephants were listed as Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2021, and African forest elephants were listed as Critically Endangered in the same year. In 1979, Africa had an estimated population of at least 1.3 million elephants, possibly as high as 3.0 million. A decade later, the population was estimated to be 609,000; with 277,000 in Central Africa, 110,000 in Eastern Africa, 204,000 in Southern Africa, and 19,000 in Western Africa. The population of rainforest elephants was lower than anticipated, at around 214,000 individuals. Between 1977 and 1989, elephant populations declined by 74% in East Africa. After 1987, losses in elephant numbers hastened, and savannah populations from Cameroon to Somalia experienced a decline of 80%. African forest elephants had a total loss of 43%. Population trends in southern Africa were various, with unconfirmed losses in Zambia, Mozambique and Angola while populations grew in Botswana and Zimbabwe and were stable in South Africa. The IUCN estimated that total population in Africa is estimated at around to 415,000 individuals for both species combined as of 2016. African elephants receive at least some legal protection in every country where they are found. Successful conservation efforts in certain areas have led to high population densities while failures have lead to declines as high as 70% or more of the course of ten years. As of 2008, local numbers were controlled by contraception or translocation. Large-scale cullings stopped in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1989, the African elephant was listed under Appendix I by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), making trade illegal. Appendix II status (which allows restricted trade) was given to elephants in Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe in 1997 and South Africa in 2000. In some countries, sport hunting of the animals is legal; Botswana, Cameroon, Gabon, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have CITES export quotas for elephant trophies. In 2020, the IUCN listed the Asian elephant as endangered due to the population declining by half over "the last three generations". Asian elephants once ranged from Western to East Asia and south to Sumatra. and Java. It is now extinct in these areas, and the current range of Asian elephants is highly fragmented. The total population of Asian elephants is estimated to be around 40,000–50,000, although this may be a loose estimate. Around 60% of the population is in India. Although Asian elephants are declining in numbers overall, particularly in Southeast Asia, the population in Sri Lanka appears to have risen and elephant numbers in the Western Ghats may have stablised. ### Threats The poaching of elephants for their ivory, meat and hides has been one of the major threats to their existence. Historically, numerous cultures made ornaments and other works of art from elephant ivory, and its use was comparable to that of gold. The ivory trade contributed to the fall of the African elephant population in the late 20th century. This prompted international bans on ivory imports, starting with the United States in June 1989, and followed by bans in other North American countries, western European countries, and Japan. Around the same time, Kenya destroyed all its ivory stocks. Ivory was banned internationally by CITES in 1990. Following the bans, unemployment rose in India and China, where the ivory industry was important economically. By contrast, Japan and Hong Kong, which were also part of the industry, were able to adapt and were not as badly affected. Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Malawi wanted to continue the ivory trade and were allowed to, since their local populations were healthy, but only if their supplies were from culled individuals or those that died of natural causes. The ban allowed the elephant to recover in parts of Africa. In February 2012, 650 elephants in Bouba Njida National Park, Cameroon, were slaughtered by Chadian raiders. This has been called "one of the worst concentrated killings" since the ivory ban. Asian elephants are potentially less vulnerable to the ivory trade, as females usually lack tusks. Still, members of the species have been killed for their ivory in some areas, such as Periyar National Park in India. China was the biggest market for poached ivory but announced they would phase out the legal domestic manufacture and sale of ivory products in May 2015, and in September 2015, China and the United States said "they would enact a nearly complete ban on the import and export of ivory" due to causes of extinction. Other threats to elephants include habitat destruction and fragmentation. The Asian elephant lives in areas with some of the highest human populations and may be confined to small islands of forest among human-dominated landscapes. Elephants commonly trample and consume crops, which contributes to conflicts with humans, and both elephants and humans have died by the hundreds as a result. Mitigating these conflicts is important for conservation. One proposed solution is the protection of wildlife corridors which give populations greater interconnectivity and space. Chili pepper products as well as guarding with defense tools have been found to be effective in preventing crop-raiding by elephants. Less effective tactics include beehive and electric fences. ## Human relations ### Working animal Elephants have been working animals since at least the Indus Valley civilization over 4,000 years ago and continue to be used in modern times. There were 13,000–16,500 working elephants employed in Asia in 2000. These animals are typically captured from the wild when they are 10–20 years old when they are both more trainable and can work for more years. They were traditionally captured with traps and lassos, but since 1950, tranquillisers have been used. Individuals of the Asian species have been often trained as working animals. Asian elephants are used to carry and pull both objects and people in and out of areas as well as lead people in religious celebrations. They are valued over mechanised tools as they can perform the same tasks but in more difficult terrain, with strength, memory, and delicacy. Elephants can learn over 30 commands. Musth bulls are difficult and dangerous to work with and so are chained up until their condition passes. In India, many working elephants are alleged to have been subject to abuse. They and other captive elephants are thus protected under The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960. In both Myanmar and Thailand, deforestation and other economic factors have resulted in sizable populations of unemployed elephants resulting in health problems for the elephants themselves as well as economic and safety problems for the people amongst whom they live. The practice of working elephants has also been attempted in Africa. The taming of African elephants in the Belgian Congo began by decree of Leopold II of Belgium during the 19th century and continues to the present with the Api Elephant Domestication Centre. ### Warfare Historically, elephants were considered formidable instruments of war. They were described in Sanskrit texts as far back as 1500 BC. From South Asia, the use of elephants in warfare spread west to Persia and east to Southeast Asia. The Persians used them during the Achaemenid Empire (between the 6th and 4th centuries BC) while Southeast Asian states first used war elephants possibly as early as the 5th century BC and continued to the 20th century. War elephants were also employed in the Mediterranean and North Africa throughout the classical period since the reign of Ptolemy II in Egypt. The Carthaginian general Hannibal famously took African elephants across the Alps during his war with the Romans and reached the Po Valley in 218 BC with all of them alive, but died of disease and combat a year later. Their heads and sides were equipped with armour, the trunk may have had a sword tied to it and tusks were sometimes covered with sharpened iron or brass. Trained elephants would attack both humans and horses with their tusks. They might have grasped an enemy soldier with the trunk and tossed him to their mahout, or pinned the soldier to the ground and speared him. Some shortcomings of war elephants included their great visibility, which made them easy to target, and limited maneuverability compared to horses. Alexander the Great achieved victory over armies with war elephants by having his soldiers injure the trunks and legs of the animals which caused them to panic and become uncontrollable. ### Zoos and circuses Elephants have traditionally been a major part of zoos and circuses around the world. In circuses, they are trained to perform tricks. The most famous circus elephant was probably Jumbo (1861 – 15 September 1885), who was a major attraction in the Barnum & Bailey Circus. These animals do not reproduce well in captivity, due to the difficulty of handling musth bulls and limited understanding of female oestrous cycles. Asian elephants were always more common than their African counterparts in modern zoos and circuses. After CITES listed the Asian elephant under Appendix I in 1975, imports of the species almost stopped by the end of the 1980s. Subsequently, the US received many captive African elephants from Zimbabwe, which had an overabundance of the animals. Keeping elephants in zoos has met with some controversy. Proponents of zoos argue that they allow easy access to the animals and provide fund and knowledge for preserving their natural habitats, as well as safekeeping for the species. Opponents claim that animals in zoos are under physical and mental stress. Elephants have been recorded displaying stereotypical behaviours in the form of wobbling the body or head and pacing the same route both forwards and backwards. This has been observed in 54% of individuals in UK zoos. Elephants in European zoos appear to have shorter lifespans than their wild counterparts at only 17 years, although other studies suggest that zoo elephants live just as long. The use of elephants in circuses has also been controversial; the Humane Society of the United States has accused circuses of mistreating and distressing their animals. In testimony to a US federal court in 2009, Barnum & Bailey Circus CEO Kenneth Feld acknowledged that circus elephants are struck behind their ears, under their chins and on their legs with metal-tipped prods, called bull hooks or ankus. Feld stated that these practices are necessary to protect circus workers and acknowledged that an elephant trainer was rebuked for using an electric prod on an elephant. Despite this, he denied that any of these practices hurt the animals. Some trainers have tried to train elephants without the use of physical punishment. Ralph Helfer is known to have relied on positive reinforcement when training his animals. Barnum and Bailey circus retired its touring elephants in May 2016. ### Attacks Elephants can exhibit bouts of aggressive behaviour and engage in destructive actions against humans. In Africa, groups of adolescent elephants damaged homes in villages after cullings in the 1970s and 1980s. Because of the timing, these attacks have been interpreted as vindictive. In parts of India, male elephants have entered villages at night, destroying homes and killing people. From 2000 to 2004, 300 people died in Jharkhand, and in Assam, 239 people were reportedly killed between 2001 and 2006. Throughout the country, 1,500 people were killed by elephants between 2019 and 2022, which led to 300 elephants being killed in kind. Local people have reported their belief that some elephants were drunk during their attacks, though officials have disputed this. Purportedly drunk elephants attacked an Indian village in December 2002, killing six people, which led to the retaliatory slaughter of about 200 elephants by locals. ### Cultural significance Elephants have a universal presence in global culture. They have been represented in art since Paleolithic times. Africa, in particular, contains many examples of elephant rock art, especially in the Sahara and southern Africa. In Asia, the animals are depicted as motifs in Hindu and Buddhist shrines and temples. Elephants were often difficult to portray by people with no first-hand experience of them. The ancient Romans, who kept the animals in captivity, depicted elephants more accurately than medieval Europeans who portrayed them more like fantasy creatures, with horse, bovine and boar-like traits, and trumpet-like trunks. As Europeans gained more access to captive elephants during the 15th century, depictions of them became more accurate, including one made by Leonardo da Vinci. Elephants have been the subject of religious beliefs. The Mbuti people of central Africa believe that the souls of their dead ancestors resided in elephants. Similar ideas existed among other African societies, who believed that their chiefs would be reincarnated as elephants. During the 10th century AD, the people of Igbo-Ukwu, in modern day Nigeria, placed elephant tusks underneath their death leader's feet in the grave. The animals' importance is only totemic in Africa but is much more significant in Asia. In Sumatra, elephants have been associated with lightning. Likewise in Hinduism, they are linked with thunderstorms as Airavata, the father of all elephants, represents both lightning and rainbows. One of the most important Hindu deities, the elephant-headed Ganesha, is ranked equal with the supreme gods Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma in some traditions. Ganesha is associated with writers and merchants and it is believed that he can give people success as well as grant them their desires, but could also take these things away. In Buddhism, Buddha is said to have been a white elephant reincarnated as a human. In Western popular culture, elephants symbolise the exotic, especially since – as with the giraffe, hippopotamus and rhinoceros – there are no similar animals familiar to Western audiences. As characters, elephants are most common in children's stories, where they are portrayed positively. They are typically surrogates for humans with ideal human values. Many stories tell of isolated young elephants returning to or finding a family, such as "The Elephant's Child" from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, Disney's Dumbo, and Kathryn and Byron Jackson's The Saggy Baggy Elephant. Other elephant heroes given human qualities include Jean de Brunhoff's Babar, David McKee's Elmer, and Dr. Seuss's Horton. Several cultural references emphasise the elephant's size and strangeness. For instance, a "white elephant" is a byword for something that is weird, unwanted, and has no value. The expression "elephant in the room" refers to something that is being ignored but ultimately must be addressed. The story of the blind men and an elephant involves blind men touching different parts of an elephant and trying to figure out what it is. ## See also - Animal track - Desert elephant - Elephants' graveyard - List of individual elephants - Motty, captive hybrid of an Asian and African elephant - National Elephant Day (Thailand) - World Elephant Day
57,113,489	2019 World Snooker Championship	1,153,075,399	Professional snooker world championship tournament, April–May 2019	[ "2019 in English sport", "2019 in snooker", "April 2019 sports events in the United Kingdom", "May 2019 sports events in the United Kingdom", "Sports competitions in Sheffield", "World Snooker Championships" ]	The 2019 World Snooker Championship (officially the 2019 Betfred World Snooker Championship) was a professional snooker tournament that took place from 20 April to 6 May 2019 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. It was the 43rd consecutive year the World Snooker Championship had been held at the Crucible, and the 20th and final ranking event of the 2018–19 snooker season. Qualifying for the tournament took place from 10 to 17 April 2019 at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield. Sports betting company Betfred sponsored the event. The winner of the title was Judd Trump, who defeated John Higgins 18–9 in the final to claim his first World Championship. In doing so, Trump became the 11th player to win all three Triple Crown titles at least once. Defending champion Mark Williams lost 9–13 to David Gilbert in the second round of the tournament. For the first time in the history of the World Snooker Championship, an amateur player appeared at the main stage of the event—debutant James Cahill defeated world number one Ronnie O'Sullivan in the first round, before being narrowly defeated by Stephen Maguire in a second round deciding . The tournament featured 100 century breaks; at the time, this was the highest number recorded at an official snooker event (superseded at the 2021 World Championship). The final match alone included 11 centuries, the most ever scored in the final of a ranking event. Higgins compiled the highest break, a 143, in his semi-final win over Gilbert. Shaun Murphy defeated Luo Honghao in the first round 10–0, the first whitewash at the World Championship since 1992. ## Background The World Snooker Championship is an annual cue sport tournament and the official world championship of the game of snooker. Founded in the late 19th century by British Army soldiers stationed in India, the sport was popular in the British Isles. However, in the modern era it has become increasingly popular worldwide, especially in East and Southeast Asian nations such as China, Hong Kong and Thailand. The championship features 32 professional and qualified amateur players competing in one-on-one snooker matches in a single elimination format, each played over several . The 32 competitors in the main tournament are selected using a combination of the top players in the world snooker rankings and a pre-tournament qualification stage. Joe Davis won the first World Championship in 1927, the final match being held in Camkin's Hall, Birmingham, England. Since 1977, the event has been held in the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. As of 2022, Stephen Hendry and Ronnie O’Sullivan are the event's most successful participants in the modern era, having both won the championship seven times. The 2018 World Championship had been won by Welsh professional player Mark Williams, who defeated Scotland's John Higgins 18–16 in the final. This was Williams' third world title, having won the championship in 2000 and 2003. The winner of the 2019 tournament earned prize money of £500,000, from a total pool of £2,231,000. The title sponsor of the event was sports betting company Betfred, who had sponsored the World Snooker Championship every year since 2015 (having previously sponsored the event from 2009 to 2012). ### Format The 2019 World Snooker Championship took place between 20 April and 6 May 2019 in Sheffield, England. The tournament was the last of twenty ranking events in the 2018/2019 season on the World Snooker Tour. It featured a 32-player main draw that was held at the Crucible Theatre, as well as a 128-player qualifying draw that was played at the English Institute of Sport from 10 to 17 April 2019, finishing three days before the start of the main draw. This was the 43rd consecutive year the tournament was held at the Crucible, and the 51st consecutive year the championship was contested using the modern knockout format. The top 16 players in the latest world rankings automatically qualified for the main draw as seeded players. Defending champion Mark Williams was automatically seeded first overall. The remaining 15 seeds were allocated based on the latest world rankings, which were released after the China Open, the penultimate event of the season. Matches in the first round of the main draw were played as the best of 19 frames. The number of frames required to win a match increased progressively with each successive round, leading up to the final match which was played as the best of 35 frames. All 16 non-seeded spots in the main draw were filled with players who had advanced through the qualifying rounds. There were 128 players in the qualifying draw, which comprised 106 of the remaining 112 players on the World Snooker Tour, as well as 22 wildcard places allotted to non-tour players. These invited players included the women's world champion, the European junior champion, and the four semi-finalists at the amateur championship. As with the main draw, half of the participants in the qualifying draw were seeded players; those ranked from 17th to 80th in the world rankings were allocated one of 64 seeds in order of their ranking, while the other competitors were placed randomly into the draw. To reach the main draw at the Crucible, players needed to win three best-of-19-frames qualifying matches. ### Participant summary Eight former world champions participated in the main tournament at the Crucible. They were Ronnie O'Sullivan (five titles: 2001, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2013), John Higgins (four titles: 1998, 2007, 2009, 2011), Mark Williams (defending champion, three titles: 2001, 2003, 2018), Mark Selby (three titles: 2014, 2016, 2017), Shaun Murphy (one title: 2005), Graeme Dott (one title: 2006), Neil Robertson (one title: 2010), and Stuart Bingham (one title: 2015). This was O'Sullivan's 27th consecutive appearance in the final stages of the World Championship since his debut in 1993, equalling Stephen Hendry's record for consecutive appearances, and three short of Steve Davis's overall record of 30 appearances. Four other former World Championship finalists also competed: Ali Carter (twice: 2008 and 2012), Judd Trump (once: 2011), Barry Hawkins (once: 2013), and Ding Junhui (once: 2016). The youngest player to participate in the main stage of the tournament was Luo Honghao at 19 years of age, while 46-year-old Mark Davis was the oldest; both players entered the main draw through qualifying. Three former world champions participated in the qualifying rounds: Ken Doherty (1997), Peter Ebdon (2002) and Graeme Dott (2006). Of these, only Dott succeeded in qualifying for the main tournament at the Crucible. Also, four former World Championship finalists participated in the qualifying rounds: Jimmy White (six times: 1984 and 1990–1994), Nigel Bond (once: 1995), Matthew Stevens (twice: 2000 and 2005), and Ali Carter (twice: 2008 and 2012). Of these, only Carter qualified for the main tournament at the Crucible. ### Prize fund The total purse for the event was greater than for any prior snooker tournament. For the first time the total prize pool was over £2 million, with the winner being awarded £500,000. The breakdown of prize money was: - Winner: £500,000 - Runner-up: £200,000 - Semi-final: £100,000 - Quarter-final: £50,000 - Last 16: £30,000 - Last 32: £20,000 - Last 48: £15,000 - Last 80: £10,000 - Main stage highest break: £10,000 - Qualifying stage highest break: £1,000 - Total: £2,231,000 The prize for a maximum break in the main stage was £50,000. ## Tournament summary ### Qualifying rounds The top 16 seeds automatically qualified for the competition's main draw. The defending champion Mark Williams was seeded first, whilst other seeds were allocated based on the world rankings following the China Open. The remaining players competed in the preliminary qualifying rounds, and were required to win three best-of-19-frames matches to reach the main stage of the championship. The qualifying rounds took place at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield between 10 and 17 April 2019, with 16 players progressing to the main stage at the Crucible Theatre. A total of 128 players competed in the qualifying stage, including those tour players not automatically qualified for the main draw, as well as invited amateurs. James Cahill became the first amateur player ever to qualify for the Crucible main stage of the World Championship, defeating fellow amateur Michael Judge 10–6 in the third qualifying round. Seven players—the largest number since 1999—advanced through the qualifying rounds to make their debuts at the main stage of the tournament. Besides Cahill, they were Scott Donaldson, Michael Georgiou (The first ever Cypriot to play at the crucible), Li Hang, Luo Honghao, Tian Pengfei and Zhao Xintong. The 2006 World Champion Graeme Dott and two-time finalist Ali Carter also qualified. Marco Fu failed to reach the main draw of the competition for the first time since 2004. ### First round The draw for the first round of the championship was made on 18 April 2019, the day after the conclusion of the qualifying rounds and two days before the start of the main event. The matches were drawn by World Snooker chairman Barry Hearn and 1991 World Champion John Parrott. The first round of the championship took place between 20 and 25 April 2019. All first round matches were played over two sessions as best-of-19 frames. #### Top half The tournament began with defending champion Mark Williams (seeded one) drawing qualifier Martin Gould. Both sessions of this first match were played on the opening day of the event. Gould won the first frame with a break of 64, before Williams took the next five with breaks of 55, 54 and 129, to lead 5–1. Gould won frames seven and eight, but Williams took the session's final frame with a break of 97 to lead 6–3. Williams opened up a lead in frame ten, before Gould made a to force a . However, Williams potted the black to go ahead 7–3. Gould then won frame 11, but Williams claimed the next two frames to open up a five-frame lead, at 9–4. Despite Gould responding with breaks of 70, 87 and 76, to reduce his deficit to 7–9, Williams clinched the 17th frame to win the match 10–7. After his victory, Williams complained that World Snooker had not allowed his 12-year-old son backstage before the match, which the governing body denied. Event debutant Luo Honghao was drawn against 13th seed Shaun Murphy. Finishing 10–0 to Murphy, the match was a whitewash, only the second ever to be witnessed at the Crucible (the first being John Parrott's defeat of Eddie Charlton in the first round of the 1992 championship). Luo accumulated just 89 points during the entire match, the lowest number of points ever scored in a World Championship match, and more than 100 fewer than the previous record low of 191 scored by Danny Fowler when he lost 1–10 to Stephen Hendry in the 1993 championship. Fourth seed Neil Robertson met qualifier, Michael Georgiou, in the first round. At the conclusion of the initial session, Georgiou was 0–9 behind, having scored even fewer points than Luo in the first nine frames of the match. However, he won frame ten on the resumption of play in the second session, with a break of 90, thus avoiding both the whitewash and the lowest points total. Robertson later won the match 10–1 to progress to the second round. Fifth seed John Higgins played qualifier Mark Davis, who had won six of the pair's last seven encounters. Higgins took a 6–3 lead after the first session, but then spent the night in Royal Hallamshire Hospital because his brother Jason had fallen down some stairs at the venue and fractured his kneecap. Higgins won the match 10–7 the following day. Two former world champions, 12th seed Stuart Bingham (2015 winner) and qualifier Graeme Dott (2006 winner), met in the first round of the competition. Bingham led 8–1 after the first session, and later 9–4, before Dott won five frames to level the match at 9–9. Bingham won the deciding frame after Dott missed a simple shot on the . After the match, Dott explained that "serious sleeping problems" had caused him difficulties while playing. #### Bottom half The first round match between 14th seed Luca Brecel and qualifier Gary Wilson, which featured a large amount of tactical play, was suspended when the afternoon session overran, with Wilson leading 9–8. On resuming that evening, Brecel won frame 18 to send the match to a deciding frame. After first requiring a re-rack, this frame lasted for 79 minutes and 31 seconds, setting the record for the longest frame ever played at the Crucible (breaking the previous record set in 2016 by Mark Selby and Marco Fu by more than three minutes) which Wilson won. Tenth seed Ding Junhui played qualifier Anthony McGill. After leading 6–3 overnight, Ding won the match 10–7 to progress to the second round. Having lost eight of his previous 15 first round matches at the Crucible, 15th seed Stephen Maguire played event debutant Tian Pengfei. In frame 17, Maguire was 7–9 down and needed a on the colours to stay in the match. He snookered Tian on the , but then missed a difficult shot to a corner; however, on rebounding from the pocket, the blue hit the and went into the other baulk pocket. Maguire later described this fluke as "just outrageous" and admitted he "got lucky". He added and black to steal the frame, and then took the next two frames to win the match 10–9. Three-time former world champion and third seed, Mark Selby, played debutant Zhao Xintong. Despite trailing 1–5 after the first six frames, Selby won nine of the next eleven frames, with two breaks of 131, to win 10–7. Amateur player James Cahill drew the world number one Ronnie O'Sullivan, who had reached the finals of the other Triple Crown events earlier in the season. Cahill finished the first session with a 5–4 lead, and then went ahead 8–5 in the second session before O'Sullivan levelled the match at 8–8. Cahill missed a straightforward shot on a after compiling an early break in frame 17; however, despite needing only the final pink and black to win, O'Sullivan missed the pink, allowing Cahill to clinch the frame. With a break of 56 in the next frame, Cahill won the match 10–8 to secure a place in the second round. This was Cahill's second win over the top-ranked player in the season, having defeated Mark Selby in the first round of the UK Championship five months earlier. Afterwards, O'Sullivan indicated that he had been unwell during the match, but former world champion Ken Doherty accused him of "playing too casually". ### Second round The last 16 players in the competition took part in the second round, which was played between 25 and 29 April, with matches completed over three sessions as best of 25 frames. Fourth seed Neil Robertson played 13th seed Shaun Murphy. The first session of the match featured a maximum break attempt by Murphy; with just two red balls remaining, he asked for the screen between the tables to be lifted, allowing the spectators in the other half of the auditorium to watch his attempt at a maximum, but he failed to finish it. Prior to this dramatic turn of events, Robertson had won the first three frames of the match, without Murphy attempting a pot. Robertson led 5–3 after the first session and 10–6 after the second. He later won the first three frames of the final session to win the match 13–6. Post-match, Murphy called Robertson "just too good" and "unplayable". Defending champion Mark Williams played 16th seed David Gilbert. After the first session, with Gilbert leading 5–3, Williams said he had been feeling chest pains during play. He was taken to Northern General Hospital overnight but returned the following morning for the second session of the match. He later tied the match 7–7, but was trailing again 7–9 after the second session. Gilbert then won the first four frames of the final session to win the match 13–9. Amateur player James Cahill drew 15th seed Stephen Maguire. After the first two sessions, Maguire was ahead 5–3 and 9–7, but Cahill then took three of the first four frames in the third session to level the match at 10–10. He also won frame 21, to take the lead for the first time in the match, but Maguire drew level in the following frame. Both players missed shots in frame 23, with Cahill looking to win the frame before being penalised for a , and later going from a , allowing Maguire to pull ahead again 12–11. Cahill won frame 24, after Maguire missed a by a wide margin, taking the match to a deciding frame. Maguire won the decider, and the match, 13–12. Three-time world champion Mark Selby played qualifier Gary Wilson. Despite trailing 3–5 after the first session, Selby won four of the first five frames in the second session to lead 7–6; however, Wilson took the last three frames of the session to lead 9–7. Selby later tied the match at 10–10, before Wilson won three consecutive frames to secure a place in the quarter-finals. Two former world champions, fifth seed John Higgins and 12th seed Stuart Bingham, met in the second round. Bingham took an early 4–1 lead, but Higgins won the remaining frames of the first session, with a 132 break in the eighth, to level at 4–4. The second session was even, with no more than two frames separating the players, and the match was tied again at 8–8 and 11–11. In frame 23, Bingham missed a on two reds, allowing Higgins to claim the next two frames and the match, 13–11. Bingham described the close-fought encounter as a "good battle" and Higgins admitted he was "over the moon" to have won. Ninth seed and 2013 runner-up, Barry Hawkins, played eighth seed Kyren Wilson. This match included nine century breaks, setting a new record for the second round of the championships. Hawkins made four century breaks of 105, 130, 136, and 137 during the first session, including a maximum break attempt; Wilson also compiled a century in frame five. With four frames in a row ending with a 100+ break, this was the first time since the 1999 semi-final between Ronnie O'Sullivan and Stephen Hendry that four centuries had been compiled in consecutive frames in a World Championship match. After winning the first four frames of the match, Hawkins ended the first session with a 6–2 lead. Wilson won the second session of the match 5–3, to trail 7–9, before twice drawing level at 9–9 and 10–10 in the final session. Despite Hawkins pulling ahead, at 10–9 and 11–10, Wilson won the last three frames of the match to progress to the next round, 13–11. Zhou Yuelong played Ali Carter in the only all-qualifier encounter of the second round. Zhou took four of the first five frames to lead 4–1, then led 5–3 after the first session, and held the lead at 9–7 after the second. On resuming the match in the final session, Carter won six straight frames to progress 13–9. Two former world finalists, Judd Trump and Ding Junhui, met in the second round. Trump took an early 5–1 lead in the first session, but Ding won eight of the next ten frames to lead 9–7 before the final session. Trump then took six frames in a row, including breaks of 93, 79, 54 and 103, to win the match 13–9. ### Quarter-finals The quarter-finals took place on 30 April and 1 May, and like the previous round, matches were played as best of 25 frames across three sessions. Ali Carter played Gary Wilson in an all-qualifier match. Despite this being his first World Championship quarter-final, and after losing the first three frames of the match, Wilson won five straight frames to lead 5–3 after the first session. The pair shared the second session, with both players winning four frames, bringing the score to 9–7 ahead of the final session. Carter won two of the next three frames, including a break of 128, to trail 9–10, before Wilson won the next three to progress 13–9. Post-match, Carter said, "You have to take your hat off to [Wilson]. I did not think he could play that good," noting that despite Wilson's low ranking of 32 "[he] has to be the favourite to win it now, the way he has been playing." The 2019 Masters champion, Judd Trump, played 15th seed Stephen Maguire. Having won six straight frames to conclude his second-round match against Ding Junhui, Trump won another six consecutive frames at the start of this match, scoring breaks of 131, 67, 106, 78 and 101, to lead 7–1 after the first session. He looked set to win the match in the second session without needing to play the third, extending his lead to 9–1. However, Maguire won four of the remaining frames, to trail 5–11 by the end of the session. Trump won the match 13–6, after just three frames of the final session. Maguire was fined £250 for swearing in a post-match press conference when he was asked to summarise his performance in the match. Eighth seed Kyren Wilson played 16th seed David Gilbert. The pair had met earlier in the season, in the final of the 2019 German Masters, where Wilson had won the tournament 9–7. The two players shared the opening session of their quarter-final, 4–4; Gilbert then won six of the eight frames in the second session to lead 10–6 overnight. Wilson won two of the first three frames of the final session to trail 8–11, but Gilbert took the next two frames to win the match 13–8. Four-time world champion John Higgins played fourth seed Neil Robertson in the last of the quarter-finals. Robertson took an early 3–1 lead, but Higgins tied the match at 4–4. Robertson pulled away to 7–4 at the start of the second session, before Higgins won five frames in a row to take a 9–7 lead. After sharing the first six frames of the final session, Higgins won the match 13–10, with a century break of 101 in the next frame, to progress to the semi-finals. ### Semi-finals The two semi-finals were played from 2 to 5 May, with the matches spread over four sessions as best of 33 frames. The first semi-final pitted four-time champion John Higgins against David Gilbert, who had never previously progressed past the second round of the championships. Higgins won the first two frames, but Gilbert tied the match at 2–2, with the help of a 94 break. Higgins then took a 3–2 lead, before Gilbert claimed the last three frames of the session, including a maximum break attempt, potting 15 red balls but failing a on the , to lead 5–3. Gilbert won the first three frames of the second session, including a 125 break, to increase his lead to 8–3. He was ahead 56–17 in frame 12 but missed a pink into a , allowing Higgins to clear the table and clinch the frame. Higgins also won the next two frames, compiling breaks of 67, 52 and 58, to trail 6–8; however, Gilbert took the final two frames of the session to lead 10–6. Pundit John Virgo reflected that Higgins was "not with it", whilst six-time champion Steve Davis called Higgins' performance "ridiculous". When the match resumed for the third session, a crowd member was ejected from the auditorium for shouting out immediately after the shot in the initial frame; Gilbert took the frame, increasing his lead to 11–6. Higgins won two of the next three frames to stay four behind at 8–12. He then compiled a 143 break, the highest of the tournament, in frame 21; this was also the 86th century break of the championship so far, tying the record for the number of centuries in a World Snooker Championship, set in 2015. Gilbert won the next frame, falling short of a century, with a break of 91. Higgins then won the final two frames of the session to reduce his deficit to 11–13. Gilbert took the initial frame of the fourth (and final) session, but Higgins, having not led the match since mid-way through the first session, won the next four frames to go ahead 15–14. Gilbert then restored his lead by winning the next two frames, before Higgins scored a 139 break to level the score at 16–16, forcing a decider. Higgins won the final frame and the match after Gilbert missed the black ball from the spot. Both players gave emotional press conferences afterward, with Gilbert commenting, "I have never won anything, I have come close but this is the best couple of weeks I have had in my snooker career by a mile. It might be the closest I will come to winning the World Championship." Higgins apologized for his poor play during the match, and for bringing Gilbert "down to [his] level" in the first three sessions. Judd Trump faced qualifier, Gary Wilson, in the second semi-final. They shared the opening session, 4–4, but Wilson later took a 6–5 lead with a break of 65. Trump won the next three frames with breaks of 73, 123 and 75, to lead 9–6, before Wilson compiled a 77 break, bringing the score to 9–7 after the first two sessions. Wilson won frame 17 with a break of 50; however, Trump took the next three frames, including a break of 114, which was the 87th century of the tournament (overtaking the previous all-time record of centuries compiled at any World Snooker Championship). Trump was 14–10 ahead at the end of the third session. Wilson won the first frame of the final session, but Trump claimed the next three to win the match 17–11. Afterwards, Trump suggested that neither he nor Higgins had played particularly well in their respective semi-final matches, despite their both reaching the final. Wilson, ranked 30 in the world, said Judd deserved to win, but he commented on the poor playing conditions, saying: "I wasn't good enough ... but I've got to say that table is disgusting. It's running off all over the place, you're getting square bounces, kicks every other shot." ### Final The final was played over four sessions on 5 and 6 May, as a best-of-35-frames match. It was a repeat of the 2011 World Championship final between John Higgins and Judd Trump, when Higgins won the match 18–15 to claim his fourth world title. To reach the 2019 final, Higgins had defeated Mark Davis, Stuart Bingham, Neil Robertson and David Gilbert, while Trump had defeated Thepchaiya Un-Nooh, Ding Junhui, Stephen Maguire and Gary Wilson. This was Higgins' third consecutive World Championship final (having been defeated by Mark Selby in 2017 and Mark Williams in 2018), and his eighth overall. Higgins had previously won the World Snooker Championship four times (in 1998, 2007, 2009 and 2011). This was Trump's second world final, his first being the 2011 loss to Higgins. Trump won the first two frames of the opening session, with breaks of 51 and 63. Higgins replied with a break of 139 to trail 1–2, before Trump scored a century of his own, a 105, to take a two-frame lead at the first mid-session interval. Breaks of 69, 34, 40 and 101 allowed Higgins to accumulate 244 unanswered points, claiming three consecutive frames to lead 4–3. Trump then tied the match at 4–4 by compiling the fourth century of the session. At the beginning of the nine-frame evening session, Higgins compiled a break of 125, the third consecutive century of the match, to move ahead 5–4. Trump won the remaining eight frames of the session, including breaks of 135 and 114, to lead by seven frames overnight, 12–5. Steve Davis commented on the session: "I've seen some astonishing snooker here, a lot of it from Ronnie O'Sullivan, but that was a different type of astonishing. I am a little bit in shock. He is making a lot of very difficult shots seem very easy." The third session opened with an attempt at a maximum break from Higgins, who potted 14 reds and 14 blacks before running out of position for the final red; he played a full-table double to pot the red ball, but then missed the following black. He also won frame 19, to trail 7–12, but Trump took the next three to extend his lead to 15–7. Higgins won the next two frames, which prevented the match from concluding with a session to spare. Trump attempted a maximum break of his own in frame 25, but he a red into the middle pocket. Going into the evening session with a 16–9 lead, Trump won two straight frames to win the match 18–9 and claim the 2019 world title. This was the largest margin of victory in a World Championship final since 2009, when Higgins defeated Shaun Murphy by the same scoreline. With eleven centuries between the two players, the final set the record for the most 100+ breaks in a single match, one more than the previous record held by Alan McManus and Ding Junhui in the semi-final of the 2016 World Championship. After the final, Higgins praised Trump's performance saying, "I was the lucky one to not have to pay for a ticket, he was just awesome." BBC pundit Steve Davis commented, "The standard in that final may have been the greatest we have ever seen and Judd Trump was at the heart of it." This was Trump's second Triple Crown title of the season after winning the Masters in January. ## Main draw Numbers given in brackets after players' names show the seedings for the top 16 players in the competition. The sole amateur player in the championship is indicated with (a). ## Qualifying Qualifying for the 2019 World Snooker Championship took place from 10 to 17 April 2019 at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield, using a 12-table set-up. Starting with a pool of 128 players, the qualifying competition consisted of three knock-out rounds, with all matches played over two sessions as best of 19 frames. The 16 winners of the third round matches progressed to the main stages of the tournament at the Crucible Theatre. The tour players (ranked outside the top-16) were joined by wildcard amateur players who achieved success through the WPBSA qualifying criteria: - 2018–19 Challenge Tour—top four ranked players: Brandon Sargeant, David Grace, Mitchell Mann, David Lilley - EBSA European U-21 / U-18 Championship 2019 semi-finalists: Jackson Page, Aaron Hill, Ross Bulman, Dylan Emery, Florian Nüßle - World Women's Snooker Tour—top two ranked players: Ng On-yee, Reanne Evans - World Seniors Snooker Tour—top ranked player: Johnathan Bagley - African champion: Mostafa Dorgham - Americas champion: Igor Figueiredo - Oceania champion: Adam Lilley - CBSA nomination: Pang Junxu - Decided by WPBSA: Farakh Ajaib, James Cahill, Adam Duffy, Andy Hicks, Luke Simmonds, Michael Judge Players ranked 17 to 80 in the 2018/2019 world rankings were seeded 1 to 64 in qualifying. The remaining tour players plus the invited amateurs were drawn randomly. Round 1 There were 64 matches in the first round of qualifying. Each match was played between a seeded and a non-seeded player. Numbers given in brackets after players' names (in left-hand columns below) show the seedings (1 to 64) for the players ranked 17 to 80 in the 2018/2019 world rankings. Round 2 Round 3 Winners of the third round qualifying matches advanced to the main draw. ## Century breaks ### Main stage centuries The main stage of the 2019 World Snooker Championship yielded 100 centuries, made by 23 players. The highest break of the tournament, a 143, was compiled by John Higgins in his semi-final match with David Gilbert. The championship broke a number of records in terms of century breaks, including the total number compiled in the main stage of a snooker tournament: there were 14 more centuries than the 86 recorded in both the 2015 and the 2016 championships. The final featured 11 century breaks, the highest number ever compiled in a single match, one more than the ten centuries in the 2016 semi-final between Ding Junhui and Allan McManus. Judd Trump equalled Ding's record of seven centuries made by one player in a world championship match. - 143, 139, 139, 135, 132, 132, 130, 125, 113, 101, 101, 100 – John Higgins - 141, 135, 131, 126, 123, 114, 114, 106, 105, 104, 103, 103, 101, 101 – Judd Trump - 140, 134, 134, 117, 115, 109, 106, 100 – Gary Wilson - 139, 125, 113, 109, 105, 102, 100 – David Gilbert - 138, 132, 131, 125, 111, 104, 100 – Kyren Wilson - 138, 123, 112, 109, 102, 101 – Shaun Murphy - 137, 136, 130, 105 – Barry Hawkins - 136 – Joe Perry - 135, 128, 102 – Ali Carter - 134, 129, 106 – Ding Junhui - 131, 131, 120, 102 – Mark Selby - 131, 125, 122, 121, 110, 105, 103 – Stephen Maguire - 131 – Mark Allen - 131 – Luca Brecel - 129, 105, 101 – Mark Williams - 127, 120, 120, 114, 106, 100 – Neil Robertson - 124, 101 – Jack Lisowski - 114 – Graeme Dott - 112, 107, 106 – Stuart Bingham - 106, 105, 101 – Zhou Yuelong - 104, 100 – Tian Pengfei - 104 – Ronnie O'Sullivan - 101 – James Cahill ### Qualifying stage centuries A total of 122 century breaks were made by 57 players during the qualifying stage of the World Championship. - 146, 121, 118, 113 – Noppon Saengkham - 143, 143, 116, 114, 111 – Matthew Stevens - 141, 133, 122, 119, 114 – Liang Wenbo - 140, 135, 103 – Graeme Dott - 139, 109, 107 – Chris Wakelin - 138, 128 – Marco Fu - 138, 124, 122, 102, 100 – Joe O'Connor - 138, 107 – Thepchaiya Un-Nooh - 136, 136, 115, 106 – Zhou Yuelong - 136, 113, 107, 100, 100 – Daniel Wells - 136, 106 – Michael Holt - 136 – Elliot Slessor - 135, 113 – Lu Ning - 135, 100 – Lyu Haotian - 134, 112, 100 – Gary Wilson - 133, 125 – Tian Pengfei - 133, 119, 105 – Xiao Guodong - 132, 102, 100 – Martin Gould - 132 – Eden Sharav - 131, 119, 118, 113, 103, 100 – James Cahill - 131, 118, 116 – Anthony McGill - 130, 102 – Scott Donaldson - 130 – Andy Hicks - 130 – Alan McManus - 128, 103 – Yan Bingtao - 128 – Hossein Vafaei - 127, 120, 102, 101 – Ali Carter - 127, 110, 102, 100 – Joe Perry - 127, 106 – Sam Craigie - 124, 103 – Zhao Xintong - 122, 109, 102 – Mark Davis - 121, 117, 101 – Michael Georgiou - 121 – Kurt Maflin - 121 – Alexander Ursenbacher - 120 – Johnathan Bagley - 119, 100 – Stuart Carrington - 118 – Gerard Greene - 117 – Ashley Carty - 116 – Brandon Sargeant - 116 – Soheil Vahedi - 116 – Xu Si - 114, 100 – Ben Woollaston - 114 – Robbie Williams - 112 – Zhang Anda - 111, 108 – John Astley - 111 – Li Hang - 109 – Niu Zhuang - 108, 102 – Ian Burns - 106, 101 – Tom Ford - 106 – Sam Baird - 106 – Luo Honghao - 105, 101 – Mei Xiwen - 103 – Lukas Kleckers - 102 – David Lilley - 101 – Martin O'Donnell - 101 – Sunny Akani - 100 – Dominic Dale ## Coverage The 2019 World Snooker Championship was broadcast live in the United Kingdom by BBC Television and BBC Online, as well as on Eurosport. Internationally, the event was broadcast by DAZN in Canada and the United States, by SKY in New Zealand, and by Now TV in Hong Kong. World Snooker live streamed the event internationally on Facebook, doing so for the second time. Coverage of the qualifying rounds was also live streamed on Facebook, Eurosport Player and selected betting sites. In Scotland, the BBC was criticised for showing the World Championship on BBC Scotland, rather than a speech by Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon on Scottish independence. The BBC defended the decision, explaining that the speech had been broadcast live on its BBC Scotland news website.
488,524	HMS St Vincent (1908)	1,136,831,741	British Royal Navy battleship	[ "1908 ships", "Ships built in Plymouth, Devon", "St. Vincent-class battleships", "World War I battleships of the United Kingdom" ]	HMS St Vincent was the lead ship of her class of three dreadnought battleships built for the Royal Navy in the first decade of the 20th century. After commissioning in 1910, she spent her whole career assigned to the Home and Grand Fleets, often serving as a flagship. Aside from participating in the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, during which she damaged a German battlecruiser, and the inconclusive action of 19 August several months later, her service during World War I generally consisted of routine patrols and training in the North Sea. The ship was deemed obsolete after the war and was reduced to reserve and used as a training ship. St Vincent was sold for scrap in 1921 and broken up the following year. ## Design and description The design of the St Vincent class was derived from that of the previous Bellerophon class, with more powerful guns and slight increases in size and protection. St Vincent had an overall length of 536 feet (163.4 m), a beam of 84 feet (25.6 m), and a normal draught of 28 feet (8.5 m). She displaced 19,700 long tons (20,000 t) at normal load and 22,800 long tons (23,200 t) at deep load. Her crew numbered 756 officers and ratings in 1911, and 835 in 1915. St Vincent was powered by two sets of Parsons direct-drive steam turbines each driving two propeller shafts using steam provided by 18 coal-burning Babcock & Wilcox boilers. The turbines were rated at 24,500 shaft horsepower (18,300 kW) and were intended to give the ship a maximum speed of 21 knots (39 km/h; 24 mph). During her sea trials on 17 December 1909, the ship reached a top speed of 21.67 knots (40.13 km/h; 24.94 mph) from 28,218 shp (21,042 kW). St Vincent carried enough coal and fuel oil to give her a range of 6,900 nautical miles (12,800 km; 7,900 mi) at a cruising speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph). ### Armament and armour The St Vincent class was equipped with ten breech-loading (BL) 12-inch (305 mm) Mk XI guns in five twin-gun turrets, three along the centreline and the remaining two as wing turrets. The secondary, or anti-torpedo boat armament, comprised twenty BL 4-inch (102 mm) Mk VII guns. Two of these guns were each installed on the roofs of the fore and aft centreline turrets and the wing turrets in unshielded mounts, and the other ten were positioned in the superstructure. All guns were in single mounts. The ships were also fitted with three 18-inch (450 mm) torpedo tubes, one on each broadside and the third in the stern. The St Vincent-class ships were protected by a waterline 10-inch (254 mm) armoured belt that extended between the end barbettes. Their decks ranged in thickness between 0.75 to 3 inches (19 to 76 mm) with the thickest portions protecting the steering gear in the stern. The main battery turret faces were 11 inches (279 mm) thick, and the turrets were supported by 9-or-10-inch-thick (229 or 254 mm) barbettes. #### Modifications The guns on the forward turret roof were removed in 1911–1912 and the upper forward pair of guns in the superstructure were removed in 1913–1914. In addition, gun shields were fitted to all guns in the superstructure and the bridge structure was enlarged around the base of the forward tripod mast. During the first year of the war, a fire-control director was installed high on the forward tripod mast. Around the same time, the base of the forward superstructure was rebuilt to house 4 four-inch guns and the turret-top guns were removed, which reduced her secondary armament to a total of fourteen guns. In addition, a pair of three-inch (76 mm) anti-aircraft (AA) guns were added. Approximately 50 long tons (51 t) of additional deck armour was added after the Battle of Jutland. By April 1917, St Vincent mounted 13 four-inch anti-torpedo boat guns as well as one four-inch and one three-inch AA gun, and the ship was modified to operate a kite balloon around the same time. In 1918 a high-angle rangefinder was fitted and the stern torpedo tube was removed before the end of the war. ## Construction and career St Vincent, named after Admiral of the Fleet John Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent (1735 – 1823), was ordered on 26 October 1907. She was laid down at HM Dockyard, Portsmouth, on the same date, launched on 10 September 1908 and completed in May 1909. Including her armament, her cost is variously quoted at £1,721,970 or £1,754,615. She was commissioned on 3 May 1910 and assigned as the junior flagship of the 1st Division of the Home Fleet. She was commanded by Captain Douglas Nicholson and was present in Torbay when King George V visited the fleet in late July. St Vincent also participated in the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead on 24 June 1911. On 1 May 1912, the 1st Division was renamed the 1st Battle Squadron. The ship participated in the Parliamentary Naval Review on 9 July at Spithead before beginning a lengthy refit late in the year. On 21 April 1914, she was recommissioned and resumed her role as the flagship of the second-in-command of the 1st Battle Squadron, Rear-Admiral Hugh Evan-Thomas. ### World War I Between 17 and 20 July 1914, St Vincent took part in a test mobilisation and fleet review as part of the British response to the July Crisis. Arriving in Portland on 27 July, she was ordered to proceed with the rest of the Home Fleet to Scapa Flow two days later to safeguard the fleet from a possible surprise attack by the Imperial German Navy. In August 1914, following the outbreak of World War I, the Home Fleet was reorganised as the Grand Fleet, and placed under the command of Admiral John Jellicoe. On the evening of 22 November 1914, the Grand Fleet conducted a fruitless sweep in the southern half of the North Sea; St Vincent stood with the main body in support of Vice-Admiral David Beatty's 1st Battlecruiser Squadron. The fleet was back in port in Scapa Flow by 27 November. The 1st Battle Squadron cruised north-west of the Shetland Islands and conducted gunnery practice on 8–12 December. Four days later, the Grand Fleet sortied during the German raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, but failed to make contact with the High Seas Fleet. St Vincent and the rest of the Grand Fleet conducted another sweep of the North Sea on 25–27 December. Jellicoe's ships, including St Vincent, conducted gunnery drills on 10–13 January 1915 west of the Orkney and Shetland Islands. On the evening of 23 January, the bulk of the Grand Fleet sailed in support of Beatty's battlecruisers, but the fleet was too far away to participate in the Battle of Dogger Bank the following day. On 7–10 March, the Grand Fleet conducted a sweep in the northern North Sea, during which it conducted training manoeuvres. Another such cruise took place on 16–19 March. On 11 April, the Grand Fleet conducted a patrol in the central North Sea and returned to port on 14 April; another patrol in the area took place on 17–19 April, followed by gunnery drills off Shetland on 20–21 April. The Grand Fleet conducted sweeps into the central North Sea on 17–19 May and 29–31 May without encountering any German vessels. During 11–14 June the fleet conducted gunnery practice and battle exercises west of Shetland. King George V inspected all of the personnel of the 2nd Division aboard St Vincent during his visit to Scapa on 8 July and the Grand Fleet conducted training off Shetland beginning three days later. On 2–5 September, the fleet went on another cruise in the northern end of the North Sea and conducted gunnery drills. Throughout the rest of the month, the Grand Fleet conducted numerous training exercises. The ship, together with the majority of the Grand Fleet, conducted another sweep into the North Sea from 13 to 15 October. Almost three weeks later, St Vincent participated in another fleet training operation west of Orkney during 2–5 November. She became a private ship that month when she was relieved by Colossus as flagship. The fleet departed for a cruise in the North Sea on 26 February 1916; Jellicoe had intended to use the Harwich Force of cruisers and destroyers to sweep the Heligoland Bight, but bad weather prevented operations in the southern North Sea. As a result, the operation was confined to the northern end of the sea. Another sweep began on 6 March, but had to be abandoned the following day as the weather grew too severe for the escorting destroyers. On the night of 25 March, St Vincent and the rest of the fleet sailed from Scapa Flow to support Beatty's battlecruisers and other light forces raiding the German Zeppelin base at Tondern. By the time the Grand Fleet approached the area on 26 March, the British and German forces had already disengaged and a strong gale threatened the light craft, so the fleet was ordered to return to base. On 21 April, the Grand Fleet conducted a demonstration off Horns Reef to distract the Germans while the Imperial Russian Navy relaid its defensive minefields in the Baltic Sea. The fleet returned to Scapa Flow on 24 April and refuelled before proceeding south in response to intelligence reports that the Germans were about to launch a raid on Lowestoft, but only arrived in the area after the Germans had withdrawn. On 2–4 May, the fleet conducted another demonstration off Horns Reef to keep German attention focused on the North Sea. #### Battle of Jutland In an attempt to lure out and destroy a portion of the Grand Fleet, the High Seas Fleet, composed of 16 dreadnoughts, 6 pre-dreadnoughts, and supporting ships, departed the Jade Bight early on the morning of 31 May. The fleet sailed in concert with Rear Admiral Franz von Hipper's 5 battlecruisers. The Royal Navy's Room 40 had intercepted and decrypted German radio traffic containing plans of the operation. In response the Admiralty ordered the Grand Fleet, totalling some 28 dreadnoughts and 9 battlecruisers, to sortie the night before to cut off and destroy the High Seas Fleet. St Vincent, under the command of Captain William Fisher, was assigned to the 5th Division of the 1st Battle Squadron at this time. Shortly after 14:20, Fisher semaphored the Grand Fleet's flagship, Iron Duke, that his ship was monitoring strong radio signals on the frequency used by the High Seas Fleet that implied the Germans were nearby. Detection of further signals was communicated at 14:52. As the Grand Fleet began deploying from columns into a line of battle beginning at 18:15, the 5th Division was near the rear. St Vincent, the twentieth ship from the head of the battle line after deployment, was briefly forced to stop to avoid overrunning ships further forward as the fleet had been forced to slow to 14 knots (26 km/h; 16 mph) to allow the battlecruisers to assume their position at the head of the line. During the first stage of the general engagement, the ship began firing a few salvos from her main guns at the crippled light cruiser SMS Wiesbaden at 18:33, although the number of hits made, if any, is unknown. Between 18:40 and 19:00 the ship turned away twice from what were thought to be torpedoes that stopped short of the ship. From 19:10 St Vincent began firing at what was initially identified as a German battleship, but proved to be the battlecruiser SMS Moltke, hitting her target twice before she disappeared into the mist. The first armour-piercing, capped (APC) shell was probably a ricochet and struck the upper hull abreast the bridge. It wrecked the sickbay and slightly damaged the surrounding superstructure and hull, which caused some minor flooding. One man in the conning tower was wounded by a splinter. The second hit penetrated the rear armour of the superfiring turret at the rear of the ship, wrecking it and starting a small fire that was easily extinguished by the crew. This was the last time that St Vincent fired her guns during the battle. The ship fired a total of 98 twelve-inch shells (90 APC and 8 common-pointed, capped) during the battle. #### Subsequent activity After the battle, the ship was transferred to the 4th Battle Squadron. The Grand Fleet sortied on 18 August to ambush the High Seas Fleet while it advanced into the southern North Sea, but a series of miscommunications and mistakes prevented Jellicoe from intercepting the German fleet before it returned to port. Two light cruisers were sunk by German U-boats during the operation; Jellicoe decided not to risk the major units of the fleet south of 55° 30' North due to the threat from submarines and mines. The Admiralty concurred and stipulated that the Grand Fleet would not sortie unless the German fleet was attempting an invasion of Britain or there was a strong possibility it could be forced into an engagement under suitable conditions. On 24 April 1918, St Vincent was under repair at Invergordon, Scotland, when she and the dreadnought Hercules were ordered north to reinforce the forces based at Scapa Flow and the Orkneys when the High Seas Fleet sortied north for the last time to intercept a convoy to Norway. She was unable to leave port before the Germans turned back after Moltke suffered engine damage. The ship was present at Rosyth when the German fleet surrendered on 21 November. In March 1919, she was reduced to reserve and became a gunnery training ship at Portsmouth. St Vincent then became flagship of the Reserve Fleet in June and was relieved as gunnery training ship in December when she was transferred to Rosyth. There she remained until listed for disposal in March 1921 as obsolete. She was sold to the Stanlee Shipbreaking & Salvage Co. for scrap on 1 December 1921 and towed to Dover for demolition in March 1922.
3,331,285	Too Much Too Soon (album)	1,172,746,809	null	[ "1974 albums", "Albums produced by Shadow Morton", "Mercury Records albums", "New York Dolls albums" ]	Too Much Too Soon is the second album by the American hard rock band New York Dolls. It was released by Mercury Records on May 10, 1974, and recorded earlier that year at A&R Studios in New York City. Dissatisfied with the recording of their 1973 self-titled debut album, the Dolls' lead singer David Johansen enlisted veteran producer Shadow Morton to produce the sessions. Morton, who had been disenchanted by the music industry, found renewed motivation in the band's energy and undertook the project as a challenge. Although the Dolls shared an affinity for Morton, they produced little original material with him. To complete Too Much Too Soon, they covered older songs and re-recorded their past demos. Johansen impersonated different characters while singing some of the novelty covers, and Morton incorporated many studio sound effects and female backing vocals in his production. For the album, lead guitarist Johnny Thunders wrote and recorded "Chatterbox", his first recorded performance singing lead. Too Much Too Soon sold poorly and only charted at number 167 on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape. After a problem-ridden national tour, the New York Dolls were dropped by Mercury and disbanded a few years later. The album received positive reviews from most critics, some of whom felt Morton's production highlighted the group's raw sound and made it a better record than their first. Like their debut album, Too Much Too Soon became one of the most popular cult records in rock music and has since been viewed by music journalists as a precursor to punk rock. ## Background After being signed by Mercury Records, the New York Dolls released their self-titled debut album in 1973 to poor sales. Although it was praised by critics, the band was not satisfied with producer Todd Rundgren's sound for the album and had disagreements with him before choosing not to retain him. Songwriting and production partners Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were originally enlisted to produce their next album, while the band's guitarist Johnny Thunders wanted to produce it himself. However, Leiber and Stoller withdrew shortly before recording was to begin. The group held a single session with Mercury A&R executive Paul Nelson at Mediasound Studios in New York City, where they recorded 14 songs, most of which were covers. At Leiber and Stoller's recommendation, frontman David Johansen asked veteran producer Shadow Morton to work on the album. Morton was best known for his work with the Shangri-Las, of whom the New York Dolls were fans, and had also been Johansen's first choice to produce their debut album. Morton had become disenchanted with the music industry and wanted to challenge himself by producing the band's second album: "The Dolls had energy, sort of a disciplined weirdness. I took them into the room as a challenge. I was bored with the music and the business. The Dolls can certainly snap you out of boredom." ## Recording and production With Morton, the New York Dolls recorded Too Much Too Soon in 1974 at A&R Studios in New York City. The album was later mastered at Sterling Sound and Masterdisk. During the sessions, Morton had Johansen record his vocals several times and incorporated sound effects such as gongs, gunshots, and feminine choruses. In a report on the album's progress for Melody Maker, journalist Lenny Kaye wrote that they were taking more time than they had on their first record, "bringing in occasional strings and horns, following Shadow's advice not 'to settle'." Morton and the band shared an affinity for each other, as he found the group's energy in the studio refreshing, while Johansen was fond of Morton and the "looser" feel he provided for their music. "That man is completely unpretentious", Johansen said of the producer. "He doesn't think he ever did a marvellous thing in his life." The New York Dolls and Morton produced little original material together. To complete the album, they had to record cover songs and re-record some of the band's earlier demos; "Babylon", "Who Are the Mystery Girls?", "It's Too Late" and "Human Being" had been recorded by the band in March 1973 as demos for Mercury before the label signed them. They had also recorded demos of two songs written by guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, "Teenage News" and "Too Much Too Soon", before working with Morton, but neither was considered for the album. Sylvain said he confronted Morton about this decision, recalling he had been in a rush: "He was too quick with me and said that he'd been told only to listen to David Johansen and Johnny Thunders. He didn't want to tell me who had told him that but obviously it was the managers. I just walked out, it was all driving me nuts." According to journalist Tony Fletcher, Morton would have been more productive on Too Much Too Soon had it not been for his alcoholism and the lifestyles of the band members—bassist Arthur Kane was also an alcoholic, while Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan had heroin addictions. Robert Christgau believed the New York Dolls relied more on cover songs for the album because, "like so many cocky songwriters, David Johansen overloaded his debut with originals and then found that record promotion wasn't a life activity that inspired new ones." English writer Clinton Heylin said their inability to sell enough records before may have discouraged them from writing original songs. ## Music and lyrics According to Billboard magazine, Too Much Too Soon is another hard rock record by the New York Dolls but with more "sophisticated" production. Music journalist Nina Antonia wrote that because of the group's "untamable wildness", the record still sounds eccentric despite Morton's attempts to "polish" their sound, such as by subduing their otherwise unrefined guitar playing. The album features covers of the Cadets' 1956 hit "Stranded in the Jungle", Archie Bell's 1969 hit "There's Gonna Be a Showdown", and Sonny Boy Williamson's "Don't Start Me Talkin'". On the novelty cover songs, Johansen impersonates characters such as the high-stepper in "(There's Gonna Be A) Showdown" and Charlie Chan in "Bad Detective", which has lyrics describing a nonsensical narrative set in China. On "Stranded in the Jungle", he alternates between a comical reject and a lecherous man at lover's lane. Journalist Ellen Willis remarked that, like the band's 1973 song "Personality Crisis", "Stranded in the Jungle" suggests a theme of "clashing cultures and the dilemma of preserving one's uniqueness while reaching out to others". For "Babylon", Johansen wrote the lyrics as a tribute to the New York Dolls' following from outside New York City: "[The song] is about people who live in Babylon, Long Island, New York, who go into the city every night dressed to kill. These people have to get home before sun-up, you know, like vampires that can't get caught by the sun." By contrast, Spin magazine's Eric Weisbard and Craig Marks interpreted "Babylon" as a reference to the Biblical city of the same name because of how the song portrays "the symbol of decadence as a sanctuary". The song's subject leaves Babylon for Manhattan, where she is then hired to work in a massage parlor. "It's Too Late" is a commentary on nostalgic fashions and makes reference to actress Diana Dors in a lyric rebuking drug use. According to Antonia, the song criticizes indifferent, decadent people who cannot, as Johansen sings, "parlez New York français". On "Who Are the Mystery Girls?", he scolds those who abuse love, wanting to "kick it on the floor" and "beat it like a scatter rug". "Puss 'n' Boots" is titled after an illustrated, podo-erotic magazine sold in adult book stores. Johansen said the song is about shoe fetishism, "or as Arthur [Kane] observed, it's about 'the woofers in relationship with the woofee'." Its lyrics depict adversities faced by the protagonist, "Little Rhinestone Target", as he tries to change his name in pursuit of his shoe fetish, before the music ends with a gunshot, a sound effect inspired by the Olympics' 1958 song "Western Movies". Willis interpreted a feminist subtext in the song, citing the lyrics "sometimes you gotta get away someway / and now you're walkin' just like you're ten feet tall ... I hope you don't get shot for tryin'." "Chatterbox" is written and sung by Thunders, whom Willis felt "uses his voice as a wailing instrument" in a manner similar to rock singer Robert Plant. The song is Thunders's first time singing lead and features vocals Weisbard and Marks said are delivered in a quavering but proud New York accent. His lyrics describe the narrator's growing frustration over a crossed-wire phone connection with a female subject. On "Human Being", an ode to self-respect and personal liberty, Thunders introduces his guitar playing with a roughly performed variation on Bill Doggett's 1956 song "Honky Tonk". Johansen addresses critics of the band in the song, telling them if they find him objectionable they should instead find themselves "a saint", "a boy who's gonna be what I ain't", and a "plastic doll with a fresh coat of paint who's gonna sit through the madness and always act so quaint". ## Marketing and sales Too Much Too Soon was titled after the biography on actress Diana Barrymore. According to music journalist Jon Savage, the title was "more than applicable to the Dolls themselves" because of alcoholism and other issues among the band members, including Thunders's heroin use and Nolan's contraction of hepatitis. A dedication to Barrymore was printed in the album's gatefold. For its front cover, the group eschewed the drag image that their first album had presented, and that they had developed a reputation for, in favor of a fake concert shot. During the shoot, Thunders held a doll in his arm as if to strike it against his guitar to add shock value. The album was first released on May 10, 1974, in the United States. Two double A-sided, 7" singles were released to promote the album—"Stranded in the Jungle" / "Who Are the Mystery Girls?" in July and "(There's Gonna Be A) Showdown" / "Puss 'n' Boots" in September 1974—but neither charted. According to Antonia, the selected singles demonstrated how "the Dolls were in need of a hit single and their current producer wanted to see them attain it" by accommodating radio audiences with toned-down studio versions of songs the band had performed more rowdily in concert. "Stranded in the Jungle", originally a rowdy concert staple for the band, had been produced by Morton with a more polished sound and feminine vocals; according to popular music academic Nick Talevski, it became the New York Dolls' most successful single. Too Much Too Soon was another commercial failure for the New York Dolls, however, as it only charted at number 167 on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape. It performed well below Mercury's expectations and sold less than 100,000 copies. Joe Gross later wrote in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004) that the band's attempt to garner more airplay by enlisting Morton did not work because, "with a slicker sound, background choruses, and cleaner riffs, the Dolls just sounded skankier". When the album was released in Europe in July, the New York Dolls performed at the Buxton Festival in Derbyshire and the Rock Prom Festival at Olympia in London. They also embarked on their second tour of the United States, which lasted only a few months. It was marred by cancelled shows and conflicts between the band members stemming from their escalating addictions to alcohol and other drugs. Because of their alcoholism, they failed to set up a recording session for a scheduled third album after the tour had ended, and by 1975, they were dropped by Mercury before disbanding a few years later. ## Critical reception and legacy Too Much Too Soon received positive reviews from contemporary critics. Reviewing for Rolling Stone in June 1974, Dave Marsh hailed the New York Dolls as the leading hard rock band in the US and noted what he felt was Nolan's competent drumming, Johansen's ability to add depth to his characters, and Thunders's innovative guitar playing. Marsh especially praised his playing on "Chatterbox", calling it "a classic", and believed even the most brazen songs sounded successful because Morton's production highlighted the group's more unrefined musical qualities. Writing for Creem magazine, Christgau said the polished sound reproduction preserved the band's raw qualities, especially in the case of Johansen's vocals and Nolan's drumming, and remarked that Rundgren "should be ashamed—Shadow Morton has gotten more out of the Dolls than they can give us live on any but their best nights." Robert Hilburn from the Los Angeles Times felt Too Much Too Soon was a better-produced album that proved the band to be "the real thing", calling it the best record of derisive punk rock since Exile on Main St. by the Rolling Stones in 1972. In The New Yorker, Ellen Willis wrote that she learned to appreciate Too Much Too Soon more than New York Dolls after seeing the band perform songs from the former album in concert, particularly "Human Being" and "Puss 'n' Boots", while Ron Ross from Phonograph Record magazine said the group's "easy going ironic sensibility" was expressed "far more amusingly and accessibly" here than on their debut album. Tom Hull, in a review published in Overdose, gave the album an A-minus and said that rationalizing one's love of the Dolls "misses the point". Along with being "cute", they are "just about the best really hard rock band around, and in an age of cleverness and chic that's mighty good to see", Hull concluded. Some reviewers were critical of Too Much Too Soon for what they felt was a poorly recorded and overproduced sound. In a negative review for NME, Nick Kent said it sounded cluttered and "shot through with unfulfilled potential", while Circus magazine panned the record as "cut after cut of annoying screeching". It was nonetheless voted the tenth best album of 1974 in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics nationwide, published in The Village Voice. Willis, one of the critics polled, listed it as her fifth favorite record of the year. Christgau, the poll's creator and supervisor, named it third best. ### Impact and reappraisal Along with the New York Dolls' first album, Too Much Too Soon became one of the most popular cult records in rock music. According to AllMusic senior editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine, the group predated punk rock with their "gleeful sleaziness and reckless sound" on the record, which he said was embellished by Morton's production details and exemplified by "musically visceral and dangerous" songs such as "Human Being". At the end of the 1970s, Too Much Too Soon appeared on decade-end favorite albums lists by Christgau, who ranked it fourth in the Voice, and Richard Cromelin, who wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Morton's production made it slightly better than New York Dolls. In 1986, Sounds magazine ranked it sixtieth on its list of the 100 best albums of all time. After it was reissued by Mercury in 1987, Don McLeese of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that Morton's production highlighted the New York Dolls' sense of humor and was rendered vividly by the CD remaster. However, he felt Too Much Too Soon was marred by inconsistent material and rated it lower than their first record. In a review of the reissue, Don Waller of the Los Angeles Times said the album was underappreciated and as much an "instant classic" as New York Dolls. In 2005, Too Much Too Soon was remastered and reissued by Hip-O Select and Mercury, after which Christgau wrote in Blender that both it and New York Dolls make up "a priceless proto-punk legacy". He wrote that although Johansen's best original songs are on the first record, Too Much Too Soon has consistent hooks, clever lyrics, and exceptional cover songs, including "two R&B novelties whose theatrical potential was barely noticed until the Dolls penetrated their holy essence". That same year, rock journalist Toby Creswell named "Babylon" as one of the greatest songs of all time in his book 1001 Songs. In the Encyclopedia of Popular Music (2006), Colin Larkin felt that the band's issues with alcohol and other drugs affected their performance on the record, which he deemed "a charismatic collection of punk/glam-rock anthems, typically delivered with 'wasted' cool". ## Track listing ## Personnel Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes. New York Dolls - David Johansen – vocals, gong - Arthur "Killer" Kane – bass - Jerry Nolan – drums, percussion - Sylvain Sylvain – guitar, piano, vocals - Johnny Thunders – guitar, vocals Additional personnel - Album Graphics – graphic supervision - Dennis Druzbik – engineering - Bob Gruen – photography - Gilbert Kong – mastering - Hans G. Lehmann – photography - Pieter Mazel – photography - Shadow Morton – production - Paul Nelson – A&R - Dixon Van Winkle – engineering ## Release history Information is adapted from Nina Antonia's Too Much Too Soon: The New York Dolls (2006). ## See also - Lipstick Killers – The Mercer Street Sessions 1972 (album featuring demos re-recorded for Too Much Too Soon) - Timeline of punk rock (list of records such as Too Much Too Soon and events important in punk rock)
3,350,309	Sound and Vision	1,154,157,234	1977 song by David Bowie	[ "1977 singles", "David Bowie songs", "RCA Records singles", "Song recordings produced by David Bowie", "Song recordings produced by Tony Visconti", "Songs written by David Bowie" ]	"Sound and Vision" is a song by the English musician David Bowie. It was released in January 1977 by RCA Records on side one of his 11th studio album Low. RCA later chose it as the first single from the album. Co-produced by Bowie and Tony Visconti, the song was recorded at the Château d'Hérouville in Hérouville, France, in September 1976, and completed at Hansa Studios in West Berlin in October and November. The song began as a simple G major chord progression that Bowie gave to the backing musicians, writing and recording his vocals afterward. It features backing vocals from Brian Eno and Visconti's then-wife Mary Hopkin. Regarded by biographers as the closest to a "conventional pop song" on Low, "Sound and Vision" is oddly structured. Beginning as an instrumental, elements are added throughout the song's runtime; Bowie's vocals do not appear for over a minute and a half. The song's lyrics are dark and introspective, reflecting Bowie's mental state after years of drug addiction, and provide a stark contrast to the music itself, which is more joyous and upbeat. Like other Low tracks, the song's drum sound was achieved through the use of Visconti's Eventide H910 Harmonizer. Released as a single on 11 February 1977, "Sound and Vision" was a commercial success, making number three on the UK Singles Chart, aided by its appearance in BBC television commercials. It peaked at number 69 on the Billboard Hot 100, signalling Bowie's commercial downturn in the US until 1983. Music critics and biographers consider "Sound and Vision" one of Bowie's greatest songs. He performed it only once on his 1978 Isolar II world tour, but frequently on later tours. Remixes of the song have been created in subsequent decades and it has appeared on several compilation albums. ## Writing and recording Like its parent album Low, "Sound and Vision" was co-produced by David Bowie and Tony Visconti, with contributions from multi-instrumentalist Brian Eno. The backing tracks were recorded at the Château d'Hérouville in Hérouville, France, in September 1976, and Bowie's vocals and other overdubs were recorded at Hansa Studios in West Berlin in October and November. It was the first song Bowie wrote at the Château with Eno in mind. The recording process for the song, and the rest of the album, differed from Bowie's previous work. The backing tracks were recorded first, followed by overdubs, and the lyrics and vocals were written and recorded last. Used during the recording of Iggy Pop's The Idiot earlier that year, Bowie heavily favoured this "three-phase" process, which he would use for the rest of his career. According to biographer Chris O'Leary, the song began as a simple descending-by-fifths G major progression that Bowie gave to the band, suggesting further melodies, a baseline and drum ideas. Drummer Dennis Davis thought it sounded "like a Crusaders tune", while bassist George Murray found it reminiscent of Bo Diddley. As with most of the tracks on the album, the band went with the basic idea and finished the backing track in a few takes. The song was largely completed without Eno, who arrived late in the sessions after all the backing tracks for side one were almost finished. The drums on "Sound and Vision" were treated through the use of an Eventide H910 Harmonizer, used at Visconti's insistence. The sound, described by biographer David Buckley as "revolutionary" and "stunning", is particularly evident on the album tracks "Speed of Life" and "Breaking Glass", as well as "Sound and Vision". Visconti's wife, singer Mary Hopkin, contributed the song's backing vocals; she was credited as Mary Visconti. Hopkin was visiting the Château with her children when Eno asked her to sing. She recorded her vocals before any lyrics or melody were written, recalling in 2011: > One evening, Brian called me into the studio to sing a quick backing vocal with him on 'Sound and Vision'. We sang his cute little 'doo doo' riff in unison. It was meant to be a distant echo but, when David heard it, he pushed up the fader until it became a prominent vocal – much to my embarrassment, as I thought it very twee. I love the song and I'm a great admirer of David's work. ## Composition Like the majority of the tracks on the first side of Low, "Sound and Vision" is classified as a "song fragment". Structurally, it starts as an instrumental, running for 46 seconds before backing vocals croon two descending notes. At 1:14, Eno and Hopkin sing their vocal line, which echoes the main guitar line, followed by a darker saxophone part played by Bowie. Bowie's vocals take a full one minute and 45 seconds to appear, which was done at Eno's insistence to "confound listener expectations". Different elements build throughout the song's runtime: the beginning only contains the rhythm section, which is followed by a mock-string section created using an ARP Solina synthesiser, then backing vocals, brass and finally Bowie's vocal. Described by Bowie as his "ultimate retreat song", the lyrics for "Sound and Vision" offer introspection, reflecting his mental state following a long period of drug addiction. The song's narrator sits in an empty room and draws the blinds. As he has the world shut away, he waits "for the gift of sound and vision". Bowie further commented: "It was just the idea of getting out of America, that depressing era I was going through. ... It was wanting to be put in a little cold room with omnipotent blue on the walls and blinds on the windows." Wilcken calls "Sound and Vision" the centrepiece of side one. It continues the lyrical themes of "Breaking Glass" and "What in the World", in that "after failing to connect with female others", the narrator focuses on the self and by "drifting into my solitude", sets the stage for the wordless introspection of side two. Biographer Nicholas Pegg and author Peter Doggett make comparisons to Bowie's 1971 song "Quicksand". Doggett writes: "Like 'Quicksand', 'Sound and Vision' was Bowie's admission that his creative inspiration had disappeared: cunningly, he used a confession of artistic bankruptcy to spark his muse back to life." According to Visconti, there were originally more verses, but these were removed during the mixing stage. The lyrics provide a stark contrast to the music itself, which is more joyous. Author Thomas Jerome Seabrook writes that Bowie's "low, reflective [vocal is] at odds with the upbeat, almost parodic sensibilities of the music that surrounds it". The song is in the key of G major. James Perone describes its chord progression as "I (G major), ii (A minor), V (D major), I (G major)". He notes that this progression evokes classical music with a harmonic quality. Almost every instrument playing on the song sounds processed. O'Leary compares the drums to the sound of a radiator turning on; Seabrook finds it similar to a whip. The bass is distorted while the piano and mock-string section are engulfed with studio effects; Seabrook further believes the saxophone sounds as if it was treated by Visconti's Harmonizer. Throughout the song, a sizzle cymbal appears on the third beat of almost every bar and two guitars are panned to different channels, the main guitar line appearing in the left, and a "mock-reggae rhythm" appearing in the right. Bowie's biographers consider "Sound and Vision" the closest to a "conventional pop song" on Low. Wilcken writes that the track's instrumentation and backing vocals combine to create a "sonic effect" that equals that of a "pop song with quotation marks, not quite sure whether it's a part of the genre or referencing it". Perone finds the song a "hybrid of soul and pop", continuing musical and lyrical themes of Bowie's 1975 album Young Americans. Michael Gallucci of Ultimate Classic Rock describes a sense of "pop minimalism" on "Sound and Vision" and "Be My Wife" that showed Bowie entering a new phase of his career. He further considered the song the best example of its parent album's embracement of the old and new, calling it "a traditional rock song at its core wrapped in krautrock and electronic textures". In ZigZag magazine, Kris Needs described the song's beat as "bouncy, futuristic disco". Doggett calls it a "consummate pop record, as tightly produced as any disco classic of the era". ## Release When Bowie presented his 11th studio album Low to RCA Records, the label were shocked. The album was originally slated for release in November 1976, but RCA delayed it until January 1977, fearing poor commercial performance. Despite receiving no promotion from Bowie or his label, Low was a commercial success, peaking at number 2 on the UK Albums Chart and number 11 on the US Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart. "Sound and Vision" was sequenced as the fourth track on side one, between "What in the World" and "Always Crashing in the Same Car". At the time of release, Tim Lott of Sounds magazine felt that none of the tracks were "single material". Bud Scoppa of Phonograph Record magazine considered "Sound and Vision" the "obvious" choice. RCA selected "Sound and Vision" as the first single from the album, releasing it on 11 February 1977, with the catalogue number PB 0905 and the instrumental "A New Career in a New Town" as the B-side. A 12" promotional single was also released in the US the same year, featuring a seven-minute remix of "Sound and Vision" segueing into Iggy Pop's "Sister Midnight". The single was used by the BBC for television trailers at the time. This provided considerable exposure, and helped the song peak at number three on the UK Singles Chart, becoming Bowie's highest-charting new single in the UK since "Sorrow" in 1973. The single's success in the UK confused RCA executives, and allowed Bowie to persuade them to release Iggy Pop's The Idiot, which they did in March 1977. The song was also a top 10 hit in Belgium Flanders, West Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand, and a top 20 hit in Austria and Belgium Wallonia. It stalled at number 74 in Australia, number 87 on Canada's RPM Singles chart and only peaked at number 69 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US, signalling Bowie's commercial downturn until "Let's Dance" in 1983. In 2021, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) certified the song silver for sales and streams exceeding 200,000 units in the UK. ## Critical reception On release, Lott reviewed Low and described "Sound and Vision" as the centrepiece of the album. Calling it "metallic beauty", he praised Bowie's vocal performance, stating: "His singing, as always, is more mechanical than melodic, but in context, the perfect foil for the harsh guitar and sliding synthesiser." Doggett calls "Sound and Vision" "arguably one of the most important songs [Bowie] had ever written," because the song allowed Bowie to reconnect with himself after a long period of drug addiction. Pegg regards it as "one of his most distinctive and brilliant recordings". NME ranked it the 29th best song of the year in 1977. "Sound and Vision" has been ranked one of Bowie's best songs by several publications. Following Bowie's death in 2016, the writers at Rolling Stone ranked "Sound and Vision" one of Bowie's 30 essential songs, noting that although Low garnered mixed reception on release, releasing "Sound and Vision" as the lead single was "genius" owing to the song's "clever bait-and-switch". The same year, in a list ranking every Bowie single from worst to best, Ultimate Classic Rock placed "Sound and Vision" at number nine. In lists of Bowie's best songs by Consequence of Sound, Smooth Radio and Uncut, the song was voted numbers 22, 10 and 15, respectively. In 2018, readers of NME voted "Sound and Vision" Bowie's 19th best song, while staff-writer Emily Barker voted it Bowie's second best song, behind "Heroes'". Mojo magazine ranked it number four in 2015, behind "Life on Mars?", "Heroes'" and "Starman". In 2020, Alexis Petridis of The Guardian called "Sound and Vision" Bowie's greatest song, finding it "both a fantastic pop song and an act of artistic daring" and a track that "transcends time"; he concluded that it was: "Completely original, nothing about its sound tethers it to the mid-70s. Its magic seems to sum Bowie up." A year later, writers of The Telegraph voted it Bowie's 12th greatest song, writing: "A punch of a song at the start of Low, it showed Bowie entering a new, dispassionate style which would divide his listeners but, with its liberal use of synthesisers, also cement his status as a trailblazer of the electronica." Far Out placed it at number nine in a 2022 list. ## Live versions and subsequent releases "Sound and Vision" was only performed once during the 1978 Isolar II world tour, at Earl's Court in London, on 1 July 1978. According to Seabrook, this was because Bowie struggled to sing it, a problem he also had with "Golden Years". This performance was included on Rarestonebowie (1995), a compilation compiled by Bowie's former music publisher MainMan, and decades later on the live album Welcome to the Blackout (Live London '78) (2018). Bowie also performed the song during the Sound+Vision (1990), Heathen (2002), and A Reality (2003) tours, and was also performed on A&E's Live by Request on 15 June 2002. The song has since appeared on several compilations, including The Best of Bowie (1980), Changestwobowie (1981), Sound + Vision (1989), Changesbowie (EMI LP and cassette versions) (1990), The Singles Collection and Bowie: The Singles 1969–1993 (both 1993), The Best of David Bowie 1974/1979 (1998), Best of Bowie (2002), The Platinum Collection (2006), Nothing Has Changed (2014), and Bowie Legacy (2016). The song, along with the rest of its parent album, was remastered in 2017 for Parlophone's A New Career in a New Town (1977–1982) box set. The 1991 reissue of Low featured a new remix of "Sound and Vision" by producer David Richards, Bowie's Never Let Me Down collaborator. Pegg writes that it contains an "unpleasant honking saxophone" that he feels "disrupts the original's textured atmospherics". This remix and two additional remixes were released as a single in the US by 808 State; it was credited to "David Bowie vs 808 State" and were subsequently released as an EP download in 2010. Another stripped-down remix was created by Sonjay Prabhakar in 2013 for a Sony commercial. Titled "Sound and Vision 2013", it was solely included on a CD-R promo. An extended version of the remix was released later the same year. Ultimate Classic Rock placed "Sound and Vision 2013" at number 117 (out of 119) in a list ranking every Bowie single from worst to best. ## Cover versions and media appearances Artists who have covered "Sound and Vision" include Scottish rock band Franz Ferdinand, American indie rock band the Sea and Cake, English singer-songwriter Anna Calvi, and American singer-songwriter Beck, whose version included a 157-piece orchestra. Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos recalled that the band were asked to cover a song from 1977 for BBC Radio 1 and chose "Sound and Vision" as it was his favourite song from that year, particularly due to the song's unique structure and unpredictability: "You feel like the song is playing for eternity in some other universe. It's like you caught a snippet of something that will always be playing." Bowie's original recording appeared in the 1993 television serial The Buddha of Suburbia, and an excerpt appeared in the Off-Broadway musical Lazarus. According to Pegg, instead of performing the song live in the musical, an excerpt from the original was used in order to "underscore a particularly dramatic moment". Hopkin's backing vocal was echoed in the British rock band Doves' 2002 single "There Goes the Fear". ## Track listing All tracks are written by David Bowie. Original 7" single 1. "Sound and Vision" – 3:00 2. "A New Career in a New Town" – 2:50 David Bowie vs 808 State (1991) 1. "Sound + Vision (808 Gift mix)" – 3:58 2. "Sound + Vision (808 'lectric Blue remix instrumental)" – 4:08 3. "Sound + Vision (David Richards remix 1991)" – 4:40 4. "Sound + Vision (Original version)" – 3:03 David Bowie vs 808 State – "Sound and Vision" Remix EP (2010) 1. "Sound + Vision (808 Gift mix)" – 3:58 2. "Sound + Vision (808 'lectric Blue remix instrumental)" – 4:08 3. "Sound + Vision (David Richards remix 1991)" – 4:40 4. "Sound + Vision (Original version)" – 3:03 - This 2010 release is a digital download only David Bowie – "Sound and Vision (2013)" 1. "Sound and Vision 2013" – 1:50 2. "Sound and Vision (Remastered)" – 3:04 ## Personnel According to biographer Chris O'Leary: - David Bowie – lead and backing vocals, baritone saxophone, Chamberlin and/or ARP Solina ("synthetic strings") - Ricky Gardiner – lead guitar - Carlos Alomar – rhythm guitar - George Murray – bass - Dennis Davis – drums - Brian Eno – piano, backing vocals - Mary Visconti – backing vocals - Roy Young – piano Production - David Bowie – producer - Tony Visconti – producer ## Charts ### Weekly charts ### Year-end charts ## Certifications
11,924,059	SMS Kaiser Friedrich III	1,158,095,087	Battleship of the German Imperial Navy	[ "1896 ships", "Kaiser Friedrich III-class battleships", "Ships built in Wilhelmshaven", "World War I battleships of Germany" ]	SMS Kaiser Friedrich III ("His Majesty's Ship Emperor Frederick III") was the lead ship of the Kaiser Friedrich III class of pre-dreadnought battleships. She was laid down at the Kaiserliche Werft in Wilhelmshaven in March 1895, launched in July 1896, and finished in October 1898. The ship was armed with a main battery of four 24-centimeter (9.4 in) guns in two twin gun turrets supported by a secondary battery of eighteen 15 cm (5.9 in) guns. Sea trials and modifications lasted more than a year, and once she entered active service in October 1899, the ship became the flagship of Prince Heinrich in I Squadron of the German Heimatflotte (Home Fleet). I Squadron was primarily occupied with training exercises throughout each year, and also made numerous trips to other European countries, particularly Great Britain and Sweden–Norway. In 1901, the ship was severely damaged after striking submerged rocks in the Baltic Sea; the incident contributed to design changes in later German battleships to make them more resistant to underwater damage. Kaiser Friedrich III was extensively modernized in 1908; her secondary guns were reorganized and her superstructure was cut down to reduce top-heaviness. After returning to service in 1910, Kaiser Friedrich III was placed in the Reserve Formation; she spent the next two years laid up, being activated only for the annual fleet maneuvers. The years 1913 and 1914 passed without any active service until the outbreak of World War I in July 1914. Though obsolete, Kaiser Friedrich III and her sister ships served in a limited capacity as coastal defense ships in V Battle Squadron in the early months of the war, tasked with defending Germany's North Sea coastline. The ships conducted two operations in the Baltic but did not encounter any hostile warships. By February 1915, Kaiser Friedrich was withdrawn from service and eventually decommissioned in November, thereafter being employed as a prison ship and later as a barracks ship. She was scrapped in 1920. ## Design After the Imperial German Navy ordered the four Brandenburg-class battleships in 1889, a combination of budgetary constraints, opposition in the Reichstag (Imperial Diet), and a lack of a coherent fleet plan delayed the acquisition of further battleships. The former Secretary of the Reichsmarineamt (Imperial Navy Office), Leo von Caprivi, became the Chancellor of Germany in 1890, and Vizeadmiral (Vice Admiral) Friedrich von Hollmann became Secretary of the Reichsmarineamt. Hollmann requested a new battleship in 1892 to replace the ironclad turret-ship Preussen, built twenty years earlier, but the Franco-Russian Alliance, signed the year before, put the government's attention on expanding the Army's budget. Parliamentary opposition forced Hollmann to delay until the following year, when Caprivi spoke in favor of the project, noting that Russia's recent naval expansion threatened Germany's Baltic Sea coastline. In late 1893, Hollmann presented the Navy's estimates for the 1894–1895 budget year, again with a request for a replacement for Preussen, which was approved. The new ship abandoned the six-gun arrangement of the Brandenburgs for four large-caliber pieces, the standard arrangement of other navies at the time. Kaiser Friedrich III was 125.3 m (411 ft 1 in) long overall and had a beam of 20.4 m (66 ft 11 in) and a draft of 7.89 m (25 ft 11 in) forward and 8.25 m (27 ft 1 in) aft. She displaced 11,097 t (10,922 long tons) as designed and up to 11,785 t (11,599 long tons) at full load. The ship was powered by three 3-cylinder vertical triple-expansion steam engines that drove three screw propellers. Steam was provided by four Marine-type and eight cylindrical boilers, all of which burned coal and were vented through a pair of tall funnels. Kaiser Friedrich III's powerplant was rated at 13,000 metric horsepower (12,820 ihp; 9,560 kW), which generated a top speed of 17.5 knots (32.4 km/h; 20.1 mph). She had a cruising radius of 3,420 nautical miles (6,330 km; 3,940 mi) at a speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph). The crew comprised between 658 and 687 officers and enlisted men. The ship's armament consisted of a main battery of four 24 cm (9.4 in) SK L/40 guns in twin gun turrets, one fore and one aft of the central superstructure. Her secondary armament consisted of eighteen 15 cm (5.9 in) SK L/40 guns carried in a mix of turrets and casemates. Close-range defense against torpedo boats was provided by a battery of twelve 8.8 cm (3.5 in) SK L/30 quick-firing guns, all mounted in casemates. She also carried twelve 3.7 cm (1.5 in) machine cannon; these were later removed. There were six 45 cm (17.7 in) torpedo tubes, all in above-water swivel mounts. The ship's belt armor was 150 to 300 mm (5.9 to 11.8 in) thick, and the main armor deck was 65 mm (2.6 in) thick. The conning tower and main battery turrets were protected with 250 mm (9.8 in) of armor plating, and the secondary casemates received 150 mm (5.9 in) of armor protection. ## Service history ### Construction to 1900 Kaiser Friedrich III's keel was laid on 5 March 1895 at the Kaiserliche Werft (Imperial Shipyard) in Wilhelmshaven, under construction number 22. Kaiser Wilhelm II, the son of the ship's namesake, hammered the first rivet into the keel. She was ordered under the contract name Ersatz Preussen, to replace the elderly armored frigate Preussen. Kaiser Friedrich III was launched on 1 July 1896 and Wilhelm II was present again, this time to give the launching speech. The ship was commissioned on 7 October 1898 and began sea trials in the Baltic Sea. Of major concern was how the three-shaft arrangement would perform on a ship the size of Kaiser Friedrich III; the preceding Brandenburg class had used two shafts. After the trials were completed in mid-February 1899, Kaiser Friedrich returned to Wilhelmshaven and was decommissioned so defects identified during the trials could be remedied. The work lasted longer than originally planned, her main battery guns had not yet been delivered, and the ship remained out of service for much of the year. Upon recommissioning on 21 October, Kaiser Friedrich III was assigned to II Division of I Squadron of the Heimatflotte (Home Fleet), which was commanded by Vizeadmiral Paul Hoffmann. She took the place of the ironclad Baden, which had been decommissioned the previous day. Kaiser Friedrich III became the flagship of II Division, commanded by Konteradmiral (Rear Admiral) Wilhelm Büchsel. Before she could join her division, Kaiser Friedrich III and the aviso Hela were sent to escort the Kaiser's yacht Hohenzollern on a trip to Britain for the Kaiser to visit his grandmother, Queen Victoria. The ships left Germany on 17 November and stayed in Dover from 18 to 20 November, before proceeding to Portsmouth on the 20th, remaining there for three days. On their return they stopped in Vlissingen in the Netherlands, from 24 to 29 November, before continuing to Kiel, where they arrived on 1 December. Kaiser Friedrich III finally assumed her role as II Division flagship on 24 January 1900, when Büchsel transferred his flag to the ship. On 2 April, I Squadron steamed to Danzig Bay, where they stayed for four days. The next month, they began a cruise into the North Sea on 7 May; during the trip, the ships made stops in Lerwick in Shetland from 12 to 15 May and Bergen, Norway, from 18 to 22 May. They arrived back in Kiel four days after leaving Bergen. In early July, the four Brandenburg-class battleships were sent to Asia to suppress the Boxer Uprising, prompting a reorganization of the Heimatflotte. Kaiser Friedrich III and Kaiser Wilhelm II were the only battleships available for the annual fleet maneuvers, which were conducted from 15 August to 15 September. They were joined by the armored frigates Sachsen and Württemberg and six Siegfried and Odin-class coastal defense ships. Throughout the maneuvers, Kaiser Friedrich III was assigned to the "German" force, which had to combat a hostile "Yellow" squadron. Thereafter, Büchsel became the deputy commander of I Squadron, but he remained aboard Kaiser Friedrich III only briefly before transferring his flag to the ironclad Württemberg. Konteradmiral Max von Fischel replaced him on 30 September, but Kaiser Friedrich III went into drydock for her annual overhaul shortly thereafter. On 1 November, Vizeadmiral Prince Heinrich, who had replaced Hoffmann as I Squadron commander, raised his flag aboard Kaiser Friedrich III; the ship held the role as squadron flagship for the next three years, interrupted only during the annual fleet exercises conducted in August and September, when Admiral Hans von Koester, the Generalinspekteur der Marine (Inspector-General of the Navy), commanded the fleet from Kaiser Wilhelm II. Through November, the ships of the squadron were occupied with individual training. On 17 November 1900, Kaiser Friedrich III was steaming to Kiel after conducting training exercises. Kaiser Wilhelm II attempted to pass Kaiser Friedrich III, so the latter stopped and allowed the former to pass to port. However, the order to resume steaming was given too quickly, and the ship accidentally rammed Kaiser Wilhelm II. Kaiser Friedrich III suffered minor damage to her bow, while her sister was slightly damaged in the steering engine compartment. Repairs were completed within three days, without the need for either vessel to enter drydock. On 4 December, the ships began a winter training cruise, during which they stopped in Larvik, Norway, from 10 to 12 December. The squadron returned to Germany three days later. ### 1901 grounding In early 1901 the ships underwent maintenance. The repairs were completed by mid-March, and the members of the squadron reunited in Kiel. They then began a training cruise into the Baltic Sea, stopping in Danzig on 1 April. There, Koester informed Prince Heinrich about upcoming joint Army–Navy maneuvers. While returning to Kiel on the night of 1–2 April, Kaiser Friedrich III struck an uncharted rock off Kap Arkona, north of the Adlergrund, at around 01:27. The rock breached the starboard side of the hull and damaged four of the ship's watertight compartments, which filled with water and caused the ship to list to port. Eventually, some 1,200 t (1,200 long tons; 1,300 short tons) of water entered the ship. The shock from the collision damaged the ship's boilers and started a fire in the coal bunkers, which spread to the starboard aft boiler room, forcing the crew to shut down the ship's engines. All the ship's ammunition magazines, engine rooms, and storage compartments had to be flooded to prevent the fire from spreading. Three men were seriously injured while fighting the fire, one of whom died of his injuries. The crew were able to suppress the fire and contain the flooding. Kaiser Wilhelm II, which had also had a slight grounding (without damage), came alongside to take off the crew if it became necessary to abandon ship and, once the fires were controlled, attempted to take Kaiser Friedrich III under tow, but the cables snapped. By this time, the crew had raised steam in the remaining boilers, and the ship proceeded at 5 knots (9.3 km/h; 5.8 mph) to Kiel, which she reached on 3 April. There, the ship was thoroughly examined. The dockyard workers found that eight of the ship's boilers had been badly damaged, and many bulkheads had been bent from the pressure of the water. The keel was extensively damaged, with large holes torn in several places. All three of the ship's propellers were damaged as well. Temporary repairs were effected in Kiel, which included sealing the holes with cement and wood. On 23 April, this work was completed, and she left for Wilhelmshaven, where she was decommissioned for permanent repairs on 4 May. The investigation found that the nearby lightship—which was used to navigate the channel at night—was 700 meters (2,300 ft) from its assigned location, and there were several uncharted rocks in the area of the accident. Therefore, the investigation concluded that the ship's command staff was not at fault in the accident. The investigators recommended design changes to the Deutschland-class battleships, then still being designed, namely the adoption of a torpedo bulkhead to improve resistance to underwater damage. The changes would not be incorporated in a German battleship until the subsequent Nassau-class dreadnought battleships, as their increased size allowed room for the bulkhead and associated watertight compartments. While Kaiser Friedrich III was decommissioned for repairs, her crew was transferred to her new sister Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. The work was completed by early November, and on the 11th, the ship was recommissioned. Both her crew and Prince Heinrich returned from Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. Divisional exercises followed through the rest of November, and on 2 December, I Squadron began another winter training cruise into the Kattegat and Skagerrak. From 7 to 12 December, the ships stopped in Oslo, Norway, where Oscar II visited Kaiser Friedrich III. The ships returned to Kiel on 15 December. ### 1902–1903 The last ironclad left the squadron in February 1902, having been replaced by Kaiser Friedrich III's newly commissioned sister ship Kaiser Karl der Grosse. The squadron began a major training cruise on 25 April; that day, while the ships were passing through the Danish straits, there was a serious boiler accident aboard Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, forcing her to turn back for repairs. Kaiser Friedrich III and the rest of the squadron continued into the North Sea, toward Scotland. They passed through the Pentland Firth on 29 April before turning south toward Ireland. The ships stopped briefly in Lough Swilly on 1 May before proceeding to Bantry Bay, where they anchored off Berehaven five days later. There, Prince Heinrich visited his British uncle, Prince Arthur, and the ships were received by the British Channel Squadron. The German vessels then steamed to Dublin, and then the Isles of Scilly, where Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse rejoined the squadron. They returned to Dublin, where they were visited by Gerald Cadogan, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The ships began their return voyage to Germany on 24 May, and reached Kiel four days later. For most of June, the ships of the squadron conducted individual training. Vizeadmiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the State Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office, brought the Reichstag budget committee to view I Squadron in an attempt to convince them of the value of continued naval expansion. Toward the end of the month, Kaiser Friedrich III departed for Britain with Prince Heinrich to represent Germany during the coronation of King Edward VII. The ceremony was delayed, however, and Kaiser Friedrich III returned to Kiel on 30 June. I Squadron began a training cruise to Norwegian waters on 8 July that ended on 20 July. During the annual gunnery training held after the ships' return to Kiel, Kaiser Friedrich III won the Kaiser's Schießpreis (Shooting Prize) for excellence in gunnery. On 17 August, the fleet assembled in Kiel for the annual training maneuvers. Assigned to the "hostile" force, Kaiser Friedrich III patrolled the Great Belt in the Baltic to prevent the "German" squadron from passing through. Kaiser Friedrich III and several other battleships then forced an entry into the mouth of the Elbe, where the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and Hamburg could be seized. The "hostile" flotilla accomplished these tasks within three days. Starting in November, I Squadron—less the Wittelsbach-class ships, which were still occupied with trials—conducted a number of short cruises, culminating in the annual winter cruise that began on 1 December. The ships steamed into the Kattegat and stopped in Frederikshavn, Denmark, before continuing to Bergen, where they stayed from 6 to 10 December. Kaiser Friedrich III and the rest of the squadron returned to Kiel, arriving two days later. On 2 April 1903, the squadron went to sea again, and began gunnery training two days later. These exercises continued for the rest of the month, interrupted only by heavy storms. A major training cruise followed the next month; on 10 May the ships departed the Elbe and made their way into the Atlantic. They cruised south to Spain, passing Ushant on 14 May and reaching the Iberian Peninsula five days later. There, they conducted a reconnaissance exercise off Pontevedra before anchoring in Vigo on 20 May. Prince Heinrich left Kaiser Friedrich III for a visit to Madrid. After he returned, the squadron departed Spain on 30 May. The ships passed through the Strait of Dover on 3 June and continued into the Kattegat. There, they rendezvoused with the torpedo boats of I Torpedobootsflotille (Torpedo Boat Flotilla)—commanded by Korvettenkapitän (Lieutenant Commander) Franz von Hipper—for a mock attack on the fortifications at Kiel. Later in June, the ships took part in additional gunnery training and were present at the Kiel Week sailing regatta. During Kiel Week, an American squadron that included the battleship USS Kearsarge and four cruisers visited. After Kiel Week, I Squadron, which had been strengthened with the new cruiser Arcona, and I Torpedobootsflotille went to sea for more tactical and gunnery exercises in the North Sea from 6 to 28 July. During the maneuvers, Kaiser Friedrich III collided with the torpedo boat G112. One man aboard G112 was killed in the accident, but the boat remained afloat and was towed to Wilhelmshaven. Kaiser Friedrich III sustained only minor damage. After the exercises, I Squadron stopped in Arendal from 24 to 27 July, while the smaller vessels went to Stavanger. The ships returned to Kiel on 28 July to prepare for the annual fleet maneuvers, which started on 15 August. Following the exercises, the Heimatflotte was reorganized as the Aktive Schlachtflotte (Active Battle Fleet), and Koester replaced Prince Heinrich as the fleet commander; he transferred his flag from Kaiser Friedrich III to Kaiser Wilhelm II. ### 1904–1914 In 1904 Kaiser Friedrich III took part in a training cruise to Britain that included squadron exercises in the northern North Sea and along the Norwegian coast. During the cruise, the ship stopped in Plymouth, Vlissingen, Lerwick, and Molde. The annual autumn fleet maneuvers, conducted from 29 August to 15 September, passed uneventfully for Kaiser Friedrich III. On 1 October, she was transferred to II Squadron, where she served as the flagship. She had informally served in this role since 17 September, as the previous flagship, the coastal defense ship Hildebrand, had been decommissioned. Fischel, by now promoted to Vizeadmiral, raised his flag aboard the ship during her formal transfer to the squadron. The two squadrons of the fleet ended the year with the usual training cruise into the Baltic, which took place uneventfully. On 12 July 1905, the fleet began its annual summer cruise to northern waters; the ships stopped in Gothenburg from 20 to 24 July and Stockholm from 2 to 7 August. The trip ended two days later, and was followed by the autumn fleet maneuvers later that month. On 1 October, the position of deputy commander of I Squadron was recreated, and Kapitän zur See (Captain) Hugo von Pohl was assigned to the role and Kaiser Friedrich III became his flagship. In December the fleet took its usual training cruise in the Baltic. Kaiser Friedrich III followed the same routine of training exercises through 1906. During gunnery training that year, the ship won the Schießpreis for a second time. The summer cruise went to Norway, including stops in Molde from 20 to 26 July and Bergen from 27 July to 2 August. That year, the autumn fleet maneuvers lasted only a week, from 7 to 15 September. After the maneuvers ended, Kaiser Wilhelm II replaced Kaiser Friedrich III as the deputy commander's flagship, though she remained in I Squadron. In December the fleet took its winter cruise into the North Sea instead of the Baltic. In 1907 the ship took part in three major training exercises: the first from 8 May to 7 June; the second from 13 July to 10 August; and the third, the annual fleet maneuvers, from 26 August to 14 September. Directly after the end of the fleet maneuvers, Kaiser Friedrich III was decommissioned in the Kaiserliche Werft in Kiel, being replaced by her sister Kaiser Barbarossa. While decommissioned, the ship underwent an extensive modernization that lasted until 1909. Four of her 15 cm guns were removed, though two 8.8 cm guns were added. All twelve machine guns were removed, as was the ship's stern-mounted torpedo tube. The superstructure was also cut down to reduce the ship's tendency to roll excessively, and her funnels were lengthened. After completing the reconstruction, Kaiser Friedrich III was assigned to the Reserve Formation of the Baltic, spending most of the year out of service. She was reactivated for the annual fleet maneuvers in August and September 1910 with the Hochseeflotte (High Seas Fleet). The ship was recommissioned on 2 August and assigned to III Battle Squadron, serving as the flagship of Vizeadmiral Max Rollmann, who came aboard four days later. The squadron was disbanded after the maneuvers on 8 September, and Kaiser Friedrich III was decommissioned again on 15 September. The ship spent most of 1911 in reserve, being activated only for the annual fleet maneuvers. After recommissioning on 31 July, she briefly served as the flagship of the deputy commander of III Squadron, Konteradmiral Heinrich Saß. The ships initially trained individually before joining the rest of the fleet on 17 August. The maneuvers lasted until 11 September, after which Kaiser Friedrich III was decommissioned yet again. This was the last time the ship would be activated before the outbreak of World War I in July 1914. She and her sister ships were removed from the Reserve Formation in May 1912, having been replaced by the Wittelsbach-class vessels. ### World War I At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Kaiser Friedrich III and her sisters were brought back to active service and mobilized as V Battle Squadron. Kaiser Friedrich III was commanded by Käpitan zur See Alfred Begas. V Squadron was tasked with providing coastal defense in the North Sea. The ships were deployed to the Baltic twice, from 19 to 26 September and 26 to 30 December 1914. For the first operation, the commander of naval forces in the Baltic, Prince Heinrich, initially planned to launch a major amphibious assault on Windau, but a shortage of transports forced a revision of the plan. Instead, V Squadron was to carry the landing force, but this too was cancelled after Heinrich received false reports of British warships having entered the Baltic on 25 September. Kaiser Friedrich III and her sisters returned to Kiel the following day, where the landing force disembarked. The ships then proceeded to the North Sea, where they resumed guard ship duties. For their second deployment to the Baltic, Prince Heinrich ordered a foray toward Gotland to attack any Russian warships in the area. On 26 December 1914, the battleships rendezvoused with the Baltic cruiser division in the Bay of Pomerania and then departed on the sortie. Two days later, the fleet arrived off Gotland to show the flag, and was back in Kiel by 30 December, having failed to locate any Russian vessels. The squadron returned to the North Sea for guard duties, but was withdrawn from front-line service in February 1915. Shortages of trained crews in the High Seas Fleet, and the risk of operating older ships in wartime, necessitated the deactivation of Kaiser Friedrich III and her sisters. The ship had her crew reduced on 6 March in Kiel, where she was assigned as a harbor defense ship. The V Squadron staff came aboard the ship on 25 April, until Begas, by now promoted to Konteradmiral, left for Wörth. On 20 November, Kaiser Friedrich III was decommissioned for the last time. The ship was disarmed and used as a floating prison moored in Kiel after 1916. The guns from Kaiser Friedrich III and the rest of the ships of her class were emplaced in coastal batteries: eight guns on the mole outside Libau, and four each on the islands of Norderney and Sylt. The following year, the ship was moved to Flensburg, where she was used as a barracks; later that year she was again moved to Swinemünde. Kaiser Friedrich III was stricken from the navy list on 6 December 1919 and sold to a ship breaking firm based in Berlin. The ship was broken up at Kiel-Nordmole in 1920. Her bow ornament (bugzier) is on display at the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr in Dresden.
36,202,880	2014 FIFA World Cup final	1,169,047,217	World Cup final, held in Brazil	[ "2010s in Rio de Janeiro", "2014 FIFA World Cup", "Argentina at the 2014 FIFA World Cup", "Argentina national football team matches", "Argentina–Germany relations", "FIFA World Cup finals", "Football in Rio de Janeiro (city)", "Germany at the 2014 FIFA World Cup", "Germany national football team matches", "International sports competitions in Rio de Janeiro (city)", "July 2014 sports events in South America" ]	The 2014 FIFA World Cup final was the final match of the 2014 World Cup, the 20th edition of FIFA's competition for national football teams. The match was played at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 13 July 2014, and was contested by Germany and Argentina. The event comprised hosts Brazil and 31 other teams who emerged from the qualification phase, organised by the six FIFA confederations. The 32 teams competed in a group stage, from which 16 teams qualified for the knockout stage. En route to the final, Germany finished first in Group G, with two wins and a draw, after which they defeated Algeria in the round of 16, France in the quarter-final and Brazil, by a score of 7–1, in the semi-final. Argentina finished top of Group F with three wins, before defeating Switzerland in the round of 16, Belgium in the quarter-final and the Netherlands in a penalty shoot-out in the semi-final. The final was witnessed by 74,738 spectators in the stadium, as well as over a billion watching on television, with the referee for the match being Nicola Rizzoli from Italy. Gonzalo Higuaín missed a chance to score for Argentina in the first half when he was one-on-one with Germany goalkeeper Manuel Neuer, and Benedikt Höwedes failed to give Germany the lead shortly before half-time when his shot struck the goalpost. Lionel Messi had an opportunity to score when he was one-on-one with Neuer shortly after half time, but his low shot went wide of the goal. On 71 minutes, Thomas Müller was through on goal following a build-up involving André Schürrle and Mesut Özil, but he failed to control the ball and lost it to Argentina's goalkeeper, Sergio Romero. With the match goalless after 90 minutes, it went to extra time, in the second period of which Germany broke the deadlock. Mario Götze, who had come on as a substitute shortly before the end of normal time, received Schürrle's cross from the left on his chest before volleying a left-footed shot into the net to secure a 1–0 victory for Germany. Germany's win was their fourth World Cup title and the first since German reunification, as well as the first World Cup win by a European team in the Americas. Götze was named the man of the match, and Messi was awarded the Golden Ball as FIFA's outstanding player of the tournament. Germany's manager, Joachim Löw, labelled his side's win as the culmination of a project that had begun ten years previously under his predecessor Jürgen Klinsmann, and praised his team's spirit. His Argentine counterpart, Alejandro Sabella, thought his team had been unlucky to lose, and called his players "warriors". Germany failed to defend their trophy at the subsequent 2018 World Cup in Russia, becoming the third successive World Cup holders to be eliminated in the group phase after defeats against Mexico and South Korea. ## Background The 2014 FIFA World Cup was the 20th edition of the World Cup, FIFA's football competition for national teams, held in Brazil between 12 June and 13 July 2014. Brazil qualified for the finals automatically as tournament hosts, and 203 teams competed for the remaining 31 spots through qualifying rounds organised by the six FIFA confederations and held between June 2011 and November 2013. In the finals, the teams were divided into eight groups of four with each team playing each other once in a round-robin format. The two top teams from each group advanced to a knock-out phase. The defending champions from the 2010 World Cup were Spain, who had achieved three successive victories in major tournaments, having also won Euro 2008 and Euro 2012. Spain were eliminated in the group phase in the 2014 event. Germany had won the title three times before as West Germany – in 1954, 1974 and 1990. Argentina had two titles, in 1978 and 1986. The two sides had met each other six times previously in the World Cup, including in the 1986 final, which Argentina won 3–2, and the 1990 final, which West Germany won 1–0. They had met in the quarter-final stage of both of the most recent two World Cups, Germany winning both – a penalty-shootout win in 2006 and a 4–0 win in 2010. Germany lost in the semi-final on both occasions. The most recent meeting between the two teams before the 2014 World Cup was a friendly match played on 15 August 2012 at Commerzbank-Arena in Frankfurt, which was won by Argentina 3–1. The venue for the final was announced in 2011 as the Estádio Jornalista Mário Filho in Rio de Janeiro, commonly known as the Maracanã Stadium. It was built in preparation for the 1950 FIFA World Cup, and that tournament's final match, in which Uruguay beat Brazil 2–1 to win the trophy, is as of 2021 the record-holder for the highest attendance at any football match in history. The Maracanã also hosted the finals of the Copa América in 1989, 2019 and 2021; the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup final; and both the men's and women's football finals at the 2016 Summer Olympics. The stadium underwent an extensive rebuild before the 2014 World Cup, after which its capacity was 78,838. The match ball for the 2014 FIFA World Cup final, announced on 29 May 2014, was a variation of the Adidas Brazuca named the Adidas Brazuca Final Rio. Though the technical aspects of the ball were the same, the design was different from the Brazuca balls used in the group phase and prior knockout games, with a green, gold and black coloring. It was the third ball released specifically for FIFA World Cup final matches, after the Teamgeist Berlin (2006) and the Jo'bulani (2010). ## Route to the final ### Germany Germany were drawn in Group G for the World Cup, in which they were joined by Ghana, Portugal and the United States. Their first match was against Portugal, on 16 June 2014 at the Itaipava Arena Fonte Nova in Salvador. Germany won a penalty on 10 minutes, when João Pereira fouled Mario Götze. Müller took the kick and gave Germany the lead. Mats Hummels added a second goal with a header on 32 minutes, and Portugal's Pepe was shown a red card five minutes later, after he headbutted Müller. Müller then scored his second in injury time to give Germany a 3–0 half-time lead. Müller scored a third from close range in the second half, to complete a 4–0 victory, after Rui Patrício had failed to clear a cross by André Schürrle. Germany's second game was against Ghana at the Estádio Castelão in Fortaleza. After a goalless first half, Götze opened the scoring on 51 minutes, when his headed shot from a Müller cross bounced off his own knee and past Ghana's goalkeeper Fatau Dauda. Ghana equalised shortly afterwards, through an André Ayew header, and then took the lead when Sulley Muntari found Asamoah Gyan with a pass, after an error by Manuel Neuer. Germany levelled the game again on 71 minutes, when Miroslav Klose, who had come on as a substitute, kicked Benedikt Höwedes's goal-bound header into the goal from close range. Klose's goal equalled the Brazilian Ronaldo's World Cup record of 15 goals, and the game finished 2–2. Germany's last group game was against the United States at Itaipava Arena Pernambuco in Recife, with a win or draw needed to guarantee qualification. In rainy conditions, Müller scored the only goal of the game with a shot inside the penalty area after goalkeeper Tim Howard had saved Per Mertesacker's header. Germany qualified as group winners. Germany's opponents in the round of 16 were Algeria, with the match played on 30 June at the Estádio Beira-Rio in Porto Alegre. The game was tied at 0–0 after 90 minutes, Germany being described by BBC Sport's David Ornstein as looking frequently "rattled" as "Algeria wasted a succession of chances in an opening, exciting encounter". Germany took the lead early in extra time, when Müller crossed from the left and Schürrle scored from close range. Mesut Özil added a second for Germany in the final minute of extra time, before Abdelmoumene Djabou pulled a goal back for Algeria with a volley in injury time. Germany held on to record a 2–1 win. `They then faced France in the quarter-final at the Maracanã Stadium on 4 July. Hummels gave Germany the lead on 12 minutes with a header, following a free kick by Toni Kroos, and that proved to be the only goal of what Ornstein described as a "comfortable" win. Germany faced tournament hosts Brazil in their semi-final game, on 8 July in Belo Horizonte. In a result described by BBC Sport's Phil McNulty in 2019 as "a drama ... that will never be forgotten by anyone who witnessed it", Germany won the game 7–1, inflicting Brazil's first competitive defeat at home for 39 years. They took the lead on 10 minutes, when Müller scored from a corner, unmarked by any Brazil players. They doubled their lead on 22 minutes through Klose, with his record-breaking 16th World Cup goal, before Kroos made it 3–0 on 25 minutes with a left-footed volley. Kroos scored again 179 seconds later, from an assist by Sami Khedira, before Khedira himself scored to make it 5–0 at half time. Schürrle scored twice in the second half to make it 7–0, before Oscar scored Brazil's sole goal shortly before the end. Simon Burnton of The Guardian later described Germany's play as being "of a savagery unwitnessed against significant opposition in the tournament's history". Germany progressed to their eighth final, 12 years after their last and their second since German reunification.` ### Argentina Argentina were drawn in Group F, alongside Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iran and Nigeria. Their opening game took place on 15 June 2014 against Bosnia and Herzegovina, who were making their World Cup debut. It was the first game of the tournament at the Maracanã Stadium. Argentina took the lead on 3 minutes, when Bosnian defender Sead Kolašinac scored an own goal after a free kick by Lionel Messi had been flicked on by Marcos Rojo. In the second half, Messi scored himself to double Argentina's lead with a powerful shot following a one-two with Gonzalo Higuaín. Vedad Ibišević scored for Bosnia and Herzegovina with 6 minutes remaining, but Argentina held on for a 2–1 win. Their second game was against Iran at the Estádio Mineirão in Belo Horizonte on 21 June. Barney Ronay of The Guardian described Iran as producing a "stirring performance against an Argentina team of all the attacking talents", and the match remained goalless until the 90th minute. Argentina took the win in injury time, when Messi scored a left-footed shot into the corner from outside the penalty area to seal qualification for the next round with a game to spare. Their final group game was on 25 June, against Nigeria in Porto Alegre. Messi gave Argentina the lead on 3 minutes, scoring on the rebound after Ángel Di María's shot hit the goalpost. Ahmed Musa equalised for Nigeria a minute later with a right-footed curling shot, before Messi gave Argentina the lead again with a free kick from 25 yards (23 m) out shortly before half time. Musa equalised once again 2 minutes into the second half, hitting the ball past goalkeeper Sergio Romero after a one-two with Emmanuel Emenike, but Rojo scored with his knee 3 minutes later to seal a 3–2 win and first place in the final group table. Argentina's round-of-16 opponents were Switzerland, on 1 July at the Arena Corinthians in São Paulo. Argentina had the majority of the possession during the game, but BBC Sport's Jonathan Jurejko labelled their play "unconvincing", citing their failure to break down a Switzerland side who were playing defensively. There were no goals during normal time, and it remained 0–0 until 2 minutes before the end of extra time when Messi set up Di María to score the winner past Swiss goalkeeper Diego Benaglio. Substitute Blerim Džemaili almost equalised for Switzerland immediately afterwards with a shot that hit the goalpost, but Argentina held on for a 1–0 win. Their quarter-final was against Belgium at the Estádio Nacional Mané Garrincha in Brasília on 5 July. Argentina scored the only goal of the game on 8 minutes through Higuaín, who scored from the edge of the penalty area after Di María's pass was deflected off Belgium's Jan Vertonghen. Argentina played the Netherlands in the semi-final on 9 July. There were no goals in the game, in either normal time or extra time, in what McNulty described as "120 tedious ... minutes that were in stark contrast to the spectacular shock" of the previous day's semi-final between Brazil and Germany. Ron Vlaar of the Netherlands took the first penalty, a low shot to the right, which was saved by Romero. The next three kicks, by Messi, Arjen Robben and Ezequiel Garay, were all scored, before Romero made another save, diving to his right to keep out a high penalty from Wesley Sneijder. Sergio Agüero, Dirk Kuyt and Maxi Rodríguez all scored their penalties, giving Argentina a 4–2 shoot-out win. The press in Argentina called Romero's two saves the "hands of God", a reference to the "hand of God" goal scored by Diego Maradona in 1986. Argentina progressed to their fifth final, which was also their first since 1990. ## Match ### Pre-match Nicola Rizzoli, from Italy, was named as the referee of the final, together with fellow Italians Renato Faverani and Andrea Stefani as the assistant referees, and Carlos Vera and Christian Lescano from Ecuador as the fourth and fifth officials. Earlier in the 2014 World Cup, Rizzoli took charge of the Spain–Netherlands and Nigeria–Argentina matches in the group stage, and the Argentina–Belgium quarter-final. He had previously taken charge of the 2010 UEFA Europa League Final and the 2013 UEFA Champions League Final. He was also one of the referees at the 2011 FIFA Club World Cup, UEFA Euro 2012 and the 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup. He became the third Italian referee to take charge of a World Cup final, after Sergio Gonella in 1978 and Pierluigi Collina in 2002. A closing ceremony for the World Cup took place about an hour and forty minutes before the final. A performance of two acts, the ceremony lasted about 20 minutes. The first act featured 22 samba dancers and a host of other performers, 32 of the dancers wearing dresses decorated in the colours of each of the participating teams. The second act featured musical performances headlined by Colombian singer Shakira, and included singers Carlinhos Brown, Wyclef Jean, Alexandre Pires and Ivete Sangalo as well as guitarist Carlos Santana. Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen and Carles Puyol, a member of Spain's winning team in 2010, unveiled the FIFA World Cup Trophy. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was present at the final, along with Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose country hosted the next World Cup, and Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, the previous hosts. Representing the finalists, German president Joachim Gauck and chancellor Angela Merkel were in attendance, although Argentina's president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner could not attend because of both her grandson's birthday and a case of pharyngo-laryngitis. Other world leaders present included Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon and Antigua and Barbuda's Gaston Browne. Several celebrities and athletes also attended the final, including Rihanna, Daniel Craig, Mick Jagger, Ashton Kutcher, David Beckham, Tom Brady, Olivier Dacourt, LeBron James, and Christian Vieri. Former World Cup winners like Fabio Cannavaro, Lothar Matthäus, Daniel Passarella, Marco Materazzi and Pelé were present as well. Brazilian spectators at the game were largely supportive of the Germans as a result of the Argentina–Brazil football rivalry, despite their team's heavy semi-final loss. Germany were forced to make a late change to their line-up when Khedira sustained a calf injury during the warm-up before the match. He was replaced in the line-up by Christoph Kramer, with Germany's team otherwise unchanged from that which started in their win over Brazil in the semi-final. Argentina began the match with the identical team to that which started their semi-final against the Netherlands. ### First half Germany kicked off the match at 4 pm local time (7 pm UTC) in temperatures of 23 °C (73 °F) with 65% humidity, in front of a crowd of 74,738 and an estimated global television audience of 1.013 billion. The weather at Santos Dumont Airport, 6.5 kilometres (4 mi) from the stadium, was recorded as fair at the time of kick-off, becoming partly cloudy later in the evening. Germany won a free kick 3 minutes into the game, when Rojo fouled Müller around 25 yards (23 m) from the Argentina goal. The free kick was hit straight at the wall, and Argentina launched a counterattack from the rebound. Pablo Zabaleta ran with the ball down the right before passing to Higuaín on the edge of the penalty area. He took a shot from a narrow angle, but the ball went wide of Neuer's left-hand goalpost. On 9 minutes, Messi outpaced Hummels on the Argentina right and ran into the penalty area. He attempted to find Ezequiel Lavezzi from the byline but Schweinsteiger reached it first and cleared. Germany had considerably more of the early possession, but a German defensive error on 20 minutes gave Argentina what Jerry Hinnen of CBS Sports called "the best opportunity for either side" thus far. Kroos miscued a header, which left Higuaín one-on-one with Neuer, but the latter's shot from the edge of the penalty area went wide of the goal. On 23 minutes, Klose had a chance to score when the ball reached him following a cross by Philipp Lahm, but Zabaleta dispossessed him before he could shoot. In the 30th minute, Lavezzi found space for Argentina on the right and crossed into the penalty area. Higuaín collected the ball and slotted it past Neuer into the goal. He celebrated for several seconds, but the strike was disallowed as he had been in an offside position. Germany made a substitution shortly afterwards, taking off Kramer as a result of a head injury he had sustained 14 minutes previously. He was replaced by Schürrle. Höwedes received a yellow card on 33 minutes for a tackle which connected with Zabaleta's shins, before Messi had a 20-yard (18 m) shot blocked by Schweinsteiger. A minute later, Germany launched an attack down the left through Müller, who passed to Schürrle. He hit a shot towards the top left of the goal, but Romero did a full-stretch dive to save it, despite having his eyeline blocked by Özil. Messi then had another opportunity, running with the ball into the Germany penalty area and kicking the ball towards goal. Jérôme Boateng prevented Argentina taking the lead with a goal-line clearance. Shortly before half time, Höwedes received a Kroos corner in the penalty area, in what reporters for UEFA called the "best chance of the half", but his headed shot from an offside position struck the goalpost and it remained 0–0 at half time. ### Second half Argentina began the second half with Agüero on the field in place of Lavezzi. Higuaín had a shot in the first minute of the half after running down the right wing, but it went wide of Neuer's goal. Messi then had an opportunity to score when he was one-on-one with the goalkeeper a minute later, but his low shot on goal also went wide. Argentina had more possession than Germany in the opening 10 minutes of the half, and they had another chance on 50 minutes when Higuaín received a ball just inside the penalty area; he missed the ball with his attempted shot. In the 56th minute, Neuer took down Higuaín in the penalty area, but no penalty was given, despite Argentine commentators believing it should be given. No card was given either. Klose had Germany's first shot on goal of the second half on 59 minutes but his shot lacked power and was caught by Romero. Argentina had an opportunity to score through a Martín Demichelis header four minutes later, but Klose intercepted to send it behind. Shortly afterwards, Javier Mascherano brought down Klose after losing the ball to him, and was booked. His team-mate Agüero was also booked a minute later for a foul on Schweinsteiger. Midway through the second half, The Guardian's Scott Murray commented that the first half had been "goalless and brilliant", but the second was "goalless and ... well, not so much", although he noted that it remained an open game. Germany had a chance on 71 minutes, Müller, Schürrle and Özil all getting involved in a build-up which Murray described as "tiki-taka", but when Schürrle eventually reached the penalty area with only Romero to beat, he failed to control the ball properly and the goalkeeper claimed it. Messi had a shot on 75 minutes, following a run across the edge of the German penalty area, which he attempted to curl into the top left-hand corner of the goal; it missed the target. Germany appealed for a penalty with 10 minutes remaining, after a tussle close to the Argentina goalpost following a Lahm cross, but the referee awarded a goal kick to Argentina. Kroos then had a chance for Germany following a lay-off pass by Özil, but he again missed the target. Both sides made substitutions in the final 5 minutes – Fernando Gago replacing Enzo Pérez for Argentina, and Götze came on for Klose for Germany. This represented Klose's last appearance for Germany, and he remains as of 2021 the most prolific goalscorer for any country in World Cup history. The final remained goalless after 90 minutes, and extra time was played. ### Extra time Early in the first half of extra time, Schürrle received a pass in front of goal from Götze, but his close-range shot was stopped by Romero. This was followed by a break upfield by Messi and Agüero with only two defenders covering, but Boateng was able to intercept and clear the danger. Five minutes later, a lob by Rodrigo Palacio over Neuer went just wide after the forward jumped on a mistake by Hummels in the German penalty area. At the halfway point in extra time, Murray wrote that Argentina were "offering very little up front" and speculated that many of the players might be "thinking about penalties already". Alan Tyers of The Daily Telegraph noted that Messi did not "look quite the ticket" and that he had not been playing well since half time. In the second half of extra time, Germany broke the deadlock when Götze scored in the 113th minute. Schürrle raced past two defenders on the left before crossing into the penalty area, where Götze controlled the ball on his chest and then volleyed left-footed into the net. Müller had a chance to double Germany's lead shortly afterward when he dribbled past two defenders, but his shot across the net was too wide. Late in extra time, Messi had an opportunity to equalise from a free kick within goal-scoring distance, but his attempt flew high over the crossbar. That proved to be the last action of the game as the final whistle was blown, confirming Germany's 1–0 victory. ### Details ## Post-match Germany's victory marked the first World Cup win by a European team in the Americas, as well as the third successive European triumph after Italy and Spain's wins in 2006 and 2010. President Rousseff of Brazil delivered the trophy to German captain Philipp Lahm during the awards ceremony on the stands. Alongside her during the trophy handover was FIFA president Sepp Blatter. As Lahm raised the trophy, the outro of the tournament's official song "We Are One (Ole Ola)" was played. The goalscorer Götze was named as the official man of the match for the final, despite playing only the last two minutes of normal time and thirty minutes of extra time. Messi was awarded the Golden Ball, FIFA's award for whom they considered the tournament's best player, and Neuer was given the Golden Glove for best goalkeeper. Joachim Löw, the manager of Germany, labelled his side's win as the culmination of a project which had begun ten years previously under his predecessor Jürgen Klinsmann. Speaking after the game, Löw said: "We'd not made this ultimate step before, but champions do what they will do. This team has developed a spirit which is unbelievable." His Argentine counterpart, Alejandro Sabella, praised his players, describing them as "warriors", and felt that they had been unlucky to lose. He said that his team had had the better chances "but we didn't take them, and we only had to last another five minutes or so to reach penalties. The pain is immense." Götze expressed a sense of disbelief at his scoring of the winning goal, having not had the opportunity to play for much of the tournament. He said: "You score the goal and you don't really know what's happening. It hasn't been a simple tournament, or year, for me and I owe a lot to my family and my girlfriend who always believed in me. But a dream became reality here." The German press praised the team for their overall performance in the tournament, contrasting it with the team's poor form a decade earlier. Christian Gödecke, writing in Der Spiegel wrote "Now Germany is world champion, and German football is barely recognisable. It's the perfect mix of virtue and magic, of hurrah and heave ho." Writers in the Süddeutsche Zeitung described the final as a "fitting punchline" to the tournament, while noting that "There won't be debates like there were in Rome in 1990, when the penalty that Andreas Brehme netted for the 1–0 victory was controversial and triggered conspiracy theories against Fifa amongst the Argentinians". In Argentina, the press were downbeat but also indicated their pride in the team's achievement, with many newspapers featuring a front-page picture of Messi after the match, alone or with his teammates. Newspaper Clarín lamented the team's missed chances and their denied penalty appeal. Ezequiel Fernández Moores of La Nacion thought Germany the deserved winners, and believed the referee correct in denying Higuaín's penalty appeal. The host country's rivalry with Argentina continued to feature in the Brazilian press after the game, sports daily Lance! using the headline "Tell Me How You Feel Now" in response to Argentine mocking of Brazil throughout the tournament. Speaking on his TV show, Maradona responded to this by contrasting Argentina's one-goal defeat to the 7–1 loss suffered by Brazil. A photograph by Chinese photographer Bao Tailiang of the Chengdu Economic Daily, showing Messi staring at the World Cup Trophy after Argentina's defeat, won the Sports Singles award at the 2015 World Press Photo of the Year contest. Germany's next major tournament was UEFA Euro 2016, in which they reached the semi-final before losing 2–0 to France. At the subsequent 2018 World Cup in Russia, Germany failed to advance from the group phase, finishing bottom of their group behind Sweden, Mexico and South Korea. Germany secured only one win at the tournament, over Sweden, and lost to Mexico and South Korea, becoming the third successive World Cup holders to be eliminated without reaching the knock-outs for the first time since 1938. Argentina's next major tournament was the 2015 Copa América, where they reached the final but were defeated by Chile in a penalty shoot-out, followed by a rematch at the 2016 Copa América at the final where they would also lose to them in a penalty shoot-out. In the 2018 World Cup, they advanced from their group in second place behind Croatia, before being beaten in the round of 16 by France. Argentina eventually won their third World Cup with victory against France in the 2022 FIFA World Cup final. ## See also - Argentina at the FIFA World Cup - Germany at the FIFA World Cup
21,051,201	Don Bradman with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948	1,151,899,186	Bradman's involvement with the 1948 England tour	[ "Don Bradman", "The Invincibles (cricket)" ]	Don Bradman toured England in 1948 with an Australian cricket team that went undefeated in their 34 tour matches, including the five Ashes Tests. Bradman was the captain, one of three selectors, and overall a dominant figure of what was regarded as one of the finest teams of all time, earning the sobriquet The Invincibles. Generally regarded as the greatest batsman in the history of cricket, the right-handed Bradman played in all five Tests as captain at No. 3. Bradman was more influential than other Australian captains because he was also one of the three selectors who had a hand in choosing the squad. He was also a member of the Australian Board of Control while still playing, a privilege that no other person has held. At the age of 40, Bradman was by far the oldest player on the team; three-quarters of his team were at least eight years younger, and some viewed him as a father figure. Coupled with his status as a national hero, cricketing ability and influence as an administrator, this associated the team more closely to him than other teams to their respective captains. Bradman's iconic stature as a cricketer also led to record-breaking public interest and attendances at the matches on tour. Bradman ended the first-class matches atop the batting aggregates and averages, with 2428 runs at 89.92, and eleven centuries, the most by any player. Despite his success, his troubles against Alec Bedser's leg trap—he fell three consecutive times in the Tests and twice in other matches to bowlers using this ploy—were the subject of much discussion. Bradman scored 138 in the first innings of the First Test at Trent Bridge, laying the foundation for Australia's 509, which set up a lead of 344 and eventual victory. In the Fourth Test at Headingley, he scored an unbeaten 173 on a deteriorating pitch on the final day, combining in a triple-century partnership with Arthur Morris as Australia scored 3/404 in the second innings to win by seven wickets. This set a world record for the highest ever successful run-chase in Test history. The tour was Bradman's international farewell, and when needing only four runs for a Test career average of exactly 100, he bowed out with a second ball duck in the Fifth Test at The Oval, bowled by an Eric Hollies googly. Australia nevertheless won the Test to complete a 4–0 series win, and Bradman ended the series with 508 runs at 72.57, with two centuries. Only Morris—with three centuries—scored more runs in the five Tests. Bradman's Test average for the series was the third-highest among the Australians, behind that of Sid Barnes and Morris. ## Background Bradman had almost opted out of the tour, citing business commitments in Australia; at the time, it was not possible to make a living from cricket. Prior to the campaign in England, Australia hosted India for a five-Test series during the southern hemisphere summer of 1947–48. Australia easily defeated the tourists 4–0, and Bradman and his fellow selectors Chappie Dwyer and Jack Ryder thus began planning for the tour of England. Bradman made it publicly known that he wanted his team to become the first to play an English summer without defeat. England had agreed to make a new ball available every 55 overs, instead of the previous rule of after 200 runs had been scored. As the run rate was generally much slower than 3.64, 55 overs would usually elapse long before 200 runs were scored. This meant that the ball was in a shiny state more often, and thereby more conducive to fast and swing bowling. Bradman and his colleagues thus chose the team with an emphasis on strong batting and fast bowling, basing his strategy on an intense speed attack against England's batsmen. His 17-man squad sailed for England and arrived in mid-April. ## Early tour Australia traditionally fielded its first-choice team in the tour opener, which was customarily against Worcestershire at the end of April. Bradman thus captained against Worcestershire with Australia bowling first and dismissing the hosts for 233. After Sid Barnes and Arthur Morris put on a partnership of 79 runs in 99 minutes, Bradman came in at No. 3 and put on a stand of 186 in 152 minutes with Morris, before falling for 107, having hit 15 fours. Morris narrowly beat Bradman to score Australia's first century on tour, reaching triple figures while Bradman's score was on 99. Bradman declared Australia's innings at 7/462 and the hosts fell for 212 to complete an Australian victory by an innings and 17 runs. In the next match, against Leicestershire, Bradman won the toss and elected to bat, promoting Keith Miller ahead of himself to No. 3. As Miller came out to bat, the large crowd mobbed the players' entrance only to see that Bradman was not batting in his customary position. Bradman came to the crease at 2/157, and after initially being troubled by the left-arm unorthodox spin of Australian expatriate Jack Walsh, added 159 with Miller before falling for 81. Australia compiled 448 and bowled out the home side for 130 and 147 to win by an innings, with Bradman taking one catch. The Australians then proceeded to play Yorkshire, on a damp pitch that suited slower bowling. Bradman rested himself and returned to London, so his deputy Lindsay Hassett led the team. Yorkshire were bowled out in difficult batting conditions for 71, before Australia replied with 101. The hosts were then bowled out for 89. Chasing 60 for victory, the Australian top order collapsed to 6/31. Neil Harvey and Don Tallon survived a dropped catch and a stumping opportunity, before seeing Australia home by four wickets. It was the closest Australia came to defeat for the whole tour. Bradman then returned in the next match against Surrey at The Oval in London, winning the toss and electing to bat. The last time Australia had played at the ground was the Fifth Test in 1938, when England declared at a world record score of 7/903; Bradman had hurt his ankle, and was unable to bat as Australia fell to the largest defeat in Test history. This match was a far different experience for the Australians. Barnes and Morris put on 136 before Bradman came in to join Barnes; together they added another 207 before Barnes fell for 176. Bradman started slowly and was heckled by the crowd for taking 80 minutes to reach 50, but accelerated and went on to score 146 before being dismissed at 3/403, with Australia proceeding to be all out for 632. He had attacked the medium pacers with his pull shot, but had some difficulties reading the left arm wrist spin of Australian expatriate John McMahon, nearly being caught behind the wicket on multiple occasions. Australia then bowled Surrey out for 141 and 195 to win by an innings. Bradman rested himself for the next match against Cambridge University, leaving Hassett to orchestrate another innings victory. Bradman returned for the following match against Essex, and batted first after winnings the toss. Bill Brown opened with Barnes and they put on 145 in 97 minutes before Barnes hit his own wicket and was out. Bradman came in and seized the initiative, reaching 42 in the 20 minutes before lunch, including five fours from one over by Frank Vigar which subsequently entered Essex club folklore, as Australia passed 200. Bradman and Brown put on a second-wicket partnership of 219 in 90 minutes before Brown was out for 153 from three hours of batting, with the score at 2/364. After Miller fell without scoring on the next ball, Ron Hamence joined Bradman and they put on another 88 before the Australian skipper was out for 187 at 4/452. Bradman had added his last 87 runs in 48 minutes, hitting a total of 32 fours. Australia was out for 721 at stumps, setting a world record for the most runs in a single day's play in first-class cricket; the record still stands. The tourists completed victory by an innings and 451 runs, their biggest winning margin for the tour. Bradman rested himself for the next match against Oxford University, which resulted in another innings victory. The next match was against the Marylebone Cricket Club at Lord's in late-May. The MCC fielded seven players who would represent England in the Tests, and were basically a full strength Test team, as were Australia, who fielded their first-choice team. Bradman captained the team and batted at No. 3. Barring one change in the bowling department, the same team would line up for Australia in the First Test, with the top six batsmen playing in the same positions. It was a chance for both teams to gain a psychological advantage. Australia won the toss and batted but stumbled early. Morris was out for five and Bradman came in to join Barnes at 1/11. The pair added 160 before Barnes fell and Hassett came in to join his captain. They took the score to 200 before the Bradman fell for 98, leaving Australia at 3/200. It was Bradman's highest score under 100 in first-class cricket and in his disappointment, he was slow to leave the ground after his dismissal. Bradman's men went on to amass 552 and bowled out the hosts for 189 and 205 to win by an innings, with Bradman catching his opposite number Norman Yardley in the second innings. Up to this point, Bradman had played in five of the first eight matches, all of which were won, seven by an innings. He had scored 107, 81, 146, 187 and 98, yielding a total of 619 runs at an average of 123.80. The MCC match was followed by Australia's first non-victory of the tour, against Lancashire. Australia were sent in to bat and dismissed for 204, with Bradman bowled by an arm ball from Malcolm Hilton for 11, his first score on the tour below 80. The hosts replied with 182 and in the second innings, Bradman was again dismissed by Hilton, this time for 43 as the tourists reached 4/259 at the end of play. When Hilton came on, Bradman attempted to seize the initiative and hit him out of the attack, but missed his first two balls. On the third ball, he charged out of his crease and swung across the line, missed, fell over and was stumped. Hilton's achievement garnered widespread press attention, particularly in Lancashire. In the following match against Nottinghamshire, the hosts batted first and made 179. Bradman joined Brown at 1/32 and they took the score to 197 when Bradman fell for 86. The tourists reached 400 and the hosts ended at 8/299 in the second innings to hang on for a draw. Bradman rested himself for the next fixture against Hampshire, and Australia were dismissed for 117 on a drying pitch in reply to the home side's 195, the first time they had conceded a first innings lead in the tour. Australia would have been in deeper trouble but for a flurry of sixes by Miller. Hampshire were then bowled out for 103 to leave Australia a target of 182, and this time the tourists batted with much more authority to seal an eight-wicket win. The tourists had survived another tight battle under the leadership of Hassett. The final match before the First Test was against Sussex. Australia skittled the hosts for 86 before Morris and Brown put on an opening stand of 153. Bradman then joined Morris, and gave two early chances. He was dropped on two and escaped a stumping on 25. He and Morris put on 189 before the latter fell for 184. Bradman then ended his Test preparation by reaching 109, in 124 minutes with 12 fours, and declaring at 5/549, before completing another innings victory. ## First Test Australia headed into the First Test at Trent Bridge starting on 10 June with ten wins and two draws from twelve tour matches, with eight innings victories. It was thought that Bradman would play a specialist leg spinner, but he changed his mind on the first morning when rain was forecast. Bill Johnston, a left-arm paceman and orthodox spinner, was played in the hope of exploiting a wet wicket. This was the only change from the teams that Australia had fielded in the matches against Worcestershire and the MCC. Yardley won the toss and elected to bat. Pundits predicted that the pitch would be ideal for batting apart from some assistance to fast bowlers in the first hour, as the surface of the pitch had become moist following overnight rain, assisting seam bowling. Australia's selection policy meant that their reserve opener Brown would bat out of position in the middle order while Barnes and Morris opened, while Neil Harvey was dropped despite making a century in Australia's most recent Test against India. Despite an injury to pace spearhead Ray Lindwall, Bradman's fast bowlers reduced England in their first innings to 8/74 before finishing them off for 165. Bradman dropped two catches in this innings. English gloveman Godfrey Evans came to the crease with the score at 6/60, and hit Johnston hard to cover, where the ball went through Bradman for a boundary. The second chance went through Bradman's hand and struck him in the abdomen. However, these missed catches did not cost Australia much, as Evans was soon caught at short leg by Morris close in, leaving England at 7/74. England managed to recover somewhat after Laker and Bedser added 89 runs in only 73 minutes for the ninth wicket. At first, Bradman did not appear concerned by the partnership, and it was surmised that he may have been happy for England to continue batting so that his top order would not have to bat in fading light towards the end of the afternoon, but he became anxious as the total continued to mount and both Bedser and Laker appeared comfortable. On the second day, Morris fell at 1/73 and Bradman came in to join Barnes. Yardley set a defensive field, employing leg theory to slow the scoring. He packed the leg side with fielders and ordered Alec Bedser to bowl at leg stump. Bradman almost edged the second ball onto his stumps, before defending uneasily for a period. While Jim Laker stopped the scoring at the other end, Bradman managed only four runs in his first 20 minutes. The Australian captain regarded Bedser as the finest seam bowler he faced in his career, and he batted in a circumspect manner as he sought to establish himself. At the other end, Bradman misjudged a ball from Laker and an incorrectly executed cut shot narrowly went wide of the slip fielder. Now aged 40, Bradman's reflexes had slowed and he no longer started his innings as confidently as he had done in the past. The score progressed to 121 when Barnes fell to Laker. Miller came in and was dismissed for a duck without further addition to Australia's total. The hard-hitting Miller had come in at No. 4, a position usually occupied by the more sedate Hassett, indicating that Bradman may have been looking to attack, but the change in batting order failed. All the while, Australia had been scoring slowly, as they would throughout the day. Brown came in, but he looked unaccustomed to batting in the middle order. The Australian captain decided to hasten the new ball by using his feet to get to the pitch of the ball to attack the spinners, hitting them through the off side. Yardley took the second new ball, but this move backfired as Bradman struck his first boundary in over 80 minutes, and in the first 40 minutes after lunch, 43 runs were added. Yardley then took the second new ball. Bradman struck his first boundary in more than 80 minutes but the run rate remained low. Australia passed England's total before Yardley brought himself on to bowl and removed Brown. This ended a 64-run stand with Bradman in 58 minutes, and Hassett came in at 4/185. Following the departure of Brown, the Australian scoring slowed as Bradman changed the team strategy to one of attempting to bat only once. Yardley continued to employ a leg side field, as he and Barnett bowled outside leg stump. During one over, Bradman did not attempt a single shot and then put his hands on his hips. During the 15 minutes before the tea break, Bradman did not add a single run and was heckled by the crowd for his lack of scoring. The Australian captain reached the tea break on 78; 55 minutes after the resumption of play he played a cover drive against Bedser to reach his century in 218 minutes. It was his 28th Test century, and his 18th in Ashes Tests; the last 29 runs took 70 minutes. It was one of his slower innings as Yardley focused on stopping runs rather than taking wickets. Nevertheless, Bradman had appeared comfortable after the early stages of his innings, and patiently scored most of his runs between mid-off and mid-on, often from the back foot. After the Australian captain had reached his milestone, many of the spectators began to leave the ground, content with what they had seen. Bradman added a further 30 in the last hour to end with 130. Australia batted to stumps on the second day without further loss, ending at 4/293, a lead of 128. After the day's play, former Australian Test leg spinner Bill O'Reilly and former teammate of Bradman, then a journalist, consulted Bedser on his use of leg theory. O'Reilly had much experience in attacking leg stump in his career and helped Bedser refine his leg trap plan to ensnare Bradman. On the third morning, amid sunshine, Bradman resumed on 130, before progressing to 132 and becoming the first player to pass 1,000 runs for the English season. The Australian captain was not aware of the reason for the spontaneous crowd applause until notified by wicket-keeper Evans. Bedser was bowling and soon implemented O'Reilly's variation of the leg trap. Hutton was moved from leg-slip to a squarer position at short fine leg, around 11 metres from the bat. Two short legs and a mid on were put in place. Bradman drove Bedser through cover for a boundary, but on the next ball, his innings was terminated at 138 when he glanced an inswinger from Bedser to Hutton at short fine leg, where he caught the ball without having to move. Bradman had batted for 290 minutes and faced 321 balls and Johnson replaced him with Australia at 5/305. Bedser waved to O'Reilly in the press box. When former Australian Test cricketer and journalist Jack Fingleton reported what his friend and former team-mate O'Reilly had done, there was some debate in the media as to whether O'Reilly's actions in advising Bedser were treacherous. Australia went on to end on 509 and take a 344-run first innings lead. Although Lindwall was able to run between the wickets during Australia's innings, he did not take the field in the second innings and the 12th man Neil Harvey replaced him. However, Yardley was sceptical as to whether Lindwall was sufficiently injured to be forced from the field, but did not approach Bradman to object to Harvey's presence on the field. O'Reilly said that as Lindwall demonstrated his mobility during his innings, he was in no way "incapacitated" and that the English captain "must be condemned for carrying his concepts of sportsmanship too far" when no substitute was justified. After lunch on day four, with England on 3/191, the light was poor with clouds gathering, although England did not appeal against it. Yardley wanted to bat in poor visibility so that he could build a lead, so that if a shower came later and turned the pitch into a sticky wicket, Australia would have to chase a target on an erratic surface. Bradman thought that rain might come so he utilised Ernie Toshack and Ian Johnson to bowl defensively with a leg side field so that England would not have a lead should rain and a sticky wicket arise. Wisden opined that "rarely can a Test Match have been played under such appalling conditions as on this day". Fingleton said the conditions were "pitiable" and "utmost gloom in which batsmen and fieldsmen had intense difficulty in sighting the ball". Australia eventually finished off the hosts' second innings for 441, leaving them a target of 98 on the final afternoon. Late in England's innings, Bradman raised eyebrows by deliberately giving centurion Denis Compton easy singles by spreading his fielders in order to bring Evans on strike so that he could be targeted. Compton thought that Evans could be relied upon and readily accepted the runs gifted to him by the Australian captain, and Evans continued to play confidently, eventually reaching 50. Australia proceeded steadily to 38 from 32 minutes before Morris fell. Bradman came to the crease and stayed 12 minutes without getting off the mark. He was out for a duck from the 10th ball that he faced, caught again by Hutton at short fine leg in Bedser's leg trap. Bradman showed obvious displeasure at allowing himself to be dismissed by the same trap in consecutive innings, and his departure left Australia at 48/2. It was the first time in four tours to England that Bradman had made a duck in a Test. This left Australia 2/48, but they reached the target without further loss after 87 minutes of batting. Between Tests, Bradman rested himself during the match against Northamptonshire, which started the day after the Test, as Hassett led Australia to victory by an innings. He returned for the match against Yorkshire. Bradman came in at 1/0 when Barnes fell for a duck and top-scored with 54 as Australia made 249. Bradman pulled many short balls and reached 50 in 76 minutes. After the hosts replied with 209, Bradman came in at 1/17 and put on 154 for the second wicket with Brown, ending with 86 as the match petered into a draw. His innings ended when Hutton caught him in the leg trap. Not wanting to tire his bowlers before the Second Test that started the day after next, Bradman showed little intent to win the match. The batsmen batted unhurriedly and set Yorkshire 329 for victory with only 70 minutes of play remaining and the hosts ended at 4/85. Yardley expressed his displeasure by allowing his part-timers to bowl and then promoting tail-enders to the upper half of the batting order in the second innings. The Australians were booed from the field by the spectators. ## Second Test Bradman opted to field an unchanged lineup for the Second Test, which started on 24 June at Lord's. Following his injury in the previous Test, Lindwall was subjected to a thorough fitness test on the first morning. Bradman was not convinced of Lindwall's fitness, but the bowler's protestations were sufficient to convince his captain to gamble on his inclusion. Bradman won the toss and elected to bat, allowing Lindwall further time to recover. Miller played, but was unfit to bowl. Barnes fell for a duck in his second over, bringing Bradman to the crease at 1/3. Bradman received a loud reception from the crowd as he came out to bat in his final Test at Lord's. Bradman initially struggled against the English bowling. He faced his first ball from Alec Coxon and inside edged it past his leg stump, before missing the third ball from Coxon and surviving an appeal for leg before wicket (lbw). Bowling from the other end, Bedser beat Bradman with seam movement off the pitch and the ball narrowly skimmed past the stumps. Standing up to the stumps, wicket-keeper Godfrey Evans removed the bails as Bradman leaned forward, but his foot had stayed firmly behind the crease. In another close call, Bradman inside edged a ball towards Yardley at short leg, but the English captain was slow to react and the ball landed in front of him. The Australian captain managed only three runs in the first twenty minutes as Australia had only 14 after the first half-hour. Coxon consistently moved the ball into a cautious Bradman, and the Australians scored only 32 runs in the first hour. Edrich came on and bowled a bouncer, which Bradman tried to swing to the leg side, but instead the edge went in the air and landed behind point. On 13, Bradman played a Bedser ball from his legs, narrowly evading Hutton in the trap at short fine leg. After one hour he was on 14. Bradman and Morris settled down as Coxon and Doug Wright operated. The Australian captain drove the debutant Coxon through the covers for two fours, and Yardley made frequent rotations of his bowlers. At the lunch break, Australia were 1/82 with Morris on 45 and Bradman 35. Shortly afterwards, in the third over after the resumption of play, with the score at 87, Bradman was caught for 38 for the third consecutive time in Tests by Hutton off Bedser at short fine leg, just two days after falling the same way in the second innings against Yorkshire. According to O'Reilly, this was evidence that Bradman was no longer the player he was before World War II, as he had been unable to disperse the close-catching fielders by counter-attacking, before eventually being dismissed. O'Reilly said that this was the first time that Bradman had fallen to the same trap three times in succession. Australia reached 7/258 at the end of day one, before a lower order burst took them to 350 on the second morning. England then started their reply, and Lindwall took the new ball and felt pain in his groin again after delivering his first ball to Hutton. Despite this, Lindwall persevered through the pain. Seeing that Lindwall was able to bowl through the pain, Bradman tossed the ball to Miller for the second over to see if Miller could bowl. However, Miller threw the ball back, indicating that his body would not be able to withstand it. This resulted in media consternation that Bradman and Miller had quarrelled. Although Bradman claimed that the exchange had been amicable, others disputed this. Teammate Barnes later claimed that Miller had retorted by suggesting that Bradman—a very occasional slower bowler—bowl himself. Barnes said that the captain "was as wild as a battery-stung brumby" and warned his unwilling bowler that there would be consequences for his defiance. According to unpublished writings in Fingleton's personal collection, Bradman chastised his players in the dressing room at the end of the play, saying "I'm 40 and I can do my full day's work in the field." Miller reportedly snapped "So would I—if I had fibrositis"; Bradman had been discharged from the armed services during World War II on health grounds, whereas most of the team had been sent into battle. Miller had crash-landed while serving as a fighter pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force in England and had suffered chronic back trouble since then. On the second afternoon, Bradman delayed the taking of the second new ball until after tea so that Lindwall and Johnston could have an extra period of recuperation before a new attack. This proved dividends as the bowlers took a wicket apiece within three overs of the new ball being taken, leaving England at 6/134. England were bowled out for 215 on the third morning, as Lindwall took 5/70. In later years, Bradman told Lindwall that he pretended not to notice Lindwall's pain. Lindwall was worried that Bradman had noticed his injury, but Bradman later claimed that he feigned ignorance to allow Lindwall to relax. Australia batted much more productively in the second innings in ideal weather on the third day. Morris and Barnes put on 122 before the former fell for 62. Bradman joined Barnes at the crease for his last Test innings at the home of cricket. Yardley surrounded the Australian captain with fielders and Laker then beat his bat thrice in an over. Bedser was then introduced with the leg trap ploy again in place as he bowled on Bradman's pads. The Australian captain decided to negate the danger of being caught glancing at short fine leg by padding the ball away with his front leg. Bedser responded by changing his tactics by bowling a series of outswingers, beating the outside edge of Bradman's bat three times in a row, narrowly missing the off stump on one occasion. Barnes then manipulated the strike to shield his captain from Bedser. The Australian opener had little trouble against the leg trap, and negated the danger Bedser was posing. Bradman accelerated after tea and took two consecutive boundaries from Wright to bring up his fifty, with Barnes on 96 and Australia at 1/222. Barnes passed his century and began accelerating before finally falling for 141, leaving Australia at 2/296 in 277 minutes, after a 174-run partnership with Bradman. Hassett was bowled first ball off the inside edge, but Miller survived a loud lbw appeal on Yardley's hat-trick ball. Bradman was on 89 and heading towards a century in his last Test innings at Lord's when he fell to Bedser again, this time because of a one-handed diving effort from Edrich. Bradman had been worried by Bedser's angle into his pads and the leg trap, but Bedser then moved the ball the other way towards the slips and caught Bradman's outside edge. It was the fourth time out of four innings in the series that Bedser had dismissed Bradman. This left Australia at 4/329 and the next day, Bradman was expected to declare just before lunch so that he could attack the English openers for a short period before the adjournment, but a shower at this time deterred him from doing so, as his bowlers would have struggled to grip the ball; Lindwall had also been injured on a slippery surface in earlier times. The Australian captain declared on the following day of play at 7/460, 595 runs ahead. It would take a world record chase from England to win the match. England lost wickets regularly and fell for 186 to lose by 409 runs. The next match was against Surrey and started the day after the Test. Australia elected to field and the hosts made 221. Brown injured a finger while fielding, and was not able to bat in Australia's first innings. Ron Hamence filled in as an opener but was out for a duck, so Bradman joined Hassett at 1/6. Bradman made 128 and put on 231 with Hassett (139) as Australia replied with 389. Bradman's innings took only 140 minutes with 15 fours and was described by Jack Fingleton as "lovely". In the second innings, Australia's makeshift openers Harvey and Sam Loxton chased down the 122 runs for victory to complete a 10-wicket win. Australia wanted to finish the run-chase quickly so they could watch the Australian tennis player John Bromwich compete at Wimbledon and after Bradman had accepted Harvey's offer to open, Australia made the runs in only one hour. Bradman rested himself in the following match against Gloucestershire before the Third Test. Hassett led the team as Australia reached 7/774 declared, its highest of the tour, underpinning an innings victory. ## Third Test The teams reassembled at Old Trafford on 8 July for the Third Test. Australia dropped Brown, who had scored 73 runs at 24.33 in three innings; he was replaced by the all rounder Sam Loxton, who had made 47 not out against Surrey and an unbeaten 159 against Gloucestershire. Yardley won the toss and elected to bat. On the second day, Bradman was involved in effecting a run out. Denis Compton hit a ball into the covers and Bradman and Loxton collided in an attempt to prevent a run. Compton called Bedser through for a run on the misfield, but Loxton recovered and threw the ball to the wicket-keeper's end with Bedser a long way short of the crease. It ended an innings of 145 minutes, in which Bedser scored 37 and featured in a 121-run partnership with Compton. Compton hit several boundaries and Bradman responded by spreading his field to offer Compton a single so that the tail-enders would be on strike and could be attacked. This worked, as Compton was unable to farm the strike as he desired, and wickets fell at the other end. Bradman caught Jack Young to end England's innings at 363. Having dropped Brown, Barnes was hit in the ribs by a Dick Pollard pull shot and taken to hospital, leaving Australia with only Morris as a specialist opening batsman. Ian Johnson was deployed as Australia's makeshift second opener. He fell for one to bring Bradman to bat. O'Reilly criticised the use of Johnson to partner Morris, as Hassett had transformed himself into a defensive batsman with little backlift and a guarded approach, a style typical of an opener. The Australian captain thus had to face Bedser, who had already dismissed him three times in the Tests with a new ball, and Pollard, who had troubled him in the match against Lancashire. Pollard then trapped Bradman for seven with an off cutter that struck the Australian captain on the back foot to leave Australia at 2/13. Australia were eventually out for 221, yielding a 142-run lead. When Bill Edrich came to the crease, Bradman advised Lindwall not to bowl any bouncers at Edrich, fearing that it would be interpreted as retaliation for Edrich's bouncing of Lindwall in the first innings and lead to a negative media and crowd reaction. Although Lindwall did not retaliate, Miller did so with four consecutive bouncers, earning the ire of the crowd. He struck Edrich on the body before Bradman intervened and ordered him to stop, before apologising to Edrich. England reached 3/174, a lead of 316, at the end of day three, but declared on the fifth morning after the fourth day was washed out. Bradman chose the light roller and play was supposed to begin after lunch. However, play did not begin until after tea and the pitch played very slowly because of the excess moisture. With Australia not looking to chase the runs, Yardley often had seven men in close catching positions. Australia showed little attacking intent and Bradman joined Morris with Australia at 1/10 after 32 minutes. Bradman then played 11 balls from Young without scoring. Yardley used the spin of Young and Compton for an hour, while Morris and Bradman made little effort to score. For 105 minutes, Morris stayed at one end and Bradman at the other; neither looked to rotate the strike with singles. Bradman only played eight balls from Morris's main end, and at one point was so startled that Morris wanted a single that he sent him back. The tourists thereafter batted safely in a defensive manner to ensure a draw. They ended at 1/92 in 61 overs, a run rate of 1.50, with 35 maidens, which was the slowest innings run rate to date in the series. Bradman finished unbeaten on 30 from 146 balls when the oft-interrupted match was finally terminated by a series of periodic rain interruptions. O'Reilly criticised the approach taken by the Australians in the closing stages of the match, attributing it to Bradman's orders. He said that the pitch was made so tame by the heavy rain that they could have played in a natural and attractive manner to entertain the spectators, rather than defending carefully. He said that Bradman's "unwillingness to take a risk or to accept the challenging call of some particular phase of the game is one of the greatest flaws" in his leadership. After the Test, Bradman managed only six as Australia scored 317 and 0/22 to defeat Middlesex by ten wickets in their only county match between Tests. He was again caught in the leg trap by Denis Compton. ## Fourth Test The Fourth Test was played at Headingley, starting on 22 July, and Australia made two changes. Harvey replaced the injured Sid Barnes, while Ron Saggers replaced Don Tallon, who had a finger injury, as wicket-keeper. Brown was not recalled for the Fourth Test to open; instead, Hassett was promoted to open with Morris, while the teenaged Harvey came into the middle-order. As Australia were leading 2–0 after three Tests, England needed to win the last two Tests to square the series. England won the toss and elected to bat on an ideal batting pitch. At the start of the innings, Bradman used off theory, but left a large gap square of the wicket in an attempt to coax England's out-of-form top-order to play risky shots into the inviting gap. However, Bradman's offer was spurned as Hutton and Washbrook played cautiously. Meanwhile, Australia's attack appeared unsettled. Bradman set defensive fields for most of the first day as England's openers put on 168 for the first wicket. O'Reilly said that Bradman's defensive field settings "made the sorry admission of impotency". England's batsmen dominated to reach stumps at 2/268. Jack Fingleton said that Australia's day went "progressively downhill" and was its worst day of bowling since the Second World War, citing the proliferation of full tosses. O'Reilly criticised the display as the worst by the Australians on tour and said that no bowler could be excused. He said that the attack "functioned without object—hopelessly and meaninglessly" throughout the day. He lambasted the bowlers for performing at a standard akin to county cricket. O'Reilly criticised the players for having a casual and lethargic manner, speculating that Bradman had been allowed them to become complacent. On the second day, Bradman continued to use defensive tactics for most of the day as England continued to dominate. Australia had trouble removing night-watchman Bedser, who helped take the score to 2/423. Bradman gave his leading bowler Lindwall a heavy workload as the other bowlers appeared unthreatening. O'Reilly decried the use of Lindwall as excessive and potentially harmful to his longevity. The hosts were eventually out for 496, their largest score of the series, after a largely self-inflicted collapse late on the second day. Bedser removed Morris for six to leave Australia at 1/13. This brought Bradman to the crease and he was mobbed by the spectators on a ground where he had previously scored two triple centuries and another century in three Tests at the venue. He had made a Test world record of 334 in 1930, scoring 309 in one day's play. Many spectators walked onto the playing arena to greet the arrival of Bradman and he doffed his baggy green and raised his bat to greet them. Fingleton opined that "on this field he [Bradman] has won his greatest honours; nowhere else has he been so idolatrously acclaimed". Bradman got off the mark from his first ball, which Compton prevented from going for four with a diving stop near the boundary. Hassett was restrained, while Bradman attacked, taking three fours from one Edrich over. Bradman was 31 and Hassett 13 as the tourists reached stumps at 2/63. Bradman did the majority of the scoring in the late afternoon, scoring 31 in a partnership of 50. On the third morning, Bradman resumed proceedings by taking a single from a Bedser no-ball. In same over, one ball reared from the pitch and moved into Bradman, hitting him in the groin, causing a delay as he recovered from the pain and recomposed himself before play resumed. In the second over bowled by Pollard, Hassett fell for 13 on the second ball, which lifted suddenly after bouncing. Miller came to the crease and drove his first ball for three runs, bringing Bradman on strike for the fourth ball of the over. Pollard then pitched a ball in the same place as he did to Hassett, but this time it skidded off the pitch and knocked out Bradman's off stump for 33. According to O'Reilly, Bradman backed away from the ball as it cut off the pitch with a noticeable flinch. O'Reilly attributed Bradman's unwillingness to get behind the ball to the blow inflicted on him by Bedser in the previous over and the rearing ball that dismissed Hassett. The crowd, sensing the importance of the two quick wickets, in particular that of Bradman, who had been so productive at Headingley, erupted. This left Australia struggling at 3/68, but a rapid counterattack by the middle and lower order took them to 9/457 at stumps and eventually 458 on the fourth morning. England batted for the second time, and after lunch on the fourth afternoon, Bradman set fields to restrict the scoring, as England passed 100 without loss. Washbrook then hooked Johnston and top edged it, but Bradman failed to take the catch. He repeated the shot soon after and Harvey took the catch at 1/129, so the Australian captain's miss cost little. Johnson then removed Hutton for 57 without further addition to the total, caught by Bradman on the run, leaving England at 2/129. During most of the afternoon, Bradman used a strategy of rotating his bowlers in short spells, and set a defensive, well-spread field for Johnson, who had been repeatedly attacked by the batsmen. England then reached 8/362 at the close, a lead of 400. England batted on for five minutes on the final morning, adding three runs in two overs before Yardley declared at 8/365. As the batting team is allowed to choose which (if any) roller can be used at the start of the day's play, this ploy allowed Yardley to ask the groundsman to use a heavy roller, which would help to break up the wicket and make the surface more likely to spin. Bradman had done a similar thing during the previous Ashes series in Australia in order to make the batting conditions harder for England. At the start of any innings, the batting captain also has the choice of having the pitch rolled. Bradman elected to not have the pitch rolled at all, demonstrating his opinion that such a device would disadvantage his batsmen. This left Australia to chase 404 runs for victory. At the time, this would have been the highest ever fourth innings score to result in a Test victory. Australia had only 345 minutes to reach the target, and the local press wrote them off, predicting that they would be dismissed by lunchtime on a deteriorating spinners' wicket. Morris and Hassett started slowly, with only six runs in the first six overs on a pitch that offered spin and bounce. Only 44 runs came in the first hour, leaving 360 runs needed in 285 minutes. Both players survived close calls before Hassett fell at 1/57. Bradman joined Morris with 347 runs needed in 257 minutes. After receiving another rapturous welcome from the Headingley spectators, Bradman signalled his intentions by hitting a boundary from Compton; and then, on his first ball from Laker, cover driving against the spin for a boundary. He reached 12 in six minutes. Yardley then called upon the occasional leg spin of Hutton in an attempt to exploit the turning wicket. Morris promptly joined Bradman in the counter-attack, and 20 runs in two Hutton overs, which Fingleton described as "rather terrible" due to the errant length. Bradman took two fours off Hutton's second over before almost holing out to Yardley. This let Australia reach 1/96 from 90 minutes. In the next over, Compton deceived Bradman with a googly. Bradman expected the ball to turn in, but it went the other way, took the outside edge and ran away past slip for four. Bradman leg-glanced the next one for another boundary, before again failing to read a googly on the third ball. This time the edge went to Crapp, who failed to hold on. The sixth ball of Compton's over beat Bradman and hit him on the pads. At the other end, Morris continued to plunder Hutton's inaccurate leg breaks, and Australia reached lunch at 1/121, with Morris on 63 and Bradman on 35. Hutton had conceded 30 runs in four overs, and in the half-hour preceding the interval, Australia had added 64 runs. Both players had been given lives. Although Australia had scored at a reasonable rate, they had also been troubled by many of the deliveries and were expected to face further difficulty if they were to avoid defeat. After the break, Morris added 37 runs in 14 minutes from a series of Compton full tosses and long hops, while Bradman had only added three. This prompted Yardley to take the new ball. Bradman reached 50 in 60 minutes and then aimed a drive from Ken Cranston, but sliced it in the air to point. Yardley dived and got his hands to the ball, but failed to hold on. Australia reached 202—halfway to the required total—with 165 minutes left, after Morris dispatched consecutive full tosses from Laker. Bradman then hooked two boundaries, but suffered a fibrositis attack, which put him in significant pain. Drinks were then taken, and Morris had to farm the strike until Bradman's pain had subsided. Australia then reached 250 shortly before tea with Morris on 133 and Bradman on 92. Bradman then reached his century in 147 minutes as the second-wicket stand passed 200. Bradman was given another life at 108 when he advanced two metres down the pitch to Jim Laker and missed, but Evans fumbled the stumping opportunity. Australia reached tea at 1/292 having added 171 during the session. Morris was eventually dismissed for 182, having partnered Bradman in a stand of 301 in 217 minutes. This brought Miller to the crease with 46 runs still required. He struck two boundaries and helped take the score to 396 before falling with eight runs still needed. Harvey came in and got off the mark with a boundary that brought up the winning runs. This sealed an Australian victory by seven wickets, setting a new world record for the highest successful Test run-chase, with Bradman unbeaten on 173 with 29 fours in only 255 minutes. Immediately after the Fourth Test, Bradman scored 62, before being bowled attempting a pull shot to a ball that kept low, as Australia compiled 456 and defeated Derbyshire by an innings. Bradman rested himself in the next match against Glamorgan, a rain-affected draw that did not reach the second innings. He then scored 31 and 13 not out, bowled by Eric Hollies as Australia defeated Warwickshire by nine wickets. Hollies's 8/107 was the best innings bowling figures against the Australians for the summer and earned him selection for the Fifth Test, where he famously dismissed Bradman in his final Test innings for a duck. Australia proceeded to face and draw with Lancashire for the second time on the tour. Bradman made 28 after being dropped twice in Australia's 321, before taking two catches as the tourists took a 191-run lead. He then came in at 1/16 and put on 161 for the second wicket with Barnes, and was unbeaten on 133 when he declared at 3/265. The home side hung on for a draw at 7/199 when time ran out. Bradman then rested himself during the non-first-class match against Durham, a rain-affected draw that was washed out after the first day. ## Fifth Test After the match against Durham, Australia headed south to The Oval for the Fifth Test, which started on 14 August. Barnes and Tallon returned from injury, while Ernie Toshack was omitted with knee troubles, and the leg spin of Doug Ring replaced Johnson's off spin. Overnight, hundreds of spectators had slept on wet pavements in rainy weather to queue for tickets. Bradman had already announced that he would retire at the end of the season, and the public were anxious to witness his last Test appearance. English skipper Norman Yardley won the toss and elected to bat on a rain-affected pitch. Yardley's decision was regarded as a surprise; although The Oval had traditionally been a batting paradise, weather conditions suggested that bowlers would have the advantage. Jack Fingleton speculated that Australia would have bowled first if Bradman had won the toss. Propelled by Lindwall's 6/20, England were dismissed for 52 in 42.1 overs on the first afternoon. In contrast, Australia batted much more fluently as the overcast skies cleared and the sun came out. Australia had reached 100 at 17:30 with Barnes on 52 and Morris on 47. The score had reached 117 before Barnes was removed by Hollies for 61. This brought Bradman to the crease shortly before 18:00, late on the first day. As Bradman had announced that the tour was his last at international level, the innings would be his last at Test level if Australia batted only once. The crowd gave him a standing ovation as he walked out to bat. Yardley led the Englishmen in giving his Australian counterpart three cheers before shaking Bradman's hand. With 6996 Test career runs, he only needed four runs to average 100 in Test cricket. Bradman took guard and played the first ball from Hollies from the back foot. Hollies pitched the next ball up, bowling Bradman for a duck with a googly that went between bat and pad as the batsman leaned forward. Bradman appeared stunned by what had happened and slowly turned around and walked back to the pavilion, receiving another large round of applause. Australia went on to make 389 and then bowled England out for 188 to win by an innings and 149 runs. This result sealed the series 4–0 in favour of Australia. The match was followed by a series of congratulatory speeches. Bradman said > No matter what you may read to the contrary, this is definitely my last Test match ever. I am sorry my personal contribution has been so small ... It has been a great pleasure for me to come on this tour and I would like you all to know how much I have appreciated it ... We have played against a very lovable opening skipper ... It will not be my pleasure to play ever again on this Oval but I hope it will not be the last time I come to England. Yardley said > In saying good-bye to Don we are saying good-bye to the greatest cricketer of all time. He is not only a great cricketer but a great sportsman, on and off the field. I hope this is not the last time we see Don Bradman in this country. Bradman was then given three cheers and the crowd sung "For he's a jolly good fellow" before dispersing. ## Later tour matches Seven matches remained on Bradman's quest to complete an English season without defeat. Australia batted first against Kent and Bradman made 65, putting on 104 with Brown as Australia made 361 and won by an innings. In the next match against the Gentlemen of England, Bradman came to the crease at 1/40 and featured in a 180-run second wicket partnership with Brown, before adding another 110 with Hassett. He was out for 150 at 3/331 before declaring at 5/610 against a team that included eight Test players. Australia went on to win by an innings. He then rested himself as Australia defeated Somerset by an innings and 374 runs. Bradman returned to make 143 against the South of England, adding 188 for the third wicket with Hassett. Australia declared at 7/522 and bowled out the hosts for 298 before rain ended the match. Australia's biggest challenge in the post-Test tour matches was against the Leveson-Gower's XI starting on 8 September, its last first-class match for the tour. During the last tour in 1938, this team was effectively a full-strength England outfit and had defeated Australia, but this time Bradman insisted that only six current Test players be allowed to represent the hosts. Bradman then fielded a full-strength team; the only difference from the Fifth Test team was Johnson's inclusion at the expense of Ring. His bowlers skittled the hosts for 177, and Morris and Barnes put on an opening stand of 102 before Morris was out for 62. Bradman joined Barnes and they put on 225 runs for the second wicket. Bradman top-scored with 153 as Australia declared at 8/469 late on the final day. Upon reaching 153, he threw away his wicket with a lofted cover drive, having decided to attempt sixes to give Alec Bedser his wicket. He was already running towards the pavilion before the catch was taken, ending his last first-class innings in England. The hosts were 2/75 when the match ended in a draw after multiple rain delays. When it became obvious that Australia would not lose, Bradman bowled his only over of the tour, conceding two runs. The tour ended with two non-first-class matches against Scotland. In the first match, Bradman made 27 of Australia's 236 as the tourists took an innings victory. In the second match, Bradman top-scored with 123 not out batting at No. 6, hitting 17 fours and two sixes in 89 minutes as Australia declared at 6/407. Australia ended the tour with another innings victory. Once Australia were in an unassailable position during Scotland's second innings, Bradman relaxed and allowed nine players to bowl, including the wicket-keeper Tallon, who took two wickets, while Johnson stood in as the wicket-keeper. When the victory was sealed on 18 September, Bradman's men became the first side to go through an English season without defeat. ## Role Along with Chappie Dwyer and Jack Ryder, Bradman was one of the three selectors who chose the squad to tour England. This gave Bradman more power than other Australian captains, who did not have an explicit vote in team selection. This was further magnified by Bradman being a member of the Board of Control while an active player, a threefold combination that he alone has occupied in Australian cricket history. According to Gideon Haigh, he "was the dominant figure in Australian cricket", who went on to become an "unimpeachable figure". Turning 40 in August during the tour, Bradman was by far the most senior and oldest player on the team. Bill Brown was the next oldest, making his third tour of England at 36. His vice-captain Lindsay Hassett was the third-oldest player, at the age of 35. Ernie Toshack was born in December 1914, and the remaining 13 players were born in 1916 or later. Five players, including Ray Lindwall, Bill Johnston and Morris, his two most prolific Test bowlers and batsman respectively, were more than 12 years younger than he was. Neil Harvey, the youngest player at the age of 19, was only two months old when Bradman made his Test debut. Bradman was viewed as a father figure by players such as Harvey and Sam Loxton. Before the tour, Bradman had played 47 Tests; Brown, the only other member who had played regularly before the Second World War, had appeared in 20 Tests. For Bradman, it was the most personally fulfilling period of his playing days, as the divisiveness within the team of the 1930s had passed. He wrote: > Knowing the personnel, I was confident that here at last was the great opportunity which I had longed for. A team of cricketers whose respect and loyalty were unquestioned, who would regard me in a fatherly sense and listen to my advice, follow my guidance and not question my handling of affairs ... there are no longer any fears that they will query the wisdom of what you do. The result is a sense of freedom to give full reign to your own creative ability and personal judgment. However, some players expressed displeasure at Bradman's ruthless obsession towards annihilating the opposition. The all rounder Keith Miller, who was one of two bowling spearheads, deliberately allowed himself to be bowled first ball for duck during the match against Essex, while Bradman was his batting partner, in a protest against Australia's world record of scoring 721 runs in one day. Miller also deplored Bradman's hard-nosed attitude in the match against Leveson-Gower's XI, which was traditionally regarded as a "festival match". Feeling that Bradman was needlessly batting Australia far beyond impregnability, Miller played with reckless aggression, rather than a measured style in line with Bradman's aim of remaining undefeated. Bradman's later letter revealed his hostility towards Miller. Sid Barnes later criticised Bradman for his reluctance to allow Ron Hamence—one of the reserve batsmen—to partake in meaningful matchplay; due to Bradman's reluctance to risk Australia's unbeaten run, Hamence usually batted low in the order and had limited opportunities because the senior batsmen were rarely dismissed cheaply. Along with fringe bowlers Doug Ring and Colin McCool, Hamence called himself "Ground Staff" due to the trio's lack of on-field duties, and they often sang ironic songs about their status. Bradman's relentless use of his pace attack and fieldsmen also raised eyebrows. At the time, Lindwall and Miller were groundbreaking fast bowlers, with high pace and the ability to deliver menacing short-pitched bowling at the upper body of the English batsmen. Prior to the Second World War, pace bowlers were generally much slower and did not often bowl at the body. England had yet to develop bowlers such as Lindwall and Miller, and as a result, Australia were able to pepper the upper body of the opposition without fear of retaliation. At times, the public found Lindwall and Miller's short-pitched bowling to be excessive and booed the Australians. On the fielding front, Barnes was deployed as close to the bat as possible at either forward short-leg or point, with one foot on the pitch. This had an intimidatory effect on the batsmen and led many to question whether it was in the spirit of the game. Bradman's dominant cricketing stature was also a key platform of his team's popularity with the public. The leading English writer R. C. Robertson-Glasgow said "we want him to do well. We feel we have a share in him. He is more than Australian. He is a world batsman." Haigh opined that "perhaps no touring cricketer ... has been as feted as Bradman in that northern summer". The Australians were invariably greeted by record crowds and gate receipts across the country. The attendance at the Fourth Test remains a record for a Test on English soil. The Australian journalist Andy Flanagan said that "cities, towns and hotels are beflagged, carpets set down, and dignitaries wait to extend an official welcome. He is the Prince of Cricketers." Haigh said that "cricket approached the 50s at the peak of its popularity, albeit, after Bradman's final Test ... without the player chiefly responsible for it". Bradman received hundreds of personal letters every day, and one of his dinner speeches was broadcast live, causing the British Broadcasting Corporation to postpone the news bulletin. Of Bradman's retirement, Robertson-Glasgow said "... a miracle has been removed from among us... So must ancient Italy have felt when she heard of the death of Hannibal." Bradman ended the first-class matches atop the batting aggregates and averages, with 2428 runs at 89.92, and eleven centuries, the most by any player. The next most prolific scorer was Morris with 1922 runs, and Hassett had the next best average with 74.42. His highest score of the tour was 187 against Essex, and he reached 150 on four occasions. Despite his success, he also gained attention for his troubles against Alec Bedser's leg trap; Bradman was dismissed three consecutive times in the Tests in this manner, and twice outside the Tests to other bowlers using the same ploy. Robertson-Glasgow said "at last his batting showed human fallibility. Often, especially at the start of the innings, he played where the ball wasn't, and spectators rubbed their eyes". In the Tests, Bradman finished with 508 runs at 72.57 and two centuries. Only Morris and Barnes averaged higher and only Morris and Denis Compton of England aggregated more. Apart from the match against Leicestershire, when he batted at No. 4, and the two non-first-class matches against Scotland, Bradman always batted at No. 3.<sup>N-</sup> He bowled only one over during the tour, against the Leveson-Gower's XI when the result of the match was beyond doubt.
1,792,150	Styracosaurus	1,171,440,183	Ceratopsian dinosaur genus from the Cretaceous Period	[ "Campanian genus extinctions", "Campanian genus first appearances", "Centrosaurines", "Dinosaur Park fauna", "Fossil taxa described in 1913", "Late Cretaceous dinosaurs of North America", "Ornithischian genera", "Paleontology in Alberta", "Taxa named by Lawrence Lambe" ]	Styracosaurus (/stɪˌrækəˈsɔːrəs/ sti-RAK-ə-SOR-əs; meaning "spiked lizard" from the Ancient Greek styrax/στύραξ "spike at the butt-end of a spear-shaft" and sauros/σαῦρος "lizard") is a genus of herbivorous ceratopsian dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period (Campanian stage), about 75.5 to 74.5 million years ago. It had four to six long parietal spikes extending from its neck frill, a smaller jugal horn on each of its cheeks, and a single horn protruding from its nose, which may have been up to 60 centimeters (2 feet) long and 15 centimeters (6 inches) wide. The function or functions of the horns and frills have been debated for many years. Styracosaurus was a relatively large dinosaur, reaching lengths of 5–5.5 metres (16–18 ft) and weighing about 1.8–2.7 metric tons (2.0–3.0 short tons). It stood about 1.8 meters (5.9 feet) tall. Styracosaurus possessed four short legs and a bulky body. Its tail was rather short. The skull had a beak and shearing cheek teeth arranged in continuous dental batteries, suggesting that the animal sliced up plants. Like other ceratopsians, this dinosaur may have been a herd animal, travelling in large groups, as suggested by bone beds. Named by Lawrence Lambe in 1913, Styracosaurus is a member of the Centrosaurinae. One species, S. albertensis, is currently assigned to Styracosaurus. Another species, S. ovatus, named in 1930 by Charles Gilmore was reassigned to a new genus, Rubeosaurus, by Andrew McDonald and Jack Horner in 2010, but it has been considered either its own species or a species of Styracosaurus (or even a specimen of S. albertensis) again, since 2020. ## Discoveries and species The first fossil remains of Styracosaurus were collected in Alberta, Canada by C. M. Sternberg (from an area now known as Dinosaur Provincial Park, in a formation now called the Dinosaur Park Formation) and named by Lawrence Lambe in 1913. This quarry was revisited in 1935 by a Royal Ontario Museum crew who found the missing lower jaws and most of the skeleton. These fossils indicate that S. albertensis was around 5.5–5.8 metres (18–19 ft) in length and stood about 1.65 metres (5.4 ft) high at the hips. An unusual feature of this first skull is that the smallest frill spike on the left side is partially overlapped at its base by the next spike. It appears that the frill suffered a break at this point in life and was shortened by about 6 centimeters (2.4 inches). The normal shape of this area is unknown because the corresponding area of the right side of the frill was not recovered. Barnum Brown and crew, working for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, collected a nearly complete articulated skeleton with a partial skull in 1915. These fossils were also found in the Dinosaur Park Formation, near Steveville, Alberta. Brown and Erich Maren Schlaikjer compared the finds, and, though they allowed that both specimens were from the same general locality and geological formation, they considered the specimen sufficiently distinct from the holotype to warrant erecting a new species, and described the fossils as Styracosaurus parksi, named in honor of William Parks. Among the differences between the specimens cited by Brown and Schlaikjer were a cheekbone quite different from that of S. albertensis, and smaller tail vertebrae. S. parksi also had a more robust jaw, a shorter dentary, and the frill differed in shape from that of the type species. However, much of the skull consisted of plaster reconstruction, and the original 1937 paper did not illustrate the actual skull bones. It is now accepted as a specimen of S. albertensis. In the summer of 2006, Darren Tanke of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta relocated the long lost S. parksi site. Pieces of the skull, evidently abandoned by the 1915 crew, were found in the quarry. These were collected and it is hoped more pieces will be found, perhaps enough to warrant a redescription of the skull and test whether S. albertensis and S. parksi are the same. The Tyrrell Museum has also collected several partial Styracosaurus skulls. At least one confirmed bone bed (bonebed 42) in Dinosaur Provincial Park has also been explored (other proposed Styracosaurus bone beds instead have fossils from a mix of animals, and nondiagnostic ceratopsian remains). Bonebed 42 is known to contain numerous pieces of skulls such as horncores, jaws and frill pieces. Several other species which were assigned to Styracosaurus have since been assigned to other genera. S. sphenocerus, described by Edward Drinker Cope in 1890 as a species of Monoclonius and based on a nasal bone with a broken Styracosaurus-like straight nose horn, was attributed to Styracosaurus in 1915. "S. makeli", mentioned informally by amateur paleontologists Stephen and Sylvia Czerkas in 1990 in a caption to an illustration, is an early name for Einiosaurus. "S. borealis" is an early informal name for S. parksi. ### Styracosaurus ovatus A species, Styracosaurus ovatus, from the Two Medicine Formation of Montana, was described by Gilmore in 1930, named for a partial parietal under the accession number USNM 11869. Unlike S. albertensis, the longest parietal spikes converge towards their tips, instead of projecting parallel behind the frill. There also may only have been two sets of spikes on each side of the frill, instead of three. As estimated from the preserved material, the spikes are much shorter than in S. albertensis, with the longest only 295 millimeters (11.6 inches) long. An additional specimen from the Two Medicine Formation was referred to Styracosaurus ovatus in 2010 by Andrew McDonald and John Horner, having been found earlier in 1986 but not described until that year. Known from a premaxilla, the nasal bones and their horncore, a postorbital bone and a parietal, the specimen Museum of the Rockies 492 was considered to share the medially-converging parietal spikes with the only other specimen of S. ovatus, the holotype. Following this additional material, the species was added to a phylogenetic analysis where it was found to group not with Styracosaurus albertensis, but in a clade including Pachyrhinosaurus, Einiosaurus and Achelousaurus, and therefore McDonald and Horner gave the species the new genus name Rubeosaurus. Another specimen, the partial immature skull USNM 14768, which was earlier referred to the undiagnostic genus Brachyceratops, was also referred to Rubeosaurus ovatus by McDonald and colleagues in 2011. While the medial spikes of USNM 14768 were too incomplete to show if it shared the convergence seen in other R. ovatus specimens, it was considered to be the same species as it was also found in the older deposits of the Two Medicine Formation, and had a unique combination of parietal features only shared completely with the other specimens of the species. Though it was originally found to nest closer to Einiosaurus and later centrosaurines by McDonald and colleagues in both 2010 and 2011, revisions of phylogenetic analyses in 2013 by Scott Sampson and colleagues, and further expansions and modifications of the same dataset, instead placed Rubeosaurus ovatus as the sister taxon of Styracosaurus albertensis, as had been originally considered when the species was first named, though the two species were not moved into the same genus as originally named. A review of the variability within known Styracosaurus specimens by Robert Holmes and colleagues in 2020 found that USNM 11869, the type specimen of Rubeosaurus ovatus, fell within the variation seen in other specimens from the older deposits of the Dinosaur Park Formation S. albertensis is known from. While no phylogenetic analysis was conducted, previous results of updated analyses showed that Rubeosaurus ovatus and Styracosaurus albertensis were not distantly related, so the justification for naming the genus Rubeosaurus was not present, and the variability in Styracosaurus albertensis specimens also did not support the distinction of Styracosaurus ovatus, with Holmes et al. considering the latter a junior synonym of the former. The conclusion of Holmes and colleagues was supported by a later 2020 study authored by Caleb Brown, Holmes, and Philip J. Currie, who described a new juvenile Styracosaurus specimen and determined that there were several specimens that are otherwise consistent with S. albertensis have been found with inward angled midline frill spikes, though not the same degree as S. ovatus. Though they considered that S. ovatus represented an extreme end of the S. albertensis variation not only in morphology but also as it was stratigraphically younger, they cautioned that at the least the current diagnosis of S. ovatus was inadequate. Later in 2020, the supposed specimen MOR 492 was redescribed by John Wilson and colleagues, who reinterpreted its anatomy in a way that contrasted McDonald and Horner who referred it to Styracosaurus ovatus. While Wilson et al. agreed that the close relationship between S. albertensis and S. ovatus meant that the genus name Rubeosaurus should be abandoned, they cautioned against synonymization. MOR 492 was moved into its own taxon, Stellasaurus ancellae, which nested alongside Einiosaurus, Achelousaurus and Pachyrhinosaurus in a similar result to McDonald and Horner when the specimen was included as part of the S. ovatus hypodigm. Wilson and colleagues also suggested that the new taxon may have been ancestral to the later forms it was found related to, suggesting that gradual evolution through anagenesis could be the reason for the intermediate morphologies of many specimens and species found in the Two Medicine Formation, possibly also including S. ovatus. As the holotype of Styracosaurus ovatus was found in deposits much younger than the remainder of Styracosaurus specimens, and was considered to have the most extreme morphology while still falling within plausible variation as Holmes et al. had concluded, Wilson and colleagues advised that S. ovatus was retained as a separate, probably directly descended from S. albertensis, species of Styracosaurus. The immature specimen USNM 14768, referred to S. ovatus by McDonald et al. in 2011, was considered too immature to be diagnostic, and thus S. ovatus was limited to its holotype USNM 11869. ## Description Individuals of the genus Styracosaurus were approximately 5–5.5 metres (16–18 ft) long as adults and weighed about 1.8–2.7 metric tons (2.0–3.0 short tons). The skull was massive, with a large nostril, a tall straight nose horn, and a parietal squamosal frill (a neck frill) crowned with at least four large spikes. Each of the four longest frill spines was comparable in length to the nose horn, at 50 to 55 centimeters (20 to 22 inches) long. The nasal horn was estimated by Lambe at 57 centimeters (22 inches) long in the type specimen, but the tip had not been preserved. Based on other nasal horn cores from Styracosaurus and Centrosaurus, this horn may have come to a more rounded point at around half of that length. Aside from the large nasal horn and four long frill spikes, the cranial ornamentation was variable. Some individuals had small hook-like projections and knobs at the posterior margin of the frill, similar to but smaller than those in Centrosaurus. Others had less prominent tabs. Some, like the type individual, had a third pair of long frill spikes. Others had much smaller projections, and small points are found on the side margins of some but not all specimens. Modest pyramid-shaped brow horns were present in subadults, but were replaced by pits in adults. Like most ceratopsids, Styracosaurus had large fenestrae (skull openings) in its frill. The front of the mouth had a toothless beak. The bulky body of Styracosaurus resembled that of a rhinoceros. It had powerful shoulders which may have been useful in intraspecies combat. Styracosaurus had a relatively short tail. Each toe bore a hooflike ungual which was sheathed in horn. Various limb positions have been proposed for Styracosaurus and ceratopsids in general, including forelegs which were held underneath the body, or, alternatively, held in a sprawling position. The most recent work has put forward an intermediate crouched position as most likely. ## Classification Styracosaurus is a member of the Centrosaurinae. Other members of the clade include Centrosaurus (from which the group takes its name), Pachyrhinosaurus, Avaceratops, Einiosaurus, Albertaceratops, Achelousaurus, Brachyceratops, and Monoclonius, although these last two are dubious. Because of the variation between species and even individual specimens of centrosaurines, there has been much debate over which genera and species are valid, particularly whether Centrosaurus and/or Monoclonius are valid genera, undiagnosable, or possibly members of the opposite sex. In 1996, Peter Dodson found enough variation between Centrosaurus, Styracosaurus, and Monoclonius to warrant separate genera, and that Styracosaurus resembled Centrosaurus more closely than either resembled Monoclonius. Dodson also believed one species of Monoclonius, M. nasicornis, may actually have been a female Styracosaurus. However, most other researchers have not accepted Monoclonius nasicornis as a female Styracosaurus, instead regarding it as a synonym of Centrosaurus apertus. While sexual dimorphism has been proposed for an earlier ceratopsian, Protoceratops, there is no firm evidence for sexual dimorphism in any ceratopsid. The cladogram depicted below represents a phylogenetic analysis by Chiba et al. (2017): ### Origins and evolution The evolutionary origins of Styracosaurus were not understood for many years because fossil evidence for early ceratopsians was sparse. The discovery of Protoceratops, in 1922, shed light on early ceratopsid relationships, but several decades passed before additional finds filled in more of the blanks. Fresh discoveries in the late 1990s and 2000s, including Zuniceratops, the earliest known ceratopsian with brow horns, and Yinlong, the first-known Jurassic ceratopsian, indicate what the ancestors of Styracosaurus may have looked like. These new discoveries have been important in illuminating the origins of horned dinosaurs in general, and suggest that the group originated during the Jurassic in Asia, with the appearance of true horned ceratopsians occurring by the beginning of the late Cretaceous in North America. Goodwin and colleagues proposed in 1992 that Styracosaurus was part of the lineage leading to Einiosaurus, Achelousaurus and Pachyrhinosaurus. This was based on a series of fossil skulls from the Two Medicine Formation of Montana. The position of Styracosaurus in this lineage is now equivocal, as the remains that were thought to represent Styracosaurus have been transferred to the genus Rubeosaurus. Styracosaurus is known from a higher position in the formation (relating specifically to its own genus) than the closely related Centrosaurus, suggesting that Styracosaurus displaced Centrosaurus as the environment changed over time and/or dimension. It has been suggested that Styracosaurus albertensis is a direct descendant of Centrosaurus (C. apertus or C. nasicornis), and that it in turn evolved directly into the slightly later species Rubeosaurus ovatus. Subtle changes can be traced in the arrangement of the horns through this lineage, leading from Rubeosaurus to Einiosaurus, to Achelousaurus and Pachyrhinosaurus. However, the lineage may not be a simple, straight line, as a pachyrhinosaur-like species has been reported from the same time and place as Styracosaurus albertensis. In 2020, during the description of Stellasaurus, Wilson et al. found Styracosaurus (including S. ovatus) to be the earliest member of a single evolutionary lineage that eventually developed into Stellasaurus, Achelousaurus, and Pachyrhinosaurus. ## Paleobiology Styracosaurus and other horned dinosaurs are often depicted in popular culture as herd animals. A bonebed composed of Styracosaurus remains is known from the Dinosaur Park Formation of Alberta, about halfway up the formation. This bonebed is associated with different types of river deposits. The mass deaths may have been a result of otherwise non-herding animals congregating around a waterhole in a period of drought, with evidence suggesting the environment may have been seasonal and semi-arid. Paleontologists Gregory Paul and Per Christiansen proposed that large ceratopsians such as Styracosaurus were able to run faster than an elephant, based on possible ceratopsian trackways which did not exhibit signs of sprawling forelimbs. ### Dentition and diet Styracosaurs were herbivorous dinosaurs; they probably fed mostly on low growth because of the position of the head. They may, however, have been able to knock down taller plants with their horns, beak, and bulk. The jaws were tipped with a deep, narrow beak, believed to have been better at grasping and plucking than biting. Ceratopsid teeth, including those of Styracosaurus, were arranged in groups called batteries. Older teeth on top were continually replaced by the teeth underneath them. Unlike hadrosaurids, which also had dental batteries, ceratopsid teeth sliced but did not grind. Some scientists have suggested that ceratopsids like Styracosaurus ate palms and cycads, while others have suggested ferns. Dodson has proposed that Late Cretaceous ceratopsians may have knocked down angiosperm trees and then sheared off leaves and twigs. ### Horns and frill The large nasal horns and frills of Styracosaurus are among the most distinctive facial adornments of all dinosaurs. Their function has been the subject of debate since the first horned dinosaurs were discovered. Early in the 20th century, paleontologist R. S. Lull proposed that the frills of ceratopsian dinosaurs acted as anchor points for their jaw muscles. He later noted that for Styracosaurus, the spikes would have given it a formidable appearance. In 1996, Dodson supported the idea of muscle attachments in part and created detailed diagrams of possible muscle attachments in the frills of Styracosaurus and Chasmosaurus, but did not subscribe to the idea that they completely filled in the fenestrae. C. A. Forster, however, found no evidence of large muscle attachments on the frill bones. It was long believed that ceratopsians like Styracosaurus used their frills and horns in defence against the large predatory dinosaurs of the time. Although pitting, holes, lesions, and other damage on ceratopsid skulls are often attributed to horn damage in combat, a 2006 study found no evidence for horn thrust injuries causing these forms of damage (for example, there is no evidence of infection or healing). Instead, non-pathological bone resorption, or unknown bone diseases, are suggested as causes. However, a newer study compared incidence rates of skull lesions in Triceratops and Centrosaurus and showed that these were consistent with Triceratops using its horns in combat and the frill being adapted as a protective structure, while lower pathology rates in Centrosaurus may indicate visual rather than physical use of cranial ornamentation, or a form of combat focused on the body rather than the head; as Centrosaurus was more closely related to Styracosaurus and both genera had long nasal horns, the results for this genus would be more applicable for Styracosaurus. The researchers also concluded that the damage found on the specimens in the study was often too localized to be caused by bone disease. The large frill on Styracosaurus and related genera also may have helped to increase body area to regulate body temperature, like the ears of the modern elephant. A similar theory has been proposed regarding the plates of Stegosaurus, although this use alone would not account for the bizarre and extravagant variation seen in different members of the Ceratopsidae. This observation is highly suggestive of what is now believed to be the primary function, display. The theory of frill use in sexual display was first proposed in 1961 by Davitashvili. This theory has gained increasing acceptance. Evidence that visual display was important, either in courtship or in other social behavior, can be seen in the fact that horned dinosaurs differ markedly in their adornments, making each species highly distinctive. Also, modern living creatures with such displays of horns and adornments use them in similar behavior. The use of the exaggerated structures in dinosaurs as species identification has been questioned, as no such function exists in vast majority of modern species of tetrapods (terrestrial vertebrates). A skull discovered in 2015 from a Styracosaurus indicates that individual variation was likely commonplace in the genus. The asymmetrical nature of the horns in the specimen has been compared to deer, which often have asymmetrical antlers in various individuals. The study carried out may also indicate that the genus Rubeosaurus may be synonymous with Styracosaurus as a result. ## Paleoecology Styracosaurus is known from the Dinosaur Park Formation, and was a member of a diverse and well-documented fauna of prehistoric animals that included horned relatives such as Centrosaurus and Chasmosaurus, duckbills such as Prosaurolophus, Lambeosaurus, Gryposaurus, Corythosaurus, and Parasaurolophus, tyrannosaurids Gorgosaurus, Daspletosaurus, and armored Edmontonia and Euoplocephalus. The Dinosaur Park Formation is interpreted as a low-relief setting of rivers and floodplains that became more swampy and influenced by marine conditions over time as the Western Interior Seaway transgressed westward. The climate was warmer than present-day Alberta, without frost, but with wetter and drier seasons. Conifers were apparently the dominant canopy plants, with an understory of ferns, tree ferns, and angiosperms. In the Two Medicine Formation, dinosaurs that lived alongside Styracosaurus ovatus included the basal ornithopod Orodromeus, hadrosaurids (such as Hypacrosaurus, Maiasaura, and Prosaurolophus), the centrosaurines Brachyceratops and Einiosaurus, the leptoceratopsid Cerasinops, the ankylosaurs Edmontonia and Euoplocephalus, the tyrannosaurid Daspletosaurus (which appears to have been a specialist of preying on ceratopsians), as well as the smaller theropods Bambiraptor, Chirostenotes, Troodon, and Avisaurus. ### In popular culture Styracosaurus was featured in the lost pit scene in "King Kong" (1933). Although the original footage is now lost, a similar, fictional ceratopsian called Ferrucutus based on Styracosaurus and Pachyrhinosaurus can be seen in Peter Jackson's recreation. ## See also - Timeline of ceratopsian research
282,390	James Bowie	1,173,858,081	American pioneer (1796–1836)	[ "1796 births", "1836 deaths", "19th-century American people", "19th-century American slave traders", "Alamo defenders", "American folklore", "American military personnel killed in action", "American slave owners", "Army of the Republic of Texas officers", "Converts to Roman Catholicism", "Deaths by firearm in Texas", "People from Logan County, Kentucky", "People from Opelousas, Louisiana", "People of the Texas Revolution", "Texas Consultation delegates" ]	James Bowie (/ˈbuːi/ BOO-ee) (April 10, 1796 – March 6, 1836) was a 19th-century American pioneer, slave smuggler and trader, and soldier who played a prominent role in the Texas Revolution. He was among the Americans who died at the Battle of the Alamo. Stories of him as a fighter and frontiersman, both real and fictitious, have made him a legendary figure in Texas history and a folk hero of American culture. Bowie was born on April 10, 1796 in Logan County, Kentucky. He spent most of his life in Louisiana, where he was raised and where he later worked as a land speculator. His rise to fame began in 1827 on reports of the Sandbar Fight near present-day Vidalia, Louisiana. What began as a duel between two other men deteriorated into a mêlée in which Bowie, having been shot and stabbed, killed the sheriff of Rapides Parish with a large knife. This, and other stories of Bowie's prowess with a knife, led to the widespread popularity of the Bowie knife. Bowie enlarged his reputation during the Texas Revolution. After moving to Texas in 1830, Bowie became a Mexican citizen and married Ursula Veramendi, the daughter of Juan Martín de Veramendi, the Mexican vice-governor of the province. Bowie led an expedition to find the lost San Saba mine, during which his small party repelled an attack by a large Native American raiding party. This enhanced his reputation, although they didn't find the mine. At the outbreak of the Texas Revolution, Bowie joined the Texas militia, leading forces at the Battle of Concepción and the Grass Fight. In January 1836, he arrived at the Alamo, where he commanded the volunteer forces until an illness left him bedridden. Bowie died on March 6, 1836 with the other Alamo defenders. Despite conflicting accounts of his death, the "most popular, and probably the most accurate" accounts maintain that he died in his bed while defending himself against Mexican soldiers. ## Early years According to his older brother, John, James Bowie was born in Logan County, Kentucky, on April 10, 1796 (Historical marker: 36° 46' 25"N 86° 42' 10"W). In his 1948 book, Bowie Knife, historian Raymond Thorp gives Bowie's birth date as April 10 but does not support it with any documentation. Bowie's surname was pronounced /ˈbuːi/ BOO-ee. (Some reference works refer to an incorrect alternate pronunciation /ˈboʊi/ BOH-ee). Bowie was the ninth of ten children born to Reason (or Rezin) and Elve Ap-Catesby (née Jones, or Johns) Bowie. His father was wounded while fighting in the American Revolutionary War, and in 1782 he married Elve, the young woman who nursed him back to health. The Bowies first settled in Georgia and then moved to Kentucky. At the time of Bowie's birth, his father owned eight enslaved African Americans, eleven head of cattle, seven horses, and one stud horse. The following year, the family acquired 200 acres (80 ha) along the Red River. They sold that property in 1800 and relocated to what is now Missouri. In 1802, they moved south to Spanish Louisiana, where they settled on Bushley Bayou in what soon became Rapides Parish. The family moved again in 1809, settling on Bayou Teche in Louisiana before finding a permanent home in Opelousas in 1812. Raised on the frontier, the Bowie children worked from a young age, helping to clear the land and plant and cultivate crops. All the children learned to read and write in English, but James and his elder brother Rezin could also read, write, and speak Spanish and French fluently. The children learned to survive on the frontier, learning how to fish, butcher meat, and run a farm and plantation. James Bowie became proficient with pistol, rifle, and knife, and had a reputation for fearlessness. When he was a boy, one of his Native American friends taught him to rope alligators. In late 1814, in response to General Andrew Jackson's plea for volunteers to fight the British in the War of 1812, James and Rezin enlisted in the Louisiana militia. The Bowie brothers arrived in New Orleans too late to participate in the fighting. After mustering out of the militia, Bowie settled in Rapides Parish. He supported himself by sawing planks and lumber, and floating them down the bayou for sale. In June 1819, he joined the Long Expedition, an effort to liberate Texas from Spanish rule. The group encountered little resistance and, after capturing Nacogdoches, declared Texas an independent republic. The extent of Bowie's participation is unclear, but he returned to Louisiana before the invasion was repelled by Spanish troops. ## Land speculator and slave smuggler Shortly before the senior Bowie died, circa 1820, he gave ten slaves and horses and cattle to both James and Rezin. For the next seven years, the brothers worked together to develop several large estates in Lafourche Parish and Opelousas. Louisiana's population was growing rapidly, and the brothers hoped to take advantage of its rising land prices through speculation. Lacking the capital required to buy large tracts, in 1818 they entered into a partnership with pirate Jean Lafitte. By then, the United States had outlawed the importation of slaves from Africa. Most Southern states gave incentives for informing on an illegal slave trader: Informers could receive half of what the imported slaves would earn at auction, as a reward. Bowie made three trips to Lafitte's compound on Galveston Island. On each occasion, he bought smuggled slaves and took them directly to a customhouse to inform on his own actions. When the customs officers offered the slaves for auction, Bowie purchased them and received back half the price he had paid, as allowed by the state laws. He could legally transport the slaves and resell them at a greater market value in New Orleans or areas farther up the Mississippi River. Using this scheme, the brothers collected \$65,000 to use for their land speculation. In 1825, the two brothers joined with their younger brother, Stephen, to buy Acadia Plantation near Thibodaux. Within two years, they had established there the first steam mill in Louisiana for grinding sugar cane. The plantation became known as a model operation, but on February 12, 1831, they sold it and 65 slaves for \$90,000. With their profits, James and Rezin bought a plantation in Arkansas. In the late 1820s, Bowie and his brother John were involved in a major Arkansas court case over land speculation. When the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory in 1803, it promised to honor all former land grant claims made to French and Spanish colonists. For the next 20 years, efforts were made to establish who owned what land. In May 1824, Congress authorized the superior courts of each territory to hear suits from those who claimed they had been overlooked. In late 1827, the Arkansas Superior Court received 126 claims from residents who claimed to have purchased land in former Spanish grants from the Bowie brothers. Although the Superior Court originally confirmed most of those claims, the decisions were reversed in February 1831, after further research showed that the land had never belonged to the Bowies and that the original land grant documentation had been forged. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the reversal in 1833. When the disgruntled purchasers considered suing the Bowies, they discovered that the documents in the case had been removed from the court. Left without evidence, they declined to pursue the lawsuit. ## Bowie knife Bowie became internationally famous as a result of a feud with Norris Wright, the sheriff of Rapides Parish. Bowie had supported Wright's opponent in the race for sheriff, and Wright, a bank director, had been instrumental in turning down a Bowie loan application. After a confrontation in Alexandria one afternoon, Wright fired a shot at Bowie, after which Bowie resolved to carry his hunting knife at all times. The knife he carried had a blade that was 9.25 inches (23.5 cm) long and 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) wide. The following year, on September 19, 1827, Bowie and Wright attended a duel on a sandbar outside of Natchez, Mississippi. Bowie supported duelist Samuel Levi Wells III, while Wright supported Wells's opponent, Dr. Thomas Harris Maddox. The duelists each fired two shots and, because neither man had been injured, resolved their duel with a handshake. Other members of the groups, who had various reasons for disliking each other, began fighting. Bowie was shot in the hip, and, after regaining his feet, he drew a knife, described as a butcher knife, and charged his attacker. The man hit Bowie over the head with his empty pistol, breaking the pistol and knocking Bowie to the ground. Wright shot at and missed the prone Bowie, who returned fire and possibly hit Wright. Wright drew his sword cane and impaled Bowie. When Wright attempted to retrieve his blade by placing his foot on Bowie's chest and tugging, Bowie pulled him down and disemboweled Wright with his large knife. Wright died instantly. Bowie, with Wright's sword still protruding from his chest, was shot again and stabbed by another member of the group. The doctors who had been present for the duel removed the bullets and patched Bowie's other wounds. Newspapers picked up the story and named it the Sandbar Fight, describing in detail Bowie's fighting prowess and his unusual knife. Witness accounts agreed that Bowie did not attack first, and the other combatants had focused their attack on Bowie because "they considered him the most dangerous man among their opposition." Bowie's reputation as a superb knife fighter was set across the South. Scholars disagree as to whether the knife Bowie used in this fight was the same design as the blade, now known as a Bowie knife, fabricated by a knifemaker in Arkansas who created another renowned large blade known as the Arkansas toothpick. There are multiple accounts of the design and fabrication of the first Bowie knife. Some claim that Bowie designed it, while others attribute the design to noted knife makers of the time. In a letter to The Planter's Advocate, his brother Rezin claimed to have designed the knife. Many Bowie family members, as well as "most authorities on the Bowie knife tend to believe it was invented by" Rezin. However, Rezin Bowie's grandchildren said that Rezin only supervised his blacksmith, who was the designer of the knife. After the Sandbar Fight and subsequent battles in which Bowie used his knife in self-defense, the Bowie knife became very popular. Many craftsmen and manufacturers made their own versions, and major cities of the Old Southwest had "Bowie knife schools" that taught "the art of cut, thrust, and parry." Bowie's fame, and that of his knife, spread to Great Britain, and by the early 1830s, many British manufacturers were producing Bowie knives for shipment to the United States. The design of the knife continued to evolve, but a Bowie knife is now generally considered to have a blade 8.25 inches (21.0 cm) long and 1.25 inches (3.2 cm) wide, with a curved point, a "sharp false edge cut from both sides", and a cross-guard to protect the user's hands. ## Establishment in Texas In 1828, after recovering from the wounds he received in the Sandbar Fight, Bowie decided to move to Coahuila y Texas, at that time a state in the Mexican federation. The 1824 Constitution of Mexico banned religions other than Roman Catholicism and gave preference to Mexican citizens in receiving land. Bowie was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith in San Antonio on April 28, 1828, sponsored by the alcalde (chief administrator) of the town, Juan Martín de Veramendi, and his wife, Josefa Navarro. For the next 18 months, Bowie traveled through Louisiana and Mississippi. In 1829, he became engaged to Cecilia Wells, but she died in Alexandria on September 29, two weeks before they were to be married. On January 1, 1830, Bowie left Louisiana to live in Texas, permanently. He stopped at Nacogdoches, at Jared E. Groce's farm on the Brazos River, and in San Felipe, where he presented a letter of introduction from Thomas F. McKinney, one of the Old Three Hundred colonists, to Stephen F. Austin. On February 20, Bowie swore an oath of allegiance to Mexico and proceeded to San Antonio de Bexar. At the time, the city was known as Bexar and had a population of 2500, mostly of Mexican descent. Bowie's fluency in Spanish helped him to get established in the area. Bowie was elected a commander of the Texas Rangers later that year, with the rank of colonel. Although the Rangers would not be organized officially until 1835, Austin had founded the group by hiring 30 men to keep the peace and protect the colonists from attacks by hostile Native Americans. Other areas assembled similar volunteer militias. Bowie commanded a group of volunteers. Bowie renounced his American citizenship and became a Mexican citizen on September 30, 1830, after promising to establish textile mills in the state of Coahuila y Tejas. To fulfill his promise, Bowie entered into partnership with Veramendi to build cotton and wool mills in Saltillo. With his citizenship assured, Bowie had the right to buy up to 11 leagues of public land. He convinced 14 or 15 other citizens to apply for land and transfer it to him, giving him 700,000 acres (280,000 ha) for speculation. Bowie may have been the first to induce settlers to apply for empresario grants, which could be sold in bulk to speculators, as Bowie had. The Mexican government passed laws in 1834 and 1835 that stopped much of the land speculation. On April 25, 1831, Bowie married nineteen-year-old Maria Ursula de Veramendi, the daughter of his business partner, who had become the vice governor of the province. Several days before the ceremony, he signed a dowry contract promising to pay his new bride 15,000 pesos (approximately \$15,000 then, or \$ today) in cash or property within two years of the marriage. At the time, Bowie claimed to have a net worth of \$223,000 (\$ today), mostly in land of questionable title. Bowie also lied about his age, claiming to be 30 rather than 35. The couple built a house in San Antonio, on land Veramendi had given them near the San José Mission. After a short time, however, they moved into the Veramendi Palace to live with Ursula's parents, who supplied them with spending money. The couple had two children, Marie Elve (b. March 20, 1832) and James Veramendi Bowie (b. July 18, 1833). Maria Ursula, her parents, and both children died in September 1833 during a cholera epidemic that swept through the South and along major waterways. ] ## Los Almagres Mine Shortly after his marriage, Bowie became fascinated with the story of the "lost" Los Almagres Mine (also known as the lost San Saba Mine and the lost Bowie Mine), said to be northwest of San Antonio, near the ruin of the Spanish Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba. According to legend, the mine had been operated by local Native Americans before being seized by the Spanish. After Mexico won independence from Spain, government interest in mining waned. A number of native groups roamed the area, including Comanche, Lipan Apache, Tawakoni, and Tonkawa. Without government troops to keep hostile natives at bay, mining and mineral exploration were impossible. Some believed that the Lipan took over the mine after the Mexican citizens left the area.of After obtaining permission from the Mexican government to mount an expedition into Indian territory to search for the legendary silver mine, Bowie, his brother Rezin, and ten others set out for San Saba on November 2, 1831. Six miles (10 km) from their goal, the group stopped to negotiate with a large raiding party—reportedly more than 120 Tawakoni and Waco, plus another 40 Caddo. The attempts at parley failed, and Bowie and his group fought for their lives for the next 13 hours. When the raiding party finally retreated, Bowie reportedly had lost only one man, while more than 40 Indians had been killed and 30 were wounded. In the meantime, a party of friendly Comanche rode into San Antonio bringing word of the raiding party, which outnumbered the Bowie expedition by 14 to 1. The citizens of San Antonio believed the members of the Bowie expedition must have perished, and Ursula Bowie began wearing widow's weeds. To the town's surprise, the surviving members of the group returned to San Antonio on December 6. Bowie's report of the expedition, written in Spanish, was printed in several newspapers, further establishing his reputation. He set out again the following month, with a larger force, but returned home empty-handed after 2+1⁄2 months of searching. Bowie never talked about his exploits, despite his increasing fame. Captain William Y. Lacey, who spent eight months living in the wilderness with Bowie, described him as a humble man who never used profanity or vulgarities. ## Texas Revolution ### Texan rumblings Between 1830 and 1832, the Mexican Congress passed a series of laws that seemed to discriminate against Anglo colonists in the province of Coahuila y Tejas, increasing tension between the Anglo citizenry and Mexican officials. In response to the rumblings, Mexican troops established military posts in several locations within the province, including San Antonio de Béxar. Although much of the military supported the administration of President Anastasio Bustamante, Antonio López de Santa Anna led an insurrection against him in 1832. Anglo colonists in Texas supported Santa Anna and General José Antonio Mexía, who led soldiers into Texas to oust commanders loyal to Bustamante. In July 1832, after hearing that the Mexican army commander in Nacogdoches, José de las Piedras, had demanded that all residents in his area surrender their arms, Bowie cut short a visit to Natchez to return to Texas. On August 2, 1832, he joined a group of other Texans and marched into Nacogdoches to "present their demands" to Piedras. Before the group reached the building housing the town officials, they were attacked by a force of 100 Mexican cavalry. The Texans returned fire and the Battle of Nacogdoches began. After the cavalry retreated, they laid siege to the garrison. After a second battle, in which Piedras lost 33 men, the Mexican army evacuated during the night. Bowie and 18 companions ambushed the fleeing army and, after Piedras fled, marched the soldiers back to Nacogdoches. Bowie later served as a delegate to the Convention of 1833, which formally requested that Texas become its own state within the Mexican federation. Several months later, a cholera epidemic struck Texas. Fearing the disease would reach San Antonio, Bowie sent his pregnant wife and their daughter to the family estate in Monclova, in the company of her parents and brother. The cholera epidemic struck Monclova, and between September 6 and September 14, Ursula, their children, her brother, and her parents all died of the disease. Bowie, on business in Natchez, did not hear of his family's deaths until November. From then on, he drank heavily and became "careless in his dress." The following year, the Mexican government passed new laws allowing sale of land in Texas, and Bowie returned to land speculation. He was appointed a land commissioner and was tasked with promoting settlement in the area purchased by John T. Mason. His appointment ended in May 1835, when President Antonio López de Santa Anna abolished the Coahuila y Tejas government and ordered the arrest of all Texans (including Bowie) doing business in Monclova. Bowie was forced to flee Monclova and return to the Anglo areas of Texas. The Anglos in Texas began agitating for war against Santa Anna, and Bowie worked with William B. Travis, the leader of the War Party, to gain support. Bowie visited several Native American villages in East Texas in an attempt to persuade the reluctant tribes to fight against the Mexican government. Santa Anna responded to the rumblings by ordering large numbers of Mexican troops to Texas. ### Battle of Concepción The Texas Revolution began on October 2, 1835, with the Battle of Gonzales. Stephen F. Austin formed an army of 500 men to march on the Mexican forces in San Antonio with the cannon that had precipitated the fight. The name "Texian Army" is sometimes applied to this militia. On October 22, Austin asked James W. Fannin and Bowie, now a colonel in the volunteer militia, to scout the area around the missions of San Francisco de la Espada and San José y San Miguel de Aguayo and find supplies for the volunteer forces. The scouting party left with 92 men, many of them members of the New Orleans Grays, who had just arrived in Texas. After discovering a good defensive position near Mission Concepción, the group requested that Austin's army join them. On the foggy morning of October 28, Mexican General Domingo Ugartechea led a force of 300 infantry and cavalry soldiers and two small cannons against the Texian forces. Although the Mexican army was able to get within 200 yards (183 m), the Texian defensive position protected them from fire. When the Mexicans stopped to reload their cannon, the Texians climbed a bluff and picked off some of the soldiers. The stalemate ended shortly after Bowie led a charge to seize one of the Mexican cannons, at that time only 80 yards (73 m) away. Ugartechea retreated with his troops, ending the Battle of Concepción. One Texian and ten Mexican troops had been killed. One of the men under Bowie's command during the battle later praised him "as a born leader, never needlessly spending a bullet or imperiling a life, who repeatedly admonished... Keep under cover boys, and reserve your fire; we haven't a man to spare." ### Grass Fight and commission difficulties An hour after the battle ended, Austin arrived with the rest of the Texian army to begin a siege of San Antonio de Béxar, where General Martín Perfecto de Cós, the overall commander of Mexican forces in Texas, and his troops were garrisoned. Two days later, Bowie resigned from Austin's army because he did not have an official commission in the army, and he disliked the "minor tasks of scouting and spying". On November 3, 1835, Texas declared itself an independent state, and a provisional government was formed, with Henry Smith of Brazoria elected provisional governor. Austin asked to be relieved of his command of the army, and Sam Houston was named army chief. Edward Burleson was chosen as temporary commander of the troops in San Antonio. At some point, Bowie appeared before the council and spoke for an hour, asking for a commission. The council refused his request, probably because of lingering animosity over his land dealings. Houston offered Bowie a commission as an officer on his staff, but Bowie rejected the opportunity, explaining that he wanted to be in the midst of the fighting. Instead, Bowie enlisted in the army as a private under Fannin. He distinguished himself again in the Grass Fight on November 26. Cós had sent approximately 187 men to cut grass for his horses. As they returned to San Antonio, Bowie took 60 mounted men to intercept the party, which they believed carried valuable cargo. The Mexican troops quickened their pace in hopes of reaching the safety of the city, but Bowie and his cavalry chased them. At the end of the fight, the Texians had two wounded men but had captured many horses and mules. Shortly after Bowie left San Antonio, Ben Milam led an assault on the city. In the ensuing fighting, the Texians suffered only a few casualties, including Milam, while the Mexican army lost many troops to death and desertion. Cós surrendered and returned to Mexico, taking with him the last Mexican troops in Texas. Believing the war was over, many of the Texian volunteers left the army and returned to their families. In early January 1836, Bowie went to San Felipe and asked the council to allow him to recruit a regiment. He was turned down again, because he "was not an officer of the government nor army." ### Battle of the Alamo After Houston received word that Santa Anna was leading a large force to San Antonio, Bowie offered to lead volunteers to defend the Alamo from the expected attack. He arrived with 30 men on January 19. They found a force of 104 men with a few weapons and a few cannons, but not many supplies and little gunpowder. Houston knew that there were not enough men to hold the fort in an attack, and he gave Bowie authority to remove the artillery and blow up the fortification. Bowie and the Alamo commander, James C. Neill, decided they did not have enough oxen to move the artillery, and they did not want to destroy the fortress. On January 26, one of Bowie's men, James Bonham, organized a rally that passed a resolution in favor of holding the Alamo. Bonham signed the resolution first; Bowie's signature came second. Because of Bowie's fluency in Spanish and his connections through his marriage, the predominantly Mexican population of San Antonio often furnished him with information about the movements of the Mexican army. After learning that Santa Anna had 4,500 troops and was heading for the city, Bowie wrote several letters to the provisional government asking for help in defending the Alamo, especially "men, money, rifles, and cannon powder". In another letter, to Governor Smith, he reiterated his view that "the salvation of Texas depends in great measure on keeping Béxar out of the hands of the enemy. It serves as the frontier picquet guard, and if it were in the possession of Santa Anna, there is no stronghold from which to repel him in his march toward the Sabine." The letter to Smith ended, "Colonel Neill and myself have come to the solemn resolution that we will rather die in these ditches than give it up to the enemy." On February 3, Davy Crockett appeared with thirty Tennesseans. Neill went on furlough on February 11 to visit his sick family, leaving Travis, a member of the regular army, in command. Bowie was older than Travis, had a better reputation and considered himself a colonel, thus outranking Travis, who was a lieutenant colonel. Bowie refused to answer to Travis, who called an election for the men to choose their own commander. They chose Bowie, infuriating Travis. Bowie celebrated his appointment by getting very drunk and causing havoc in San Antonio, releasing all prisoners in the local jails and harassing citizens. Travis was disgusted, but two days later the men agreed to a joint command: Bowie would command the volunteers, and Travis would command the regular army and the volunteer cavalry. On February 23, the bells of San Fernando sounded the alarm for the approach of the Mexicans. Travis ordered all the Texan forces into the Alamo. Bowie hurried to gather provisions and herd cattle into the Alamo compound. Fearing for the safety of his wife's relatives in San Antonio, Bowie invited her cousins, Getrudis Navarro and Juana Navarro Alsbury, as well as Alsbury's 18-month-old son, Alijo Perez Jr., to stay inside the walls of the Alamo. Bowie also brought several black servants, some of whom worked at the Veramendi Palace, into the security of the Alamo fortress. Bowie had been ill, and two doctors, including the fort surgeon, were unable to diagnose his illness. Travis became the sole commander of the forces when Bowie was confined to bed. Santa Anna and his army began a siege of the Alamo on February 24. The Mexican army raised a red flag to warn the defenders that no quarter would be given. Bowie and Travis began sending out couriers with pleas for provisions and assistance. On February 25, Travis sent Juan Seguin, on Bowie's horse, to recruit reinforcements, and 32 additional men arrived. On February 26, Crockett reported that Bowie, though suffering from his condition, continued to crawl from his bed around noon every day and present himself to the Alamo's inhabitants, which much boosted the morale of his comrades. Thirty-five years after the Alamo fell, a reporter identified Louis "Moses" Rose as the only man to have "deserted" the Texian forces at the Alamo. According to the reporter's version of Rose's account, when Travis realized that the Mexican army would likely prevail, he drew a line in the sand and asked those willing to die for the cause to cross the line. At Bowie's request, Crockett and several others carried his cot over the line, leaving Rose alone on the other side. After this article appeared, several other eyewitnesses confirmed the account, but because Rose was deceased the story can only be authenticated by the word of the reporter, who admitted to embellishing other articles, "and thus many historians refuse to believe it." Bowie perished with the rest of the Alamo defenders when the Mexicans attacked on March 6. Most of the noncombatants in the fort, including Bowie's relatives, survived. Santa Anna ordered the alcalde of San Antonio, Francisco Antonio Ruiz, to confirm the identities of Bowie, Travis, and Crockett. After first ordering that Bowie be buried, as he was too brave a man to be burned like a dog, Santa Anna later had Bowie's body placed with those of the other Texians on the funeral pyre. When Bowie's mother was informed of his death, she calmly stated, "I'll wager no wounds were found in his back." Various eyewitnesses to the battle gave conflicting accounts of Bowie's death. A newspaper article claimed that a Mexican soldier saw Bowie carried from his room on his cot, alive, after the conclusion of the battle. The soldier maintained that Bowie castigated a Mexican officer in fluent Spanish, and the officer ordered Bowie's tongue cut out and his still-breathing body thrown onto the funeral pyre. This account has been disputed by numerous other witnesses, and it is thought to have been invented by the reporter. Other witnesses maintained that they saw several Mexican soldiers enter Bowie's room, bayonet him, and carry him, alive, from the room. Various other stories circulated. Some witnesses claimed that Bowie shot himself. Others said he was killed by soldiers while too weak to lift his head. Alcalde Ruiz said that Bowie was found "dead in his bed." According to Wallace O Chariton, the "most popular, and probably the most accurate" version is that Bowie died on his cot, "back braced against the wall, and using his pistols and his famous knife." One year after the battle, Juan Seguin returned to the Alamo and gathered the remaining ashes from the funeral pyre. He placed these in a coffin inscribed with the names of Bowie, Travis, and Crockett. The ashes were interred at the Cathedral of San Fernando. ## Legacy Despite his continual claims of wealth, Bowie's estate was found to be very small. His possessions were auctioned for only \$99.50. His larger legacy is his position as "one of the legendary characters of the American frontier." Bowie left a "frustratingly sparse paper trail" of his life, and for many "where history failed, the legends prevailed." Although Bowie's name and knife were well known during his lifetime, his legend grew after October 1852, when DeBow's Review published an article written by his brother, John Jones Bowie, called, "Early Life in the Southwest—The Bowies." The article focused primarily on the exploits of Jim Bowie. Beginning with that article, "romanticized stories" about Bowie began appearing in national press. In many cases, "these stories were pure melodrama, with Bowie rescuing some naïve planter's son or damsel in distress." Jim Bowie was inducted posthumously into the Blade Magazine Cutlery Hall of Fame at the 1988 Blade Show in Atlanta, Georgia, in recognition of the impact that his eponymous design had upon generations of knife makers and cutlery companies. A number of films have depicted the events of the Battle of the Alamo, and Bowie has appeared as a character in each. From 1956 to 1958, Bowie was the subject of a CBS television series, The Adventures of Jim Bowie, which was primarily set in 1830s Louisiana, although later episodes ventured into the Mexican province of Texas. The show, which starred Scott Forbes as Jim Bowie, was based on the 1946 novel Tempered Blade. Rock star David Bowie, who was born David Robert Jones, adopted the folk legend's surname. Jones changed his last name in the 1960s because he feared confusion with Davy Jones, a member of the already famous The Monkees. He chose the Bowie eponym because he admired James Bowie and the Bowie knife, although his pronunciation uses the BOH-ee (/ˈboʊi/) variant. Bowie County in northeast Texas, and the city of Bowie in Montague County, Texas, were both named in honor of James Bowie. James Bowie Elementary in Corsicana, Texas was also named in his honor.
12,216	Georg Cantor	1,172,004,829	German mathematician (1845–1918)	[ "1845 births", "1918 deaths", "19th-century German male writers", "19th-century German mathematicians", "19th-century German writers", "19th-century philosophers", "20th-century German mathematicians", "20th-century German philosophers", "20th-century German writers", "Academic staff of the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg", "Baltic-German people", "ETH Zurich alumni", "Georg Cantor", "German Lutherans", "German logicians", "Members of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities", "People with bipolar disorder", "Scientists from Darmstadt", "Set theorists", "Technische Universität Darmstadt alumni" ]	Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor (/ˈkæntɔːr/ KAN-tor, ; – 6 January 1918) was a mathematician. He played a pivotal role in the creation of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. Cantor established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between the members of two sets, defined infinite and well-ordered sets, and proved that the real numbers are more numerous than the natural numbers. Cantor's method of proof of this theorem implies the existence of an infinity of infinities. He defined the cardinal and ordinal numbers and their arithmetic. Cantor's work is of great philosophical interest, a fact he was well aware of. Originally, Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers was regarded as counter-intuitive – even shocking. This caused it to encounter resistance from mathematical contemporaries such as Leopold Kronecker and Henri Poincaré and later from Hermann Weyl and L. E. J. Brouwer, while Ludwig Wittgenstein raised philosophical objections; see Controversy over Cantor's theory. Cantor, a devout Lutheran Christian, believed the theory had been communicated to him by God. Some Christian theologians (particularly neo-Scholastics) saw Cantor's work as a challenge to the uniqueness of the absolute infinity in the nature of God – on one occasion equating the theory of transfinite numbers with pantheism – a proposition that Cantor vigorously rejected. Not all theologians were against Cantor's theory; prominent neo-scholastic philosopher Constantin Gutberlet was in favor of it and Cardinal Johann Baptist Franzelin accepted it as a valid theory (after Cantor made some important clarifications). The objections to Cantor's work were occasionally fierce: Leopold Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth". Kronecker objected to Cantor's proofs that the algebraic numbers are countable, and that the transcendental numbers are uncountable, results now included in a standard mathematics curriculum. Writing decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that mathematics is "ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory", which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and "wrong". Cantor's recurring bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life have been blamed on the hostile attitude of many of his contemporaries, though some have explained these episodes as probable manifestations of a bipolar disorder. The harsh criticism has been matched by later accolades. In 1904, the Royal Society awarded Cantor its Sylvester Medal, the highest honor it can confer for work in mathematics. David Hilbert defended it from its critics by declaring, "No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created." ## Biography ### Youth and studies Georg Cantor, born in 1845 in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, was brought up in that city until the age of eleven. The oldest of six children, he was regarded as an outstanding violinist. His grandfather Franz Böhm (1788–1846) (the violinist Joseph Böhm's brother) was a well-known musician and soloist in a Russian imperial orchestra. Cantor's father had been a member of the Saint Petersburg stock exchange; when he became ill, the family moved to Germany in 1856, first to Wiesbaden, then to Frankfurt, seeking milder winters than those of Saint Petersburg. In 1860, Cantor graduated with distinction from the Realschule in Darmstadt; his exceptional skills in mathematics, trigonometry in particular, were noted. In August 1862, he then graduated from the "Höhere Gewerbeschule Darmstadt", now the Technische Universität Darmstadt. In 1862 Cantor entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. After receiving a substantial inheritance upon his father's death in June 1863, Cantor transferred to the University of Berlin, attending lectures by Leopold Kronecker, Karl Weierstrass and Ernst Kummer. He spent the summer of 1866 at the University of Göttingen, then and later a center for mathematical research. Cantor was a good student, and he received his doctoral degree in 1867. ### Teacher and researcher Cantor submitted his dissertation on number theory at the University of Berlin in 1867. After teaching briefly in a Berlin girls' school, he took up a position at the University of Halle, where he spent his entire career. He was awarded the requisite habilitation for his thesis, also on number theory, which he presented in 1869 upon his appointment at Halle University. In 1874, Cantor married Vally Guttmann. They had six children, the last (Rudolph) born in 1886. Cantor was able to support a family despite his modest academic pay, thanks to his inheritance from his father. During his honeymoon in the Harz mountains, Cantor spent much time in mathematical discussions with Richard Dedekind, whom he had met at Interlaken in Switzerland two years earlier while on holiday. Cantor was promoted to extraordinary professor in 1872 and made full professor in 1879. To attain the latter rank at the age of 34 was a notable accomplishment, but Cantor desired a chair at a more prestigious university, in particular at Berlin, at that time the leading German university. However, his work encountered too much opposition for that to be possible. Kronecker, who headed mathematics at Berlin until his death in 1891, became increasingly uncomfortable with the prospect of having Cantor as a colleague, perceiving him as a "corrupter of youth" for teaching his ideas to a younger generation of mathematicians. Worse yet, Kronecker, a well-established figure within the mathematical community and Cantor's former professor, disagreed fundamentally with the thrust of Cantor's work ever since he had intentionally delayed the publication of Cantor's first major publication in 1874. Kronecker, now seen as one of the founders of the constructive viewpoint in mathematics, disliked much of Cantor's set theory because it asserted the existence of sets satisfying certain properties, without giving specific examples of sets whose members did indeed satisfy those properties. Whenever Cantor applied for a post in Berlin, he was declined, and the process usually involved Kronecker, so Cantor came to believe that Kronecker's stance would make it impossible for him ever to leave Halle. In 1881, Cantor's Halle colleague Eduard Heine died. Halle accepted Cantor's suggestion that Heine's vacant chair be offered to Dedekind, Heinrich M. Weber and Franz Mertens, in that order, but each declined the chair after being offered it. Friedrich Wangerin was eventually appointed, but he was never close to Cantor. In 1882, the mathematical correspondence between Cantor and Dedekind came to an end, apparently as a result of Dedekind's declining the chair at Halle. Cantor also began another important correspondence, with Gösta Mittag-Leffler in Sweden, and soon began to publish in Mittag-Leffler's journal Acta Mathematica. But in 1885, Mittag-Leffler was concerned about the philosophical nature and new terminology in a paper Cantor had submitted to Acta. He asked Cantor to withdraw the paper from Acta while it was in proof, writing that it was "... about one hundred years too soon." Cantor complied, but then curtailed his relationship and correspondence with Mittag-Leffler, writing to a third party, "Had Mittag-Leffler had his way, I should have to wait until the year 1984, which to me seemed too great a demand! ... But of course I never want to know anything again about Acta Mathematica." Cantor suffered his first known bout of depression in May 1884. Criticism of his work weighed on his mind: every one of the fifty-two letters he wrote to Mittag-Leffler in 1884 mentioned Kronecker. A passage from one of these letters is revealing of the damage to Cantor's self-confidence: > ... I don't know when I shall return to the continuation of my scientific work. At the moment I can do absolutely nothing with it, and limit myself to the most necessary duty of my lectures; how much happier I would be to be scientifically active, if only I had the necessary mental freshness. This crisis led him to apply to lecture on philosophy rather than on mathematics. He also began an intense study of Elizabethan literature, thinking there might be evidence that Francis Bacon wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare (see Shakespearean authorship question); this ultimately resulted in two pamphlets, published in 1896 and 1897. Cantor recovered soon thereafter, and subsequently made further important contributions, including his diagonal argument and theorem. However, he never again attained the high level of his remarkable papers of 1874–84, even after Kronecker's death on December 29, 1891. He eventually sought, and achieved, a reconciliation with Kronecker. Nevertheless, the philosophical disagreements and difficulties dividing them persisted. In 1889, Cantor was instrumental in founding the German Mathematical Society, and he chaired its first meeting in Halle in 1891, where he first introduced his diagonal argument; his reputation was strong enough, despite Kronecker's opposition to his work, to ensure he was elected as the first president of this society. Setting aside the animosity Kronecker had displayed towards him, Cantor invited him to address the meeting, but Kronecker was unable to do so because his wife was dying from injuries sustained in a skiing accident at the time. Georg Cantor was also instrumental in the establishment of the first International Congress of Mathematicians, which took place in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1897. ### Later years and death After Cantor's 1884 hospitalization there is no record that he was in any sanatorium again until 1899. Soon after that second hospitalization, Cantor's youngest son Rudolph died suddenly on December 16 (Cantor was delivering a lecture on his views on Baconian theory and William Shakespeare), and this tragedy drained Cantor of much of his passion for mathematics. Cantor was again hospitalized in 1903. One year later, he was outraged and agitated by a paper presented by Julius König at the Third International Congress of Mathematicians. The paper attempted to prove that the basic tenets of transfinite set theory were false. Since the paper had been read in front of his daughters and colleagues, Cantor perceived himself as having been publicly humiliated. Although Ernst Zermelo demonstrated less than a day later that König's proof had failed, Cantor remained shaken, and momentarily questioning God. Cantor suffered from chronic depression for the rest of his life, for which he was excused from teaching on several occasions and repeatedly confined to various sanatoria. The events of 1904 preceded a series of hospitalizations at intervals of two or three years. He did not abandon mathematics completely, however, lecturing on the paradoxes of set theory (Burali-Forti paradox, Cantor's paradox, and Russell's paradox) to a meeting of the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung in 1903, and attending the International Congress of Mathematicians at Heidelberg in 1904. In 1911, Cantor was one of the distinguished foreign scholars invited to the 500th anniversary of the founding of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Cantor attended, hoping to meet Bertrand Russell, whose newly published Principia Mathematica repeatedly cited Cantor's work, but the encounter did not come about. The following year, St. Andrews awarded Cantor an honorary doctorate, but illness precluded his receiving the degree in person. Cantor retired in 1913, and lived in poverty and suffering from malnourishment during World War I. The public celebration of his 70th birthday was canceled because of the war. In June 1917, he entered a sanatorium for the last time and continually wrote to his wife asking to be allowed to go home. Georg Cantor had a fatal heart attack on January 6, 1918, in the sanatorium where he had spent the last year of his life. ## Mathematical work Cantor's work between 1874 and 1884 is the origin of set theory. Prior to this work, the concept of a set was a rather elementary one that had been used implicitly since the beginning of mathematics, dating back to the ideas of Aristotle. No one had realized that set theory had any nontrivial content. Before Cantor, there were only finite sets (which are easy to understand) and "the infinite" (which was considered a topic for philosophical, rather than mathematical, discussion). By proving that there are (infinitely) many possible sizes for infinite sets, Cantor established that set theory was not trivial, and it needed to be studied. Set theory has come to play the role of a foundational theory in modern mathematics, in the sense that it interprets propositions about mathematical objects (for example, numbers and functions) from all the traditional areas of mathematics (such as algebra, analysis, and topology) in a single theory, and provides a standard set of axioms to prove or disprove them. The basic concepts of set theory are now used throughout mathematics. In one of his earliest papers, Cantor proved that the set of real numbers is "more numerous" than the set of natural numbers; this showed, for the first time, that there exist infinite sets of different sizes. He was also the first to appreciate the importance of one-to-one correspondences (hereinafter denoted "1-to-1 correspondence") in set theory. He used this concept to define finite and infinite sets, subdividing the latter into denumerable (or countably infinite) sets and nondenumerable sets (uncountably infinite sets). Cantor developed important concepts in topology and their relation to cardinality. For example, he showed that the Cantor set, discovered by Henry John Stephen Smith in 1875, is nowhere dense, but has the same cardinality as the set of all real numbers, whereas the rationals are everywhere dense, but countable. He also showed that all countable dense linear orders without end points are order-isomorphic to the rational numbers. Cantor introduced fundamental constructions in set theory, such as the power set of a set A, which is the set of all possible subsets of A. He later proved that the size of the power set of A is strictly larger than the size of A, even when A is an infinite set; this result soon became known as Cantor's theorem. Cantor developed an entire theory and arithmetic of infinite sets, called cardinals and ordinals, which extended the arithmetic of the natural numbers. His notation for the cardinal numbers was the Hebrew letter $\aleph$ (aleph) with a natural number subscript; for the ordinals he employed the Greek letter ω (omega). This notation is still in use today. The Continuum hypothesis, introduced by Cantor, was presented by David Hilbert as the first of his twenty-three open problems in his address at the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris. Cantor's work also attracted favorable notice beyond Hilbert's celebrated encomium. The US philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce praised Cantor's set theory and, following public lectures delivered by Cantor at the first International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Zürich in 1897, Adolf Hurwitz and Jacques Hadamard also both expressed their admiration. At that Congress, Cantor renewed his friendship and correspondence with Dedekind. From 1905, Cantor corresponded with his British admirer and translator Philip Jourdain on the history of set theory and on Cantor's religious ideas. This was later published, as were several of his expository works. ### Number theory, trigonometric series and ordinals Cantor's first ten papers were on number theory, his thesis topic. At the suggestion of Eduard Heine, the Professor at Halle, Cantor turned to analysis. Heine proposed that Cantor solve an open problem that had eluded Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, Rudolf Lipschitz, Bernhard Riemann, and Heine himself: the uniqueness of the representation of a function by trigonometric series. Cantor solved this problem in 1869. It was while working on this problem that he discovered transfinite ordinals, which occurred as indices n in the nth derived set S<sub>n</sub> of a set S of zeros of a trigonometric series. Given a trigonometric series f(x) with S as its set of zeros, Cantor had discovered a procedure that produced another trigonometric series that had S<sub>1</sub> as its set of zeros, where S<sub>1</sub> is the set of limit points of S. If S<sub>k+1</sub> is the set of limit points of S<sub>k</sub>, then he could construct a trigonometric series whose zeros are S<sub>k+1</sub>. Because the sets S<sub>k</sub> were closed, they contained their limit points, and the intersection of the infinite decreasing sequence of sets S, S<sub>1</sub>, S<sub>2</sub>, S<sub>3</sub>,... formed a limit set, which we would now call S<sub>ω</sub>, and then he noticed that S<sub>ω</sub> would also have to have a set of limit points S<sub>ω+1</sub>, and so on. He had examples that went on forever, and so here was a naturally occurring infinite sequence of infinite numbers ω, ω + 1, ω + 2, ... Between 1870 and 1872, Cantor published more papers on trigonometric series, and also a paper defining irrational numbers as convergent sequences of rational numbers. Dedekind, whom Cantor befriended in 1872, cited this paper later that year, in the paper where he first set out his celebrated definition of real numbers by Dedekind cuts. While extending the notion of number by means of his revolutionary concept of infinite cardinality, Cantor was paradoxically opposed to theories of infinitesimals of his contemporaries Otto Stolz and Paul du Bois-Reymond, describing them as both "an abomination" and "a cholera bacillus of mathematics". Cantor also published an erroneous "proof" of the inconsistency of infinitesimals. ### Set theory The beginning of set theory as a branch of mathematics is often marked by the publication of Cantor's 1874 paper, "Ueber eine Eigenschaft des Inbegriffes aller reellen algebraischen Zahlen" ("On a Property of the Collection of All Real Algebraic Numbers"). This paper was the first to provide a rigorous proof that there was more than one kind of infinity. Previously, all infinite collections had been implicitly assumed to be equinumerous (that is, of "the same size" or having the same number of elements). Cantor proved that the collection of real numbers and the collection of positive integers are not equinumerous. In other words, the real numbers are not countable. His proof differs from the diagonal argument that he gave in 1891. Cantor's article also contains a new method of constructing transcendental numbers. Transcendental numbers were first constructed by Joseph Liouville in 1844. Cantor established these results using two constructions. His first construction shows how to write the real algebraic numbers as a sequence a<sub>1</sub>, a<sub>2</sub>, a<sub>3</sub>, .... In other words, the real algebraic numbers are countable. Cantor starts his second construction with any sequence of real numbers. Using this sequence, he constructs nested intervals whose intersection contains a real number not in the sequence. Since every sequence of real numbers can be used to construct a real not in the sequence, the real numbers cannot be written as a sequence – that is, the real numbers are not countable. By applying his construction to the sequence of real algebraic numbers, Cantor produces a transcendental number. Cantor points out that his constructions prove more – namely, they provide a new proof of Liouville's theorem: Every interval contains infinitely many transcendental numbers. Cantor's next article contains a construction that proves the set of transcendental numbers has the same "power" (see below) as the set of real numbers. Between 1879 and 1884, Cantor published a series of six articles in Mathematische Annalen that together formed an introduction to his set theory. At the same time, there was growing opposition to Cantor's ideas, led by Leopold Kronecker, who admitted mathematical concepts only if they could be constructed in a finite number of steps from the natural numbers, which he took as intuitively given. For Kronecker, Cantor's hierarchy of infinities was inadmissible, since accepting the concept of actual infinity would open the door to paradoxes which would challenge the validity of mathematics as a whole. Cantor also introduced the Cantor set during this period. The fifth paper in this series, "Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannigfaltigkeitslehre" ("Foundations of a General Theory of Aggregates"), published in 1883, was the most important of the six and was also published as a separate monograph. It contained Cantor's reply to his critics and showed how the transfinite numbers were a systematic extension of the natural numbers. It begins by defining well-ordered sets. Ordinal numbers are then introduced as the order types of well-ordered sets. Cantor then defines the addition and multiplication of the cardinal and ordinal numbers. In 1885, Cantor extended his theory of order types so that the ordinal numbers simply became a special case of order types. In 1891, he published a paper containing his elegant "diagonal argument" for the existence of an uncountable set. He applied the same idea to prove Cantor's theorem: the cardinality of the power set of a set A is strictly larger than the cardinality of A. This established the richness of the hierarchy of infinite sets, and of the cardinal and ordinal arithmetic that Cantor had defined. His argument is fundamental in the solution of the Halting problem and the proof of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem. Cantor wrote on the Goldbach conjecture in 1894. In 1895 and 1897, Cantor published a two-part paper in Mathematische Annalen under Felix Klein's editorship; these were his last significant papers on set theory. The first paper begins by defining set, subset, etc., in ways that would be largely acceptable now. The cardinal and ordinal arithmetic are reviewed. Cantor wanted the second paper to include a proof of the continuum hypothesis, but had to settle for expositing his theory of well-ordered sets and ordinal numbers. Cantor attempts to prove that if A and B are sets with A equivalent to a subset of B and B equivalent to a subset of A, then A and B are equivalent. Ernst Schröder had stated this theorem a bit earlier, but his proof, as well as Cantor's, was flawed. Felix Bernstein supplied a correct proof in his 1898 PhD thesis; hence the name Cantor–Bernstein–Schröder theorem. #### One-to-one correspondence Cantor's 1874 Crelle paper was the first to invoke the notion of a 1-to-1 correspondence, though he did not use that phrase. He then began looking for a 1-to-1 correspondence between the points of the unit square and the points of a unit line segment. In an 1877 letter to Richard Dedekind, Cantor proved a far stronger result: for any positive integer n, there exists a 1-to-1 correspondence between the points on the unit line segment and all of the points in an n-dimensional space. About this discovery Cantor wrote to Dedekind: "Je le vois, mais je ne le crois pas!" ("I see it, but I don't believe it!") The result that he found so astonishing has implications for geometry and the notion of dimension. In 1878, Cantor submitted another paper to Crelle's Journal, in which he defined precisely the concept of a 1-to-1 correspondence and introduced the notion of "power" (a term he took from Jakob Steiner) or "equivalence" of sets: two sets are equivalent (have the same power) if there exists a 1-to-1 correspondence between them. Cantor defined countable sets (or denumerable sets) as sets which can be put into a 1-to-1 correspondence with the natural numbers, and proved that the rational numbers are denumerable. He also proved that n-dimensional Euclidean space R<sup>n</sup> has the same power as the real numbers R, as does a countably infinite product of copies of R. While he made free use of countability as a concept, he did not write the word "countable" until 1883. Cantor also discussed his thinking about dimension, stressing that his mapping between the unit interval and the unit square was not a continuous one. This paper displeased Kronecker and Cantor wanted to withdraw it; however, Dedekind persuaded him not to do so and Karl Weierstrass supported its publication. Nevertheless, Cantor never again submitted anything to Crelle. #### Continuum hypothesis Cantor was the first to formulate what later came to be known as the continuum hypothesis or CH: there exists no set whose power is greater than that of the naturals and less than that of the reals (or equivalently, the cardinality of the reals is exactly aleph-one, rather than just at least aleph-one). Cantor believed the continuum hypothesis to be true and tried for many years to prove it, in vain. His inability to prove the continuum hypothesis caused him considerable anxiety. The difficulty Cantor had in proving the continuum hypothesis has been underscored by later developments in the field of mathematics: a 1940 result by Kurt Gödel and a 1963 one by Paul Cohen together imply that the continuum hypothesis can be neither proved nor disproved using standard Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory plus the axiom of choice (the combination referred to as "ZFC"). #### Absolute infinite, well-ordering theorem, and paradoxes In 1883, Cantor divided the infinite into the transfinite and the absolute. The transfinite is increasable in magnitude, while the absolute is unincreasable. For example, an ordinal α is transfinite because it can be increased to α + 1. On the other hand, the ordinals form an absolutely infinite sequence that cannot be increased in magnitude because there are no larger ordinals to add to it. In 1883, Cantor also introduced the well-ordering principle "every set can be well-ordered" and stated that it is a "law of thought". Cantor extended his work on the absolute infinite by using it in a proof. Around 1895, he began to regard his well-ordering principle as a theorem and attempted to prove it. In 1899, he sent Dedekind a proof of the equivalent aleph theorem: the cardinality of every infinite set is an aleph. First, he defined two types of multiplicities: consistent multiplicities (sets) and inconsistent multiplicities (absolutely infinite multiplicities). Next he assumed that the ordinals form a set, proved that this leads to a contradiction, and concluded that the ordinals form an inconsistent multiplicity. He used this inconsistent multiplicity to prove the aleph theorem. In 1932, Zermelo criticized the construction in Cantor's proof. Cantor avoided paradoxes by recognizing that there are two types of multiplicities. In his set theory, when it is assumed that the ordinals form a set, the resulting contradiction implies only that the ordinals form an inconsistent multiplicity. In contrast, Bertrand Russell treated all collections as sets, which leads to paradoxes. In Russell's set theory, the ordinals form a set, so the resulting contradiction implies that the theory is inconsistent. From 1901 to 1903, Russell discovered three paradoxes implying that his set theory is inconsistent: the Burali-Forti paradox (which was just mentioned), Cantor's paradox, and Russell's paradox. Russell named paradoxes after Cesare Burali-Forti and Cantor even though neither of them believed that they had found paradoxes. In 1908, Zermelo published his axiom system for set theory. He had two motivations for developing the axiom system: eliminating the paradoxes and securing his proof of the well-ordering theorem. Zermelo had proved this theorem in 1904 using the axiom of choice, but his proof was criticized for a variety of reasons. His response to the criticism included his axiom system and a new proof of the well-ordering theorem. His axioms support this new proof, and they eliminate the paradoxes by restricting the formation of sets. In 1923, John von Neumann developed an axiom system that eliminates the paradoxes by using an approach similar to Cantor's—namely, by identifying collections that are not sets and treating them differently. Von Neumann stated that a class is too big to be a set if it can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the class of all sets. He defined a set as a class that is a member of some class and stated the axiom: A class is not a set if and only if there is a one-to-one correspondence between it and the class of all sets. This axiom implies that these big classes are not sets, which eliminates the paradoxes since they cannot be members of any class. Von Neumann also used his axiom to prove the well-ordering theorem: Like Cantor, he assumed that the ordinals form a set. The resulting contradiction implies that the class of all ordinals is not a set. Then his axiom provides a one-to-one correspondence between this class and the class of all sets. This correspondence well-orders the class of all sets, which implies the well-ordering theorem. In 1930, Zermelo defined models of set theory that satisfy von Neumann's axiom. ## Philosophy, religion, literature and Cantor's mathematics The concept of the existence of an actual infinity was an important shared concern within the realms of mathematics, philosophy and religion. Preserving the orthodoxy of the relationship between God and mathematics, although not in the same form as held by his critics, was long a concern of Cantor's. He directly addressed this intersection between these disciplines in the introduction to his Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannigfaltigkeitslehre, where he stressed the connection between his view of the infinite and the philosophical one. To Cantor, his mathematical views were intrinsically linked to their philosophical and theological implications – he identified the Absolute Infinite with God, and he considered his work on transfinite numbers to have been directly communicated to him by God, who had chosen Cantor to reveal them to the world. He was a devout Lutheran whose explicit Christian beliefs shaped his philosophy of science. Joseph Dauben has traced the effect Cantor's Christian convictions had on the development of transfinite set theory. Debate among mathematicians grew out of opposing views in the philosophy of mathematics regarding the nature of actual infinity. Some held to the view that infinity was an abstraction which was not mathematically legitimate, and denied its existence. Mathematicians from three major schools of thought (constructivism and its two offshoots, intuitionism and finitism) opposed Cantor's theories in this matter. For constructivists such as Kronecker, this rejection of actual infinity stems from fundamental disagreement with the idea that nonconstructive proofs such as Cantor's diagonal argument are sufficient proof that something exists, holding instead that constructive proofs are required. Intuitionism also rejects the idea that actual infinity is an expression of any sort of reality, but arrive at the decision via a different route than constructivism. Firstly, Cantor's argument rests on logic to prove the existence of transfinite numbers as an actual mathematical entity, whereas intuitionists hold that mathematical entities cannot be reduced to logical propositions, originating instead in the intuitions of the mind. Secondly, the notion of infinity as an expression of reality is itself disallowed in intuitionism, since the human mind cannot intuitively construct an infinite set. Mathematicians such as L. E. J. Brouwer and especially Henri Poincaré adopted an intuitionist stance against Cantor's work. Finally, Wittgenstein's attacks were finitist: he believed that Cantor's diagonal argument conflated the intension of a set of cardinal or real numbers with its extension, thus conflating the concept of rules for generating a set with an actual set. Some Christian theologians saw Cantor's work as a challenge to the uniqueness of the absolute infinity in the nature of God. In particular, neo-Thomist thinkers saw the existence of an actual infinity that consisted of something other than God as jeopardizing "God's exclusive claim to supreme infinity". Cantor strongly believed that this view was a misinterpretation of infinity, and was convinced that set theory could help correct this mistake: "... the transfinite species are just as much at the disposal of the intentions of the Creator and His absolute boundless will as are the finite numbers.". Prominent neo-scholastic German philosopher Constantin Gutberlet was in favor of such theory, holding that it didn't oppose the nature of God. Cantor also believed that his theory of transfinite numbers ran counter to both materialism and determinism – and was shocked when he realized that he was the only faculty member at Halle who did not hold to deterministic philosophical beliefs. It was important to Cantor that his philosophy provided an "organic explanation" of nature, and in his 1883 Grundlagen, he said that such an explanation could only come about by drawing on the resources of the philosophy of Spinoza and Leibniz. In making these claims, Cantor may have been influenced by FA Trendelenburg, whose lecture courses he attended at Berlin, and in turn Cantor produced a Latin commentary on Book 1 of Spinoza's Ethica. FA Trendelenburg was also the examiner of Cantor's Habilitationsschrift. In 1888, Cantor published his correspondence with several philosophers on the philosophical implications of his set theory. In an extensive attempt to persuade other Christian thinkers and authorities to adopt his views, Cantor had corresponded with Christian philosophers such as Tilman Pesch and Joseph Hontheim, as well as theologians such as Cardinal Johann Baptist Franzelin, who once replied by equating the theory of transfinite numbers with pantheism. Although later this Cardinal accepted the theory as valid, due to some clarifications from Cantor's. Cantor even sent one letter directly to Pope Leo XIII himself, and addressed several pamphlets to him. Cantor's philosophy on the nature of numbers led him to affirm a belief in the freedom of mathematics to posit and prove concepts apart from the realm of physical phenomena, as expressions within an internal reality. The only restrictions on this metaphysical system are that all mathematical concepts must be devoid of internal contradiction, and that they follow from existing definitions, axioms, and theorems. This belief is summarized in his assertion that "the essence of mathematics is its freedom." These ideas parallel those of Edmund Husserl, whom Cantor had met in Halle. Meanwhile, Cantor himself was fiercely opposed to infinitesimals, describing them as both an "abomination" and "the cholera bacillus of mathematics". Cantor's 1883 paper reveals that he was well aware of the opposition his ideas were encountering: "... I realize that in this undertaking I place myself in a certain opposition to views widely held concerning the mathematical infinite and to opinions frequently defended on the nature of numbers." Hence he devotes much space to justifying his earlier work, asserting that mathematical concepts may be freely introduced as long as they are free of contradiction and defined in terms of previously accepted concepts. He also cites Aristotle, René Descartes, George Berkeley, Gottfried Leibniz, and Bernard Bolzano on infinity. Instead, he always strongly rejected Immanuel Kant's philosophy, in the realms of both the philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics. He shared B. Russell's motto "Kant or Cantor", and defined Kant "yonder sophistical Philistine who knew so little mathematics." ## Cantor's ancestry Cantor's paternal grandparents were from Copenhagen and fled to Russia from the disruption of the Napoleonic Wars. There is very little direct information on them. Cantor's father, Georg Waldemar Cantor, was educated in the Lutheran mission in Saint Petersburg, and his correspondence with his son shows both of them as devout Lutherans. Very little is known for sure about Georg Waldemar's origin or education. Cantor's mother, Maria Anna Böhm, was an Austro-Hungarian born in Saint Petersburg and baptized Roman Catholic; she converted to Protestantism upon marriage. However, there is a letter from Cantor's brother Louis to their mother, stating: > Mögen wir zehnmal von Juden abstammen und ich im Princip noch so sehr für Gleichberechtigung der Hebräer sein, im socialen Leben sind mir Christen lieber ... ("Even if we were descended from Jews ten times over, and even though I may be, in principle, completely in favour of equal rights for Hebrews, in social life I prefer Christians...") which could be read to imply that she was of Jewish ancestry. According to biographers Eric Temple Bell, Cantor was of Jewish descent, although both parents were baptized. In a 1971 article entitled "Towards a Biography of Georg Cantor", the British historian of mathematics Ivor Grattan-Guinness mentions (Annals of Science 27, pp. 345–391, 1971) that he was unable to find evidence of Jewish ancestry. (He also states that Cantor's wife, Vally Guttmann, was Jewish). In a letter written to Paul Tannery in 1896 (Paul Tannery, Memoires Scientifique 13 Correspondence, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1934, p. 306), Cantor states that his paternal grandparents were members of the Sephardic Jewish community of Copenhagen. Specifically, Cantor states in describing his father: "Er ist aber in Kopenhagen geboren, von israelitischen Eltern, die der dortigen portugisischen Judengemeinde...." ("He was born in Copenhagen of Jewish (lit: 'Israelite') parents from the local Portuguese-Jewish community.") In addition, Cantor's maternal great uncle, a Hungarian violinist Josef Böhm, has been described as Jewish, which may imply that Cantor's mother was at least partly descended from the Hungarian Jewish community. In a letter to Bertrand Russell, Cantor described his ancestry and self-perception as follows: > Neither my father nor my mother were of German blood, the first being a Dane, borne in Kopenhagen, my mother of Austrian Hungar descension. You must know, Sir, that I am not a regular just Germain, for I am born 3 March 1845 at Saint Peterborough, Capital of Russia, but I went with my father and mother and brothers and sister, eleven years old in the year 1856, into Germany. There were documented statements, during the 1930s, that called this Jewish ancestry into question: > More often [i.e., than the ancestry of the mother] the question has been discussed of whether Georg Cantor was of Jewish origin. About this it is reported in a notice of the Danish genealogical Institute in Copenhagen from the year 1937 concerning his father: "It is hereby testified that Georg Woldemar Cantor, born 1809 or 1814, is not present in the registers of the Jewish community, and that he completely without doubt was not a Jew ..." ## Biographies Until the 1970s, the chief academic publications on Cantor were two short monographs by Arthur Moritz Schönflies (1927) – largely the correspondence with Mittag-Leffler – and Fraenkel (1930). Both were at second and third hand; neither had much on his personal life. The gap was largely filled by Eric Temple Bell's Men of Mathematics (1937), which one of Cantor's modern biographers describes as "perhaps the most widely read modern book on the history of mathematics"; and as "one of the worst". Bell presents Cantor's relationship with his father as Oedipal, Cantor's differences with Kronecker as a quarrel between two Jews, and Cantor's madness as Romantic despair over his failure to win acceptance for his mathematics. Grattan-Guinness (1971) found that none of these claims were true, but they may be found in many books of the intervening period, owing to the absence of any other narrative. There are other legends, independent of Bell – including one that labels Cantor's father a foundling, shipped to Saint Petersburg by unknown parents. A critique of Bell's book is contained in Joseph Dauben's biography. Writes Dauben: > Cantor devoted some of his most vituperative correspondence, as well as a portion of the Beiträge, to attacking what he described at one point as the 'infinitesimal Cholera bacillus of mathematics', which had spread from Germany through the work of Thomae, du Bois Reymond and Stolz, to infect Italian mathematics ... Any acceptance of infinitesimals necessarily meant that his own theory of number was incomplete. Thus to accept the work of Thomae, du Bois-Reymond, Stolz and Veronese was to deny the perfection of Cantor's own creation. Understandably, Cantor launched a thorough campaign to discredit Veronese's work in every way possible. ## See also - Absolute Infinite - Aleph number - Cardinality of the continuum - Cantor medal – award by the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung in honor of Georg Cantor - Cardinal number - Continuum hypothesis - Countable set - Derived set (mathematics) - Epsilon numbers (mathematics) - Factorial number system - Pairing function - Transfinite number - List of things named after Georg Cantor
355,000	James B. Conant	1,171,643,038	American chemist (1893–1978)	[ "1893 births", "1978 deaths", "20th-century American academics", "20th-century American chemists", "20th-century American diplomats", "Ambassadors of the United States to Germany", "American physical chemists", "Burials at Mount Auburn Cemetery", "Commanders of the Legion of Honour", "Conant family", "Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences", "Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science", "Fellows of the Royal Institute of Chemistry", "Foreign Members of the Royal Society", "Grand Crosses 1st class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany", "Harvard College alumni", "Harvard University faculty", "Honorary Commanders of the Order of the British Empire", "Manhattan Project people", "Medal for Merit recipients", "Members of the American Philosophical Society", "Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences", "Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients", "Presidents of Harvard University", "U.S. Synthetic Rubber Program" ]	James Bryant Conant (March 26, 1893 – February 11, 1978) was an American chemist, a transformative President of Harvard University, and the first U.S. Ambassador to West Germany. Conant obtained a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard in 1916. During World War I, he served in the U.S. Army, where he worked on the development of poison gases, especially Lewisite. He became an assistant professor of chemistry at Harvard University in 1919 and the Sheldon Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry in 1929. He researched the physical structures of natural products, particularly chlorophyll, and he was one of the first to explore the sometimes complex relationship between chemical equilibrium and the reaction rate of chemical processes. He studied the biochemistry of oxyhemoglobin providing insight into the disease methemoglobinemia, helped to explain the structure of chlorophyll, and contributed important insights that underlie modern theories of acid-base chemistry. In 1933, Conant became the President of Harvard University with a reformist agenda that involved dispensing with a number of customs, including class rankings and the requirement for Latin classes. He abolished athletic scholarships, and instituted an "up or out" policy, under which scholars who were not promoted were terminated. His egalitarian vision of education required a diversified student body, and he promoted the adoption of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and co-educational classes. During his presidency, women were admitted to Harvard Medical School and Harvard Law School for the first time. Conant was appointed to the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) in 1940, becoming its chairman in 1941. In this capacity, he oversaw vital wartime research projects, including the development of synthetic rubber and the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bombs. On July 16, 1945, he was among the dignitaries present at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range for the Trinity nuclear test, the first detonation of an atomic bomb, and was part of the Interim Committee that advised President Harry S. Truman to use atomic bombs on Japan. After the war, he served on the Joint Research and Development Board (JRDC) that was established to coordinate burgeoning defense research, and on the influential General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC); in the latter capacity he advised the president against starting a development program for the hydrogen bomb. In his later years at Harvard, Conant taught undergraduate courses on the history and philosophy of science, and wrote books explaining the scientific method to laymen. In 1953, he retired as President of Harvard University and became the United States High Commissioner for Germany, overseeing the restoration of German sovereignty after World War II, and then was Ambassador to West Germany until 1957. On returning to the United States, he criticized the education system in The American High School Today (1959), Slums and Suburbs (1961), and The Education of American Teachers (1963). Between 1965 and 1969, Conant worked on his autobiography, My Several Lives (1970). He became increasingly infirm, had a series of strokes in 1977, and died in a nursing home the following year. ## Early life and education Conant was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, on March 26, 1893, the third child and only son of James Scott Conant, a photoengraver, and his wife Jennett Orr (née Bryant). In 1904, Conant was one of 35 boys who passed the competitive admission exam for the Roxbury Latin School in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, and he graduated near the top of his class from the school in 1910. Encouraged by his science teacher, Newton H. Black, in September of that year he entered Harvard College, where he studied physical chemistry under Theodore W. Richards and organic chemistry under Elmer P. Kohler. He was also an editor of The Harvard Crimson. He joined the Signet Society and Delta Upsilon, and was initiated as a brother of the Omicron chapter of Alpha Chi Sigma in 1912. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with his Bachelor of Arts in June 1913. He then went to work on his doctorate, which was an unusual double dissertation. The first part, supervised by Richards, concerned "The Electrochemical Behavior of Liquid Sodium Amalgams"; the second, supervised by Kohler, was "A Study of Certain Cyclopropane Derivatives". Harvard awarded Conant his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1916. In 1915, Conant entered into a business partnership with two other Harvard chemistry graduates, Stanley Pennock and Chauncey Loomis, to form the LPC Laboratories. They opened a plant in a one-story building in Queens, New York City, where they manufactured chemicals used by the pharmaceutical industry like benzoic acid that were selling at high prices on account of the interruption of imports from Germany due to World War I. In 1916, the departure of organic chemist Roger Adams created a vacancy at Harvard that was offered to Conant. Since he aspired to an academic career, Conant accepted the offer and returned to Harvard. On November 27, 1916, an explosion killed Pennock and two others and completely destroyed the plant. A contributing cause was Conant's faulty test procedures. ## World War I Following the United States declaration of war on Germany that launched U.S. involvement in World War I, Conant was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Sanitary Corps on September 22, 1917. He went to the Camp American University, where he worked on the development of poison gases. Initially, his work concentrated on mustard gas, but in May 1918, Conant took charge of a unit concerned with the development of lewisite. He was promoted to major on July 20, 1918. A pilot plant was built, and then a full-scale production plant in Cleveland, but the war ended before lewisite could be used in battle. ## Harvard University professor Conant was appointed an assistant professor of chemistry at Harvard in 1919. The following year he became engaged to Richards's daughter, Grace (Patty) Thayer Richards. They were married in the Appleton Chapel at Harvard on April 17, 1920, and had two sons, James Richards Conant, born in May 1923, and Theodore Richards Conant, born in July 1928. Conant became an associate professor in 1924. In 1925, he visited Germany, then the heart of chemical research, for eight months. He toured the major universities and laboratories there and met many of the leading chemists, including Theodor Curtius, Kazimierz Fajans, Hans Fischer, Arthur Hantzsch, Hans Meerwein, Jakob Meisenheimer, Hermann Staudinger, Adolf Windaus and Karl Ziegler. After Conant returned to the United States, Arthur Amos Noyes made him an attractive offer to move to Caltech. The President of Harvard, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, made a counter offer: immediate promotion to professor, effective September 1, 1927, with a salary of \$7,000 (roughly equivalent to as of 2023) and a grant of \$9,000 per annum for research. Conant accepted and stayed at Harvard. In 1929, he became the Sheldon Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry, and then, in 1931, the chairman of the chemistry department. Between 1928 and 1933, Conant published 55 papers. Much of his research, like his double thesis, combined natural product chemistry with physical organic chemistry. Based on his exploration of reaction rates in chemical equilibria, Conant was one of the first to recognise that the kinetics of these systems is sometimes straightforward and simple, yet quite complex in other cases. Conant studied the effect of haloalkane structure on the rate of substitution with inorganic iodide salts which, together with earlier work, led to what is now known as either the Conant-Finkelstein reaction or more commonly simply the Finkelstein reaction. A recent application of this reaction involved the preparation of an iodinated polyvinyl chloride from regular PVC. A combination of Conant's work on the kinetics of hydrogenation and George Kistiakowsky's work on the enthalpy changes of these reactions supported the later development of the theory of hyperconjugation. Conant's investigations helped in the development of a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of acids and bases. He investigated the properties of certain acids which were many times stronger than mineral acid solutions in water. Conant christened them "superacids" and laid the foundation for the development of the Hammett acidity function. These investigations used acetic acid as the solvent and demonstrated that sodium acetate behaves as a base under these conditions. This observation is consistent with Brønsted–Lowry acid–base theory (published in 1923) but cannot be explained under older Arrhenius theory approaches. Later work with George Wheland and extended by William Kirk McEwen looked at the properties of hydrocarbons as very weak acids, including acetophenone, phenylacetylene, fluorene and diphenylmethane. Conant can be considered alongside Brønsted, Lowry, Lewis, and Hammett as a developer of modern understanding of acids and bases. Between 1929 and his retirement from chemical research in 1933, Conant published papers in Science, Nature, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society about chlorophyll and its structure. Though the complete structure eluded him, his work did support and contribute to Nobel laureate Hans Fischer's ultimate determination of the structure in 1939. Conant's work on chlorophyll was recognised when he was inducted as a foreign Fellow of the Royal Society on May 2, 1941. He also published three papers describing the polymerisation of isoprene to prepare synthetic rubber. Another line of research involved the biochemistry of the hemoglobin-oxyhemoglobin system. Conant ran a series of experiments with electrochemical oxidation and reduction, following in the footsteps of the famous German chemist and Nobel laureate Fritz Haber. He determined that the iron centre in methemoglobin is a ferric (Fe<sup>III</sup>) centre, unlike the ferrous (Fe<sup>II</sup>) centre found in normal hemoglobin, and this difference in oxidation state is the cause of methemoglobinemia, a medical condition which causes tissue hypoxia. Conant wrote a chemistry textbook with his former science teacher Black, entitled Practical Chemistry, which was published in 1920, with a revised edition in 1929. This was superseded in 1937 by their New Practical Chemistry, which in turn had a revised edition in 1946. The text proved a popular one; it was adopted by 75 universities, and Conant received thousands of dollars in royalties. For his accomplishments in chemistry, he was awarded the American Chemical Society's Nichols Medal in 1932, Columbia University's Chandler Medal in 1932, and the American Chemical Society's highest honor, the Priestley Medal, in 1944. He also received the society's Charles Lathrop Parsons Award in 1955, for public service. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1924, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1929, and a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1935. Notable students of Conant's included Paul Doughty Bartlett, George Wheland, and Frank Westheimer. In 1932 he was also honored by membership of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. ## Harvard University president After some months of lobbying and discussion, Harvard's ruling body, the Harvard Corporation, announced on May 8, 1933, that it had elected Conant as the next President of Harvard. Alfred North Whitehead, Harvard's eminent professor of philosophy disagreed with the decision, declaring, "The Corporation should not have elected a chemist to the Presidency." "But," Corporation member Grenville Clark reminded him, "Eliot was a chemist, and our best president too." "I know," replied Whitehead, "but Eliot was a bad chemist." Clark was very much responsible for Conant's election. On October 9, 1933, Conant became the President of Harvard University with a low-key installation ceremony in the Faculty Room of University Hall. This set the tone for Conant's presidency as one of informality and reform. At his inauguration, he accepted the charter and seal presented to John Leverett the Younger in 1707, but dropped a number of other customs, including the singing of Gloria Patri and the Latin Oration. While, unlike some other universities, Harvard did not require Greek or Latin for entrance, they were worth double credits towards admission, and students like Conant who had studied Latin were awarded an A.B. degree while those who had not, received an S.B. One of his first efforts at reform was to attempt to abolish this distinction. But in 1937 he wrote: > I do not see how one can make very much headway as a student ... of history and literature without a reading knowledge of Latin. I do not see how a person can go very far in any branch of science without a thorough understanding of mathematics, and if the underpinning was bad in school, probably the necessary calculus and so forth would not have been taken during the college years. I know that a man cannot be a research chemist without a reading knowledge of German. It is hard to acquire it as the first language in college. Other reforms included the abolition of class rankings and athletic scholarships, but his first, longest and most bitter battle was over tenure reform, shifting to an "up or out" policy, under which scholars who were not promoted were terminated. A small number of extra-departmental positions was set aside for outstanding scholars. This policy led junior faculty to revolt, and nearly resulted in Conant's dismissal in 1938. Conant was fond of saying: "Behold the turtle. It makes progress only when it sticks its neck out." Conant added new graduate degrees in education, history of science and public policy, and he introduced the Nieman Fellowship for journalists to study at Harvard, the first of which was awarded in 1939. He supported the "meatballs", as lower class students were called. He instituted the Harvard national scholarships for underprivileged students. Dudley House was opened to provide non-resident students with increased opportunities for socialization (opportunities provided to resident undergraduates by the twelve Harvard College residential houses). Conant asked two of his assistant deans, Henry Chauncey and William Bender, to determine whether the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) was a good measure of academic potential. When they reported that it was, Conant adopted it. He waged a ten-year campaign for the consolidation of testing services, which resulted in the creation of the Educational Testing Service in 1946, with Chauncey as its director. Theodore H. White, a Boston Jewish "meatball" who received a personal letter of introduction from Conant so that he could report on the Chinese Civil War, noted that "Conant was the first president to recognize that meatballs were Harvard men too." Instead of conducting separate but identical undergraduate courses for Harvard students and students from Radcliffe College, Conant instituted co-educational classes. It was during Conant's presidency that the first class of women were admitted to Harvard Medical School in 1945, and Harvard Law School in 1950. Lowell, Conant's predecessor, had imposed a 15 percent quota on Jewish students in 1922, something Conant had voted to support. This quota was later substituted with geographic distribution preferences, having the same effect of limiting Jewish admission. In the words of historians Morton and Phyllis Keller, "Conant's pro-quota position in the early 1920s, his preference for more students from small towns and cities and the South and West, and his cool response to the plight of the Jewish academic refugees from Hitler suggest that he shared the mild antisemitism common to his social group and time. But his commitment to meritocracy made him more ready to accept able Jews as students and faculty." In 1934, Harvard-educated German businessman Ernst Hanfstaengl attended the 25th anniversary reunion of his class of 1909, and gave a number of speeches. In his inaugural commencement address in 1934, Conant spoke out against the Nazi threat to academic freedom in Germany. His speech was interrupted by two female students who had chained themselves to the stands near the speaker's platform and chanted "Down with Hitler!" and "Down with Hanfstaengl!" Hanfstaengl wrote out a check for (equivalent to as of 2023) to Conant for a scholarship to enable an outstanding Harvard student to study for a year in Germany. At the next meeting of the Corporation in October, Conant persuaded it to reject the offer due to Hanfstaengl's Nazi associations. When the issue of Hanfstaengl's scholarship came up again in 1936, Conant turned the money down a second time. Hanfstaengl's presence on campus prompted a series of anti-Nazi demonstrations, in which a number of Harvard and MIT students were arrested. Conant made a personal plea for clemency that resulted in two women being acquitted, but six men and a woman were sentenced to six months in jail. They were later pardoned by the Governor of Massachusetts, Joseph B. Ely. When the University of Berlin awarded an honorary degree in 1934 to American legal scholar and Dean of Harvard Law School Roscoe Pound, who had toured Germany earlier that year and made no secret of his admiration for the Nazi regime, Conant refused to order Pound not to accept it, and attended the informal award ceremony at Harvard where Pound was presented with the degree by Hans Luther, the German ambassador to the United States. Harvard awarded honorary degrees to two notable displaced scholars, Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein, in 1935, but Conant declined to participate in the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars. His vision of building Harvard's faculty involved hiring promising American scholars rather than helping refugees. He was not immune to anti-semitism; when DuPont asked him for an appraisal of the German chemist Max Bergmann, Conant wrote back that Bergmann was "definitely of the Jewish type—rather heavy". What Conant feared most was disruption to Harvard's tercentennial celebrations in 1936, but there was no trouble despite the presence of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the President of the United States, and a Harvard graduate of the class of 1904, whom many fellow Harvard graduates regarded as a socialist and a class traitor. Privately, Conant approved of the New Deal and expressed admiration for Roosevelt's goals. He invited Roosevelt to speak at the tercentennial celebrations. This did not sit well with Lowell, and it was only with difficulty that Lowell was persuaded to be presiding officer at an event at which Roosevelt spoke. The parallels between Roosevelt's New Deal and Conant's advocacy of meritocracy and of education as a means of social mobility did not escape notice. An incident took place during the 1941 Harvard–Navy lacrosse game, when the Harvard Crimson men's lacrosse team attempted to field a player of African-American descent. The Navy Midshipmen men's lacrosse team's coach then refused to field his team. Harvard's athletic director, William J. Bingham, overruled his lacrosse coach, and had the player, Lucien Victor Alexis, Jr., sent back to Cambridge on a train. Conant subsequently apologized to the Commandant of Midshipmen, Rear Admiral Russell Willson. ## National Defense Research Committee In June 1940, with World War II already raging in Europe, Vannevar Bush, the director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, recruited Conant to the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), although he remained president of Harvard. Bush envisaged the NDRC as bringing scientists together to "conduct research for the creation and improvement of instrumentalities, methods and materials of warfare." Although the United States had not yet entered the war, Conant was not alone in his conviction that Nazi Germany had to be stopped, and that the United States would inevitably become embroiled in the conflict. The immediate task, as Conant saw it, was therefore to organize American science for war. He became head of the NDRC's Division B, the division responsible for bombs, fuels, gases and chemicals. On June 28, 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8807, which created the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), with Bush as its director. Conant succeeded Bush as chairman of the NDRC, which was subsumed into the OSRD. Roger Adams, a contemporary of Conant's at Harvard in the 1910s, succeeded him as head of Division B. Conant became the driving force of the NDRC on personnel and policy matters. The NDRC would work hand in hand with the Army and Navy's research efforts, supplementing rather than supplanting them. It was specifically charged with investigating nuclear fission. In February 1941, Roosevelt sent Conant to Britain as head of a mission that also included Frederick L. Hovde from Purdue University and Carroll L. Wilson from MIT, to evaluate the research being carried out there and the prospects for cooperation. The 1940 Tizard Mission had revealed that American technology was some years behind that of Britain in many fields, most notably radar, and cooperation was eagerly sought. Conant had lunch with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Frederick Lindemann, his leading scientific adviser, and an audience with King George VI at Buckingham Palace. At a subsequent meeting, Lindemann told Conant about British progress towards developing an atomic bomb. What most impressed Conant was the British conviction that it was feasible. That the British program was ahead of the American one raised the possibility in Conant's mind that the German nuclear energy project might be even further ahead, as Germany was generally acknowledged to be a world leader in nuclear physics. Later that year, Churchill, as Chancellor of the University of Bristol, conferred an honorary Doctor of Laws degree on Conant in absentia. Conant subsequently moved to restrict cooperation with Britain on nuclear energy, particularly its post-war aspects, and became involved in heated negotiations with Wallace Akers, the representative of Tube Alloys, the British atomic project. Conant's tough stance, under which the British were excluded except where their assistance was vital, resulted in British retaliation, and a complete breakdown of cooperation. His objections were swept aside by Roosevelt, who brokered the 1943 Quebec Agreement with Churchill, that restored full cooperation. After the Quebec Conference, Churchill visited Conant at Harvard, where Conant returned the 1941 gesture and presented Churchill with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. After the United States entered the war in December 1941, the OSRD handed the atomic bomb project, better known as the Manhattan Project, over to the Army, with Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves as project director. A meeting that included Conant decided Groves should be answerable to a small committee called the Military Policy Committee, chaired by Bush, with Conant as his alternate. Thus, Conant remained involved in the administration of the Manhattan Project at its highest levels. In August 1942, Roosevelt appointed Conant to the Rubber Survey Committee. Chaired by Bernard M. Baruch, a trusted adviser and confidant of Roosevelt, the committee was tasked with reviewing the synthetic rubber program. Corporations used patent laws to restrict competition and stifle innovation. When the Japanese occupation of Malaya, North Borneo and Sarawak, followed by the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, cut off 90 percent of the supply of natural rubber, the rubber shortage became a national scandal, and the development of synthetic substitutes, an urgent priority. Baruch dealt with the difficult political issues; Conant concerned himself with the technical ones. There were a number of different synthetic rubber products to choose from. In addition to DuPont's neoprene, Standard Oil had licensed German patents for a copolymer called Buna-N and a related product, Buna-S. None had been manufactured on the scale now required, and there was pressure from agricultural interests to choose a process which involved making raw materials from farm products. The Rubber Survey Committee made a series of recommendations, including the appointment of a rubber director, and the construction and operation of 51 factories to supply the materials needed for synthetic rubber production. Technical problems dogged the program through 1943, but by late 1944 plants were in operation with an annual capacity of over a million tons, most of which was Buna-S. In May 1945, Conant became part of the Interim Committee that was formed to advise the new president, Harry S. Truman on nuclear weapons. The Interim Committee decided that the atomic bomb should be used against an industrial target in Japan as soon as possible and without warning. On July 16, 1945, Conant was among the dignitaries present at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range for the Trinity nuclear test, the first detonation of an atomic bomb. After the war, Conant became concerned about growing criticism in the United States of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by figures like Norman Cousins and Reinhold Niebuhr. He played an important behind-the-scenes role in shaping public opinion by instigating and then editing an influential February 1947 Harper's article entitled "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb". Written by former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson with the help of McGeorge Bundy, the article stressed that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were used to avoid the possibility of "over a million casualties", from a figure found in the estimates given to the Joint Chiefs of Staff by its Joint Planning Staff in 1945. ## Cold War The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 replaced the wartime Manhattan Project with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) on January 1, 1947. The Act also established the General Advisory Committee (GAC) within the AEC to provide it with scientific and technical advice. It was widely expected that Conant would chair the GAC, but the position went to Robert Oppenheimer, the wartime director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory that had designed and developed the first atomic bombs. At the same time, the Joint Research and Development Board (JRDC) was established to coordinate defense research, and Bush asked Conant to head its atomic energy subcommittee, on which Oppenheimer also served. When the new AEC chairman David E. Lilienthal raised security concerns about Oppenheimer's relationships with communists, including Oppenheimer's brother Frank Oppenheimer, his wife Kitty and his former girlfriend Jean Tatlock, Bush and Conant reassured Lilienthal that they had known about it when they had placed Oppenheimer in charge at Los Alamos in 1942. With such expressions of support, AEC issued Oppenheimer a Q clearance, granting him access to atomic secrets. By September 1948, the Red Scare began to take hold, and Conant called for a ban on hiring teachers who were communists, although not for the dismissal of those who had already been hired. A debate ensued over whether communist educators could teach apolitical subjects. Conant was a member of the Educational Policies Commission (EPC), a body to which he had been appointed in 1941. When it next met in March 1949, Conant's push for a ban was supported by the president of Columbia University, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower. The two found common ground in their belief in ideology-based education, which Conant called "democratic education". He did not see public education as a side effect of American democracy, but as one of its principal driving forces, and he disapproved of the public funding of denominational schools that he observed in Australia during his visit there in 1951. He called for increased federal spending on education, and higher taxes to redistribute wealth. His thinking was outlined in his books Education in a Divided World in 1948, and Education and Liberty in 1951. In 1952, he went further and endorsed the dismissal of academics who invoked the Fifth under questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee. A sign of Conant's declining influence occurred in 1950, when he was passed over for the post of President of the National Academy of Sciences in favor of Detlev Bronk, the president of Johns Hopkins University, after a "revolt" by scientists unhappy with Conant. The GAC was enormously influential throughout the late 1940s, but the opposition of Oppenheimer and Conant to the development of the hydrogen bomb, only to be overridden by Truman in 1950, diminished its stature. It was reduced further when Oppenheimer and Conant were not reappointed when their terms expired in 1952, depriving the GAC of its two best-known members. Conant was appointed to the National Science Board, which administered the new National Science Foundation, and was elected its chairman, but this body had little financial or political clout. In April 1951, Truman appointed Conant to the Science Advisory Committee, but it would not develop into an influential body until the Eisenhower administration. Conant's experience with the Manhattan Project convinced him that the public needed a better understanding of science, and he moved to revitalize the history and philosophy of science program at Harvard. He took the lead personally by teaching a new undergraduate course, Natural Science 4, "On Understanding Science". His course notes became the basis for a book of the same name, published in 1948. In 1952, he began teaching another undergraduate course, Philosophy 150, "A Philosophy of Science". In his teachings and writing on the philosophy of science, he drew heavily on those of his Harvard colleague Willard Van Orman Quine. Conant contributed four chapters to the 1957 Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science, including an account of the overthrow of the phlogiston theory. In 1951, he published Science and Common Sense, in which he attempted to explain the ways of scientists to laymen. Conant's ideas about scientific progress would come under attack by his own protégés, notably Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Conant commented on Kuhn's manuscript in draft form. ## Allied High Commissioner In April 1951, Conant was approached by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson about replacing John J. McCloy as United States High Commissioner for Germany, but he declined. However, after Dwight Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, Conant was again offered the job by the new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and this time he accepted. At the Harvard Board of Overseers meeting on January 12, 1952, Conant announced that he would retire in September 1953 after twenty years at Harvard, having reached the pension age of sixty. In Germany, there were major issues to be decided. Germany was still occupied by the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and France. Dealing with the wartime allies was a major task for the high commissioner. West Germany, made up of the zones occupied by the three western powers, had been granted control of its own affairs, except for defense and foreign policy, in 1949. While most Germans wanted a neutral and reunited Germany, the Eisenhower administration sought to reduce its defense spending by rearming Germany and replacing American troops with Germans. Meanwhile, the House Un-American Activities Committee slammed Conant's staff as communist sympathizers and called for books by communist authors held in United States Information Agency (USIA) libraries in Germany to be burned. The first crisis to occur on Conant's watch was the uprising of 1953 in East Germany. This brought the reunification issue to the fore. Konrad Adenauer's deft handling of the issue enabled him to handily win re-election as Chancellor of West Germany in September, but this also strengthened his hand in negotiations with Conant. Adenauer did not want his country to become a bargaining chip between the United States and the Soviet Union, nor did he want it to become a nuclear battlefield, a prospect raised by the arrival of American tactical nuclear weapons in 1953 as part of the Eisenhower administration's New Look policy. Conant lobbied for the European Defense Community, which would have established a pan-European military. This seemed to be the only way that German rearmament would be accepted, but opposition from France killed the plan. In what Conant considered a minor miracle, France's actions cleared the way for West Germany to become part of NATO with its own army. At noon on May 6, 1955, Conant, along with the high commissioners from Britain and France, signed the documents ending Allied control of West Germany, admitting it to NATO, and allowing it to rearm. The office of the United States High Commissioner was abolished and Conant became instead the first United States Ambassador to West Germany. His role was now to encourage West Germany to build up its forces, while reassuring the Germans that doing so would not result in a United States withdrawal. Being fluent in German, Conant was able to give speeches to German audiences. He paid numerous visits to German educational and scientific organizations. While high commissioner, Conant approved the release of many major and other German war criminals after serving only a fraction of their sentences, against protests from American political leaders and veterans' organizations (some of those sentenced had murdered American prisoners), accusing him of "moral amnesia". Such criticism continued when as ambassador he supported the West German government's leniency toward former Nazis. ## Later life Conant returned to the United States in February 1957, and moved to an apartment on the Upper East Side in New York City. Between 1957 and 1965, the Carnegie Corporation of New York gave him over a million dollars to write studies of education. In 1959 he published The American High School Today, better known as the Conant Report. This became a best seller, resulting in Conant's appearance on the cover of Time magazine on September 14, 1959. In it, Conant called for a number of reforms, including the consolidation of high schools into larger bodies that could offer a broader range of curriculum choices. Although it was slammed by critics of the American system, who hoped for a system of education based on the European model, it did lead to a wave of reforms across the country. His subsequent Slums and Suburbs in 1961 was far more controversial in its treatment of racial issues. Regarding busing as impractical, Conant urged Americans "to accept de facto segregated schools". This did not go over well with civil rights groups, and by 1964 Conant was forced to admit that he had been wrong. In The Education of American Teachers in 1963, Conant found much to criticize about the training of teachers. Most controversial was his defense of the arrangement by which teachers were certified by independent bodies rather than the teacher training colleges. President Lyndon Johnson presented Conant with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with special distinction, on December 6, 1963. He had been selected for the award by President John F. Kennedy, but the ceremony had been delayed, and went ahead after Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. In February 1970, President Richard Nixon presented Conant with the Atomic Pioneers Award from the Atomic Energy Commission. Other awards that Conant received during his long career included being made a Commander of Légion d'honneur by France in 1936 and an Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Britain in 1948, and he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957. He was also awarded over 50 honorary degrees, and was posthumously inducted into the Alpha Chi Sigma Hall of Fame in 2000. Between 1965 and 1969, Conant, living with a heart condition, worked on his biography, My Several Lives. He became increasingly infirm, and had a series of strokes in 1977. He died in a nursing home in Hanover, New Hampshire, on February 11, 1978. His body was cremated and his ashes interred in the Thayer-Richards family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery. He was survived by his wife and sons. His papers are in the Harvard University Archives. Among them was a sealed brown Manila envelope that Conant had given the archives in 1951, with instructions that it was to be opened by the President of Harvard in the 21st century. Opened by Harvard's 28th president, Drew Faust, in 2007, it contained a letter in which Conant expressed his hopes and fears for the future. "You will ... be in charge of a more prosperous and significant institution than the one over which I have the honor to preside", he wrote. "That [Harvard] will maintain the traditions of academic freedom, of tolerance for heresy, I feel sure." ## Legacy Conant is the namesake of James B. Conant High School in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, and James B. Conant Elementary School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. ## Graduate students Former graduate students of Conant include: - Louis Fieser – organic chemist and professor emeritus at Harvard University renowned as the inventor of a militarily effective form of napalm. His award-winning research included work on blood-clotting agents including the first synthesis of vitamin K, synthesis and screening of quinones as antimalarial drugs, work with steroids leading to the synthesis of cortisone, and study of the nature of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. - Benjamin S. Garvey – noted chemist at BF Goodrich who worked on the development of synthetic rubber, contributed to understanding of vulcanization, and developed early techniques for small scale evaluation of rubbers. - Frank Westheimer – was the Morris Loeb Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Harvard University.
40,816,896	Yugoslav submarine Hrabri	1,167,714,580	Yugoslav submarine built in 1927	[ "1927 ships", "Hrabri-class submarine", "Naval ships of Yugoslavia captured by Italy during World War II", "Ships built on the River Tyne", "Submarines of the Royal Yugoslav Navy", "World War II submarines of Yugoslavia" ]	Hrabri (Brave) was the lead boat of the Hrabri-class submarines; built for the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes– Yugoslavia by the Vickers-Armstrong Naval Yard in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1927, her design was based on the British L-class submarine of World War I, and was built using parts from an L-class submarine that was never completed. The Hrabri-class were the first submarines to serve in the Royal Yugoslav Navy (KM), and after extensive sea trials and testing Hrabri sailed from the UK to the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, arriving in April 1928. The submarine was armed with six bow-mounted 533 mm (21 in) torpedo tubes, two 102 mm (4 in) deck guns, one QF 2-pounder (40 mm (1.6 in)) L/39 anti-aircraft gun and two machine guns. Its maximum diving depth was restricted to 55 metres (180 ft) by Yugoslav naval regulations. Prior to World War II, Hrabri participated in cruises to Mediterranean ports. In 1933–1934 she was refitted, her superstructure was extensively modified and the 2-pounder gun was replaced with a single 13.2 mm (0.52 in) Hotchkiss M1929 anti-aircraft machine gun. By 1938 the class was considered to be obsolete, but efforts to replace them with modern German coastal submarines were stymied by the advent of World War II, and Hrabri remained in service. Immediately before the April 1941 German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, Hrabri conducted patrols in the Adriatic Sea, and was then captured by Italian forces. She was given the number N3, but after an inspection she was scrapped. ## Background The naval policy of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1929) lacked direction until the mid-1920s, although it was generally accepted by the armed forces that the Adriatic coastline was effectively a sea frontier that the naval arm was responsible for securing with the limited resources made available to it. In 1926, a modest ten-year construction program was initiated to build up a force of submarines, coastal torpedo boats, and torpedo and conventional bomber aircraft to perform this role. The Hrabri-class submarines were one of the first new acquisitions aimed at developing a naval force capable of meeting this challenge. Hrabri (Brave) was built for the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by the Vickers-Armstrong Naval Yard, on the River Tyne, in the United Kingdom. Her design was based on the British L-class submarine of World War I, and she was built using parts originally assembled for HMS L67, which was not completed due to the end of World War I. The British Royal Navy (RN) cancelled the order for L67 in March 1919, and the partially constructed hull was launched on 16 June to free up the slipways on which it was being built. In November the hull was sold by the RN to the shipyard, and once the contract with the Yugoslavs was signed they were brought back onto the slipways and completed to a modified design. The British boats were chosen for two reasons: a visit to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by HMS L53 in 1926, and a British credit for naval purchases which included spending some of the funds in British shipyards. The L-class boats were an improved version of the British E class and achieved a better relationship between displacement, propulsion, speed and armament than their predecessors, including a powerful armament of both torpedoes and guns. The class was designed for operations in the North Sea in World War I, but due to their considerable range they were deployed around the world during the interwar period by the RN, including in the Mediterranean, and three were still in service at the outbreak of World War II. ## Description and construction ### General Like her sister submarine Nebojsa, Hrabri was of a single hull design with a straight stem, circular cross section and narrow pointed stern. The ballast and fuel tanks were configured as saddle tanks, one along each side, tapered at either end. The keel was straight until it inclined upwards as part of the pointed stern, and a detachable ballast keel was also fitted. The submarine had two shafts each driving a three-bladed propeller, and boat direction was controlled using a semi-balanced rudder. The forward hydroplanes were positioned about 8 m (26 ft) aft of the bow, and the aft set were positioned aft of the propellers. The two anchors could be lowered from vertical tubes in the bow. The boat had a narrow steel-plated deck, and a tall, long and narrow conning tower with a navigation bridge positioned in the centre of the deck. Both fore and aft and at the same level as the conning tower were gun platforms protected by high bulwarks. The superstructure was partially raised both fore and aft of the gun platforms, with the torpedo hatch and a small torpedo crane forward, and the machinery hatches aft. Aft of the machinery hatches was a small step down which ran to 15 m (49 ft) short of the stern and contained a small ship's boat. The deck was too narrow and slippery for the crew to walk along it while underway. Internally, transverse bulkheads divided the hull into seven watertight compartments. The first two compartments housed the torpedo tubes and reserve torpedoes, respectively, along with sleeping accommodation for some of the crew. The forward trim tanks were located underneath these two compartments. The upper levels of the third and fourth compartments contained accommodations for the officers and additional crew, respectively, and the lower levels each contained 112-cell electric batteries. In the middle of the boat, underneath the conning tower, was the control room. Aft of that, the fifth compartment was taken up by the machinery room, containing two diesel engines for surface running. Underneath that were diesel fuel tanks. The sixth compartment contained two electric motors on the upper level and an electric battery compartment with another 112 cells on the lower level. At the stern, the seventh compartment contained the steering machinery on the upper level and the aft trim tanks on the lower level. Several innovations distinguished Hrabri and her sister boat from the original L-class design. At the suggestion of Yugoslav naval officers, gyrocompasses salvaged from former Austro-Hungarian Navy ships were fitted. A central pumping station was also installed, allowing for all ballast tanks to be blown at once from a single position. This enhancement saved the boats from sinking at least twice during their service. The final difference was that one of the three periscopes was modified to enable observation of the skies to warn of impending air attacks. Hrabri had an overall length of 72.1 metres (236 ft 7 in), a beam of 7.31 m (24 ft), and a surfaced draught of 4 m (13 ft). Her surfaced displacement was 975 long tons (991 t) or 1,164 long tons (1,183 t) submerged. Her crew initially consisted of five officers and 42 enlisted men, but by 1941 this had increased to six officers and 47 enlisted men. She had a diving depth of 50–70 m (160–230 ft), but Yugoslav naval regulations restricted her to a maximum depth of 55 m (180 ft). Hrabri was expected to dive to periscope depth in 70 seconds, but at one point her crew achieved this in 52 seconds. ### Propulsion For surface running, Hrabri was powered by two Vickers V12 diesel engines designed in 1912 that were rated at a combined 2,400 brake horsepower (1,800 kW) at 380 rpm. Each engine weighed 33.8 t (33.3 long tons; 37.3 short tons), was made up of six parts, each of which held two cylinders. The parts were held together by screws. The screws were subject to great stress during navigation in rough weather, and they often cracked. This was a severe burden on the engine crew, as the work to replace them was exhausting, and forced the navy to stock the boats with a significant number of spare screws, adding significant weight. The naval historian Zvonimir Freivogel states that on a 15-day Mediterranean cruise, Nebojša needed 420 kg (930 lb) of replacement screws. A total of 76 t (75 long tons; 84 short tons) of fuel was carried, 15 t (15 long tons; 17 short tons) in each of the saddle tanks and the rest inside the hull. As the fuel in the saddle tanks was used it was replaced with sea water to maintain displacement, buoyancy and trim. Hrabri could reach a top speed of 15.7 knots (29.1 km/h; 18.1 mph) on the surface, less than the contract speed of 17.5 kn (32.4 km/h; 20.1 mph). On the surface using the diesel engines, she had a range of 5,000 nautical miles (9,300 km; 5,800 mi) at 9 knots (17 km/h; 10 mph). When submerged, the two propeller shafts were driven by two electric motors generating a total of 1,600 shaft horsepower (1,200 kW) at 300 rpm. Hrabri also had a small 20 bhp (15 kW) electric motor for silent underwater running. The battery storage consisted of three hundred and thirty-six 3820 LS Exide cells, which had a combined weight of 138 t (136 long tons; 152 short tons). She could reach 10 kn (18.5 km/h; 11.5 mph) on her electric motors when submerged, again less than the contract speed of 10.5 knots (19.4 km/h; 12.1 mph). With the silent running motor, she could achieve a nominal speed of 1.7 to 1.8 kn (3.1 to 3.3 km/h; 2.0 to 2.1 mph) underwater. Underwater, Hrabri had a range of 200 nmi (370 km; 230 mi) at 2 kn (3.7 km/h; 2.3 mph). ### Armament Hrabri was fitted with six bow-mounted 533 mm (21 in) torpedo tubes and carried twelve Whitehead-Weymouth Mark IV torpedoes, six in the tubes and six reloads. She was also equipped with two 102 mm (4 in) Mark IV L/40 guns, one in each of the mounts forward and aft of the bridge. Each gun weighed 1,200 kg (2,600 lb). Due to the raised gun platforms and protective bulwarks, the guns could be brought into action before the submarine reached full buoyancy and the crews could work them in heavy seas without the danger of being washed overboard. The guns could fire a 14 kg (31 lb) shell up to twelve times a minute to a maximum range of 9,560 m (31,360 ft). Until the destroyer leader Dubrovnik was commissioned in 1932, the Hrabri-class boats had the heaviest armament of any Royal Yugoslav Navy vessel. ### Modifications in Yugoslav service On arrival in the Adriatic, Hrabri was fitted with a single Vickers QF 2-pounder (40 mm (1.6 in)) L/39 anti-aircraft gun and two anti-aircraft machine guns. The Vickers gun fired a 0.76 kg (1.7 lb) shell to a maximum horizontal range of 6,000 m (20,000 ft) and a maximum vertical range of 4,000 m (13,000 ft). During service the Exide battery cells were replaced with Tudor SHI-37 battery cells. Between 1933 and 1934 Hrabri's superstructure underwent a significant rebuild. The conning tower was reduced in size, the corners were rounded and a bulwark was installed that enclosed the forward part of the towers. At the same time the main gun mounts were lowered and the 2-pounder was removed and replaced with a 13.2 mm (0.52 in) Hotchkiss M1929 anti-aircraft machine gun, which had a maximum horizontal range of 4,000 m (13,000 ft) and a maximum vertical range of 3,000 m (9,800 ft). From this point, Hrabri's silhouette was similar to the British R-class submarine. ## Service history Hrabri was launched on 15 April with the tactical number 1, which was painted centrally on each side of the conning tower. During her sea trial Hrabri was accidentally rammed by the British tug Conqueror, although damage to her was slight. When trial diving on another occasion, Hrabri listed sharply to starboard and the bulwark around the bridge was damaged by waves. Many of her external details were modified by Vickers in an attempt to achieve the contract speeds. These modifications included closing and remodelling of hull openings and flood slits and using thinner hydroplanes. These changes were to no avail, and by way of compensation Vickers installed a battery charger in the submarine tender Hvar at their own expense. The trial and training phase was extensive, and once it was completed, Hrabri and Nebojša sailed to Portland where they took onboard their complement of torpedoes, before returning to Newcastle. ### Interwar period The two boats left the Tyne on 11 March 1928 in company with Hvar. En route one of the submarines suffered from engine trouble and the group had a five-day stopover at Gibraltar for repairs. They then had a five-day visit to Algiers in French Algeria and a brief stop at Malta before arriving at Tivat in the Bay of Kotor on the southern Adriatic coast on 5 April. Torpedo exercises for the two boats followed, and then a cruise along the Adriatic coast. On 16 August a serious accident was averted aboard Hrabri in the narrow harbour entrance at Šibenik in central Dalmatia. The boat's rudder jammed, but the reserve steering mechanism was started quickly and the boat brought safely through. In May and June 1929, Hrabri, Nebojša, Hvar and six 250t class torpedo boats accompanied the light cruiser Dalmacija on a cruise to Malta, the Greek island of Corfu in the Ionian Sea, and Bizerte in the French protectorate of Tunisia. According to the British naval attaché, the ships and crews made a very good impression while visiting Malta. On 9 December 1929, the two Osvetnik-class submarines joined the KM, completing the submarine flotilla. In mid-1930, Hrabri, Nebojša and the Yugoslav submarine tender Sitnica cruised the Mediterranean, visiting Alexandria in Egypt and Beirut in Lebanon. Over the next several years, the submarines engaged in a cycle of summer cruises followed by repairs and refits in the winter months. In 1932, the British naval attaché reported that Yugoslav ships engaged in few exercises, manoeuvres or gunnery training due to reduced budgets. In 1933, the attaché reported that the naval policy of Yugoslavia was strictly defensive, aimed at protecting her more than 600 km (370 mi) of coastline. On 4 October 1934, Hrabri and the Osvetnik-class boat Smeli commenced a training cruise in the Mediterranean involving sailing around Sicily independently and meeting at Bizerte. When King Alexander was assassinated in Marseille in France on 9 October, they were ordered to return home and reached Tivat on 13 October. From March 1935 to September 1936, Josip Černi [sl] was Hrabri's commanding officer; Černi went on to become the commander-in-chief of the Partisan Navy during World War II. In 1937, Hrabri participated in a cruise through the eastern Mediterranean along with Smeli, the flotilla leader Dubrovnik and the seaplane tender Zmaj. The ships continued on to Istanbul in Turkey, but the two submarines returned to Tivat. The crews of all four vessels were commended for their good behaviour during the cruise. By 1938, the KM had determined that the Hrabri-class boats were worn out and obsolete and needed replacement. In October two German Type IIB coastal submarines were ordered to replace them. The outbreak of World War II less than a year later meant that the ordered boats were never delivered and the Hrabri class had to continue in service. During the interwar period, Yugoslavia was a divided country dominated by Serb elites who essentially disregarded the rights and needs of the other constituent nations, and most Yugoslavs lacked a sense of having a share in the country's future. The Yugoslav military largely reflected this division, few considering interwar Yugoslavia worth fighting or dying for. ### World War II When the German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia commenced on 6 April 1941, the entire submarine flotilla was docked in the Bay of Kotor. A few days before the invasion, the KM deployed two submarines each night to patrol the coastline, primarily on the surface. They deployed Nebojša and Osvetnik together, and rotated them on each succeeding night with Hrabri and Smeli. On the day of the invasion Italian bombers attacked KM vessels in the Bay of Kotor. Hrabri and Osvetnik received orders to support a planned attack on the Italian enclave at Zara, but when this was cancelled Hrabri remained in the Bay of Kotor. The commanding officer of Sitnica was willing to take command of Hrabri and captain the boat to Greece, but the crew were opposed to this action, and Hrabri was captured at the Bay of Kotor by the Italians after the Yugoslav surrender came into effect on 18 April. Hrabri was designated N3 by the Italians and towed to Pola for inspection. Due to her poor condition, the Italians decided not to commission her and she was scrapped later that year. In April 2013, the 85th anniversary of Hrabri's arrival at the Bay of Kotor was marked by an event in Tivat, attended by dozens of former Yugoslav submariners. ## See also - List of ships of the Royal Yugoslav Navy
3,310,762	Doomsday (Doctor Who)	1,173,864,220	Episode of Doctor Who	[ "2006 British television episodes", "Cybermen television stories", "Dalek television stories", "Doctor Who stories set on Earth", "Fiction about supernovae", "Television episodes about parallel universes", "Television episodes set in London", "Television episodes set in Norway", "Television shows written by Russell T Davies", "Tenth Doctor episodes" ]	"Doomsday" is the thirteenth and final episode in the second series of the revival of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. It was first broadcast on 8 July 2006 and is the conclusion of a two-part story; the first part, "Army of Ghosts", was broadcast on 1 July 2006. The two-part story features the Daleks, presumed extinct after the events of the 2005 series' finale, and the Cybermen, who appeared in a parallel universe in the 2006 episodes "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel". Both species unexpectedly arrive on Earth at the conclusion of "Army of Ghosts". The episode marks the first conflict between the Daleks and the Cybermen in Doctor Who's 43-year history; the concept of the two species appearing on-screen together was first proposed in 1967, but was vetoed by Terry Nation, the creator of the Daleks. The episode also features Billie Piper's last appearance in the lead companion role as Rose Tyler; the final regular appearance of Noel Clarke as Rose's ex-boyfriend and previous companion Mickey Smith; and the first appearance of Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, the companion in the following episode, the fourth series and the sixtieth anniversary specials. The episode and its predecessor were filmed between November 2005 and January 2006, alongside the episodes "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel". Set mainly in the One Canada Square skyscraper in Canary Wharf, the episode's plot consists mostly of the Daleks and Cybermen waging a global war, with humanity on the verge of extinction in the cataclysm. The Tenth Doctor (David Tennant), the Tyler family, and Mickey Smith fight for their lives trying to reverse the situation. They are successful, but at an emotional cost to the Doctor and Rose, as they are left in separate universes. The episode is one of the most popular Doctor Who episodes since the show's revival. It was nominated, along with "Army of Ghosts", for the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form; the award was won by the fourth episode in the series, "The Girl in the Fireplace". It shared the revived series' highest Audience Appreciation rating of 89 with "The Parting of the Ways", "Silence in the Library", and "Forest of the Dead" until 28 June 2008—"The Stolen Earth" gained an AI rating of 91—and is favoured by most critics for both the Dalek–Cyberman conflict and the farewell scene between the Doctor and Rose. ## Plot In the Torchwood Institute's sphere chamber in One Canada Square, four Daleks known as the Cult of Skaro have emerged from the Void ship, along with the Genesis Ark, a prison ship built by the Time Lords to imprison the Daleks. The Cybermen who took control of Torchwood confront Dalek Thay, offering an alliance. It declines, killing two Cybermen. The Cyber Leader declares war on the Daleks. A strike team takes the Tenth Doctor to the parallel Earth to meet with Pete Tyler. The Doctor theorises that millions of Cybermen coming through from the parallel Earth to the Earth in the Doctor's universe is beginning the process that will lead to both planets falling into the Void. The Doctor explains that Pete is dead in his universe, but Pete's wife Jackie is alive. In the sphere chamber, the Doctor allows the Cybermen to enter and attack the Daleks. Mickey accidentally activates the Ark while escaping with the Doctor, Pete and Rose. Dalek Sec takes the Ark outside. Pete saves Jackie from the Cybermen and the two embrace. The Doctor then takes everyone to the control room. Outside, the Ark opens. Millions of Daleks pour out and begin killing humans and Cybermen on the ground. The Doctor explains that if he opens the breach and reverses it, anyone who has travelled between the two separate worlds will be pulled in, including Rose, Mickey and Pete. The Doctor sends them along with Jackie to the parallel Earth. Rose jumps back to help the Doctor. The Doctor and Rose open the breach and hang on to magnetic clamps as the Cybermen and Daleks are pulled into the Void, but Dalek Sec escapes using a temporal shift. Rose loses her grip and starts to fall towards the Void, but at the last second, Pete transports Rose back to the parallel Earth as the breach is closed. Some time later, Rose has a dream where she hears the Doctor's voice calling her. Rose, her parents, and Mickey follow the voice to a remote bay in Norway where the Doctor sends a holographic message through one last small breach between universes. Rose breaks down in tears and tells the Doctor that she loves him; before the Doctor can finish his reply, the breach seals completely and the Doctor's image disappears. In the TARDIS, a mysterious woman in a wedding dress appears in front of the Doctor. ## Production ### Conception The concept of the Daleks and Cybermen appearing together on screen is not new; in December 1967, the BBC approached Terry Nation to have both races in a serial, but Nation vetoed this idea. The concept came to Davies while mapping out the 2006 series: the story would both serve to resurrect the popular Daleks and provide a suitable exit for Piper, who had decided to leave Doctor Who after two series. "Doomsday" is the first episode in the history of Doctor Who where the Cybermen and the Daleks appear on-screen together; Cybermen and Daleks were both featured in The Five Doctors and "Army of Ghosts", but in separate scenes. The two-part finale was originally going to take place in Cardiff on the time rift, which was the focus of the episodes "The Unquiet Dead" and "Boom Town". When Torchwood was commissioned in 2005, Davies decided to base the spin-off in Cardiff and relocate "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday" to Canary Wharf in London. An item of discussion between the production staff was over who would rescue Rose; Davies and Julie Gardner wanted Pete to rescue her, while Clarke and Phil Collinson wanted Mickey. The role was ultimately given to Pete, to emphasise that he had accepted Rose as a surrogate daughter. The Doctor's intended reply to Rose was also discussed; Davies, who left the reply unspecified, stated he didn't know when asked by Collinson on the episode's commentary track, and Gardner vehemently believed the Doctor would reciprocate Rose's love. Some elements of the story were inspired by Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman was "flattered" by the references in the episode, and compared Davies' actions to his own practice of referencing works. ### Filming To ensure that Clarke and Dingwall were available for filming, the story was filmed in the season's third production block with "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel". Filming for the story started on 2 November 2005 on location in Kennington, London, but did not become the primary focus of the production crew until 29 November, when filming began on the scenes in and around the sphere chamber. The scenes of the Tyler family residence in Pete's World were filmed at Coedarhydyglyn on 21 November, and the subsequent scene of the Tylers driving through Norway was filmed at Bridgend on 6 December. Scenes in the lever room, the main setting for the story, were filmed on 12–15 December 2005 and 3–5 January 2006. Greenscreen work for Rose being sucked into the void took place on 13 January, and the skirmish between the military and Cybermen on the bridge was filmed on 15 January. Other location shooting took place at the Coal Exchange and Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff Bay. The penultimate scene of the episode, the Doctor's farewell to Rose, was filmed on 16 January 2006 at Southerndown beach in the Vale of Glamorgan, which was the last day of filming for Clarke and Dingwall. The shoot was rather emotional, to the point there were several tears on set. The last scene of "Doomsday", Catherine Tate's appearance in the TARDIS as Donna Noble (credited as "The Bride"), was filmed on 31 March during the wrap party. To ensure the secrecy of Rose's departure and Tate's appearance, only Piper and Tennant were given scripts of the departure scene, and director Graeme Harper was not informed of the final scene until the last possible second. ### Music As well as using existing music, such as the themes for the Daleks, Cybermen, and Rose, Murray Gold specially composed a piece of music for Rose's farewell entitled "Doomsday", which featured vocal work from Melanie Pappenheim. Instead of using the swelling violins that Davies and the rest of the production team had expected, Gold took a minimalist approach. When pitching the track to the production team, Gold described the track as representing Rose's unbridled energy and determination as she searches for the Doctor. He later said, "I wanted to get that kind of throbbing, sort of hurt sound of quite emotional rock, because I thought that's what Rose would do if she was hurting and ran up to her bedroom and locked herself in her room and had a good old cry, really." The piece uses the same vocal work from "Rose", when Rose first enters the TARDIS, thus creating a bookend effect. It is a favourite among fans and of executive producer Julie Gardner, and is one of the reasons, along with Pappenheim's overall contribution and the "Song for Ten" from "The Christmas Invasion", that the soundtrack of both series was released several months later. ## Broadcast, reception, and legacy ### Broadcast and pre-airing media blackout To protect as much information concerning the episode as possible, the final scene of "Army of Ghosts" was withheld from all pre-screeners given to reviewers. The BBC website's Fear Forecasters, a panel who rate the episodes, were not allowed to see "Doomsday" before its airing, and access to copies was restricted; the website thus does not have a Fear Forecast for the episode. Despite this, the Dalek Sec prop, which had been previously unused in the series, had invaded the stage at the 2006 BAFTA Television Awards while the production team were collecting an award. A similar moratorium would be placed on the following series' finale, "Last of the Time Lords". The episode's finalised average viewing figure was 8.22 million viewers and was, excepting World Cup games, the second most-watched television programme of the week, behind an episode of Coronation Street, and eighth most-watched overall. The companion episode of Doctor Who Confidential gained just over one million viewers, making it the second most watched programme on a non-terrestrial channel that week. The ratings for the episode were higher than the following World Cup match between Germany and Portugal, which had a million fewer viewers. ### Critical reception and later release "Doomsday" is one of the most popular episodes of the revived Doctor Who. It gained an audience Appreciation Index (AI) of 89, which was the highest figure for nearly two years—it was later surpassed by "The Stolen Earth", which had an AI of 91—and is the first episode of Doctor Who to receive a perfect 10 rating on IGN, who congratulated Davies on making an action-packed episode so emotional. Television Without Pity gave the episode an A+ rating. The Stage commented that the Dalek–Cybermen conflict was the "only thing worth watching" at the weekend, overshadowing even the World Cup Final, and that the parting scene was "beautifully written and movingly played," with "not a dry eye in the universe". Dek Hogan of Digital Spy felt that the episode was "beautifully balanced and with moments of high excitement and touching poignancy" and that the single oil tear shed by the Cyberman version of Hartman was a "nice touch". He criticised Catherine Tate's appearance as being unnecessary to end the episode and for "breaking the mood". Stephen Brook of The Guardian thought that the episode was "a highpoint of the modern series, highly emotional, scary and genuinely exciting", while Rose's departure was "brilliantly handled". He positively compared the episode's plot of a war between "the greatest monsters in the programme history" against the film Alien vs. Predator. After its initial airing, the episode was released on DVD, with "Fear Her" and "Army of Ghosts", on 25 September 2006. It was first aired on CBC Television on 19 February 2007. The story ("Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday") was one of three from the second series of Doctor Who to be nominated for the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form; the other stories nominated were "School Reunion" and "The Girl in the Fireplace", the latter winning the award. In a 2014 poll by SFX, 90,000 readers voted the farewell scene between the Doctor and Rose as the greatest sci-fi moment ever.
1,187,411	Lawrence Weathers	1,169,444,424	New Zealand and Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross	[ "1890 births", "1918 deaths", "Australian Army soldiers", "Australian World War I recipients of the Victoria Cross", "Australian military personnel killed in World War I", "Military personnel from Adelaide", "New Zealand World War I recipients of the Victoria Cross", "New Zealand emigrants to Australia", "People from Te Kōpuru" ]	Lawrence Carthage Weathers, (14 May 1890 – 29 September 1918) was a New Zealand-born Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry in battle that could be awarded to a member of the Australian armed forces at the time. His parents returned to their native South Australia when Weathers was seven, and he completed his schooling before obtaining work as an undertaker in Adelaide. He enlisted as a private in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in early 1916, and joined the 43rd Battalion. His unit deployed to the Western Front in France and Belgium in late December. After a bout of illness, Weathers returned to his battalion in time to take part in the Battle of Messines in June 1917, during which he was wounded. Evacuated to the United Kingdom, he rejoined his unit in early December. Promoted to lance corporal in March 1918, Weathers fought with his battalion during the German spring offensive, but was gassed in May and did not return to his unit until the following month. He participated in the Battle of Hamel in July, the Battle of Amiens in August, and the Battle of Mont Saint-Quentin in September. At Mont Saint-Quentin he was recommended for the award of the Victoria Cross. Promoted to temporary corporal, he was mortally wounded in the head by a shell on 29 September during the Battle of St Quentin Canal, and died soon after, unaware that he was to receive the Victoria Cross, which was not announced until late December. Until 2016, his Victoria Cross was in private hands, but in that year it was purchased at auction and donated to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, where it is displayed in the Hall of Valour. ## Early life Lawrence Carthage Weathers was born in Te Kōpuru, near Dargaville, New Zealand, on 14 May 1890, one of eight children of John Joseph Weathers, a pastoralist, and his wife Ellen Frances Johanna née McCormack. Both his parents were from Adelaide, South Australia, and the family returned there when he was seven years old. They settled in the rural mid-north of the state and Weathers attended Snowtown Public School. After leaving school, in 1909 he and two of his brothers travelled to Europe and America, including a four-month stay in England. Having spent two years away, he returned to Australia and worked as a horse handler, coachman, and as an undertaker in Adelaide. On 10 September 1913, he married Annie Elizabeth "Tess" Watson of Unley. The couple lived in the suburbs of Yatala and Parkside, and had two children. Weathers' elder brother Thomas enlisted to serve in World War I and died of wounds during the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915, while serving with the 9th Light Horse Regiment. His younger brother Joseph also enlisted, but was discharged at his own request before leaving Australia. ## World War I On 8 February 1916, Weathers enlisted as a private in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), and was initially allocated as a reinforcement to the 10th Battalion. In June, he was transferred to the 43rd Battalion, part of the 11th Brigade, 3rd Division. The 43rd Battalion embarked on HMAT A19 (formerly SS Afric) in June 1916, and after a brief stop in the Middle East and transit through France, spent the rest of the year training at Larkhill on the Salisbury Plain in southern England. The 3rd Division embarked for the Western Front in November, and entered the trenches for the first time in late December. Weathers reported sick in late January 1917, and did not rejoin his unit until late April. He returned to the front lines in time to participate in the first major action his battalion saw in the war, the Battle of Messines, during which the 43rd Battalion incurred 122 casualties in a night-time operation to capture the final objective, the Oosttaverne Line. One of those casualties was Weathers, who suffered a gunshot wound to the leg on 10 June. Evacuated to hospital in the United Kingdom, he did not return to his unit until early December. The 3rd Division spent the winter of 1917–1918 rotating through the front lines in the Messines sector of the Flanders region of Belgium, largely improving the trenches against an expected German offensive in the spring. Weathers was promoted to lance corporal on 21 March 1918, and a week later his battalion helped blunt the German spring offensive, taking up defensive positions between the Ancre and the Somme rivers west of Morlancourt. In late May he required medical treatment following a gas attack near Villers-Bretonneux that caused 230 casualties among the 43rd, and Weathers did not return to duty until mid-June. The 43rd Battalion's next major action was the highly successful Battle of Hamel on 4 July. The battalion was responsible for clearing the village itself and suffered 97 casualties. The 43rd played a supporting role in the first phase of the Battle of Amiens on 8 August, which marked the beginning of the Hundred Days Offensive to drive the Germans back to the Hindenburg Line of fortifications. This included fighting west of Suzanne on 25–26 August. On 2 September, during the Battle of Mont Saint-Quentin, the 43rd Battalion was tasked with clearing trenches north of the village of Allaines. It captured Graz Trench opposite Allaines without a fight, then using hand grenades (known as bombs), fought northwards towards Scutari Trench, and succeeded in containing about 150 Germans at a fork in the trench. Faced with a deluge of German fire, the troops halted and a deadlock ensued, which was broken by Weathers, supported by three other men. His actions on that day resulted in a recommendation for the award of the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry in battle that could be awarded to a member of the Australian armed forces at the time. The citation read: > For most conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty on the 2nd of September 1918, north of Peronne, when with an advanced bombing party. The attack having been held up by a strongly-held trench, Corporal Weathers went forward alone, under heavy fire, and attacked the enemy with bombs. Then, returning to our lines for a further supply of bombs, he again went forward with three comrades and attacked under very heavy fire. Regardless of personal danger, he mounted the enemy parapet and bombed the trench, and, with the support of his comrades, captured 180 prisoners and three machine guns. His valour and determination resulted in the successful capture of the final objective, and saved the lives of many of his comrades. When Weathers returned to his comrades, his uniform was covered in mud, he had blood running down his face, and he had five days' stubble on his chin. He was also festooned "like a Christmas tree" with looted German binoculars and pistols. Full of nervous tension, he chattered to his mates about how he had "put the wind up" the Germans. During the Battle of Mont Saint-Quentin, the 43rd Battalion suffered 67 casualties. Over the next week, the 11th Brigade was part of the pursuit of the Germans to the main Hindenburg Line. Weathers was promoted to temporary corporal on 10 September. On 29 September, the 3rd Division was part of the Battle of St Quentin Canal, one of the last Australian ground actions of the war, which involved breaching the Beaurevoir Line, the third line of defences of the Hindenburg Line. During the battle, the 43rd Battalion was sheltering in a trench when a shell burst among a small group of men, wounding Weathers in the head. He died soon after, not knowing he would receive the Victoria Cross, which was gazetted on 24 December 1918. The same shell killed his uncle, Lance Corporal J. J. Weathers. Weathers was buried at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Unicorn Cemetery, Vendhuile. Until 2016, his Victoria Cross was in private hands, but in that year it was put up for auction in Sydney, fetching a world record price for an individual medal. Late that year it was donated to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, where it is now displayed in the Hall of Valour.
19,124,437	2006 Pacific hurricane season	1,164,978,576	Hurricane season in the Pacific Ocean	[ "2006 Pacific hurricane season", "Pacific hurricane seasons", "Tropical cyclones in 2006" ]	The 2006 Pacific hurricane season was the first above-average season since 1997 which produced twenty-five tropical cyclones, with nineteen named storms, though most were rather weak and short-lived. Only eleven hurricanes formed and six major hurricanes. Following the inactivity of the previous seasons, forecasters predicted that season would be only slightly above active. It was also the first time since 2003 in which at least one cyclone of tropical storm intensity made landfall. The season officially began on May 15 in the East Pacific Ocean, and on June 1 in the Central Pacific; they ended on November 30. These dates conventionally delimit the period of each year when most tropical cyclones form in the Pacific basin. However, the formation of tropical cyclones is possible at any time of the year. Seasonal activity began on May 27, when Tropical Storm Aletta formed off the southwest coast of Mexico. No storms formed in June, though the season became active in July when five named storms developed, including Hurricane Daniel which was the second strongest storm of the season, as well as Tropical Storm Emilia. During August, Hurricanes Ioke and John formed, as well as four other storms. The strongest storm of the season was Hurricane Ioke, which reached Category 5 status on the Saffir–Simpson scale in the central Pacific Ocean; Ioke passed near Johnston Atoll and later Wake Island, where it caused heavy damage but no deaths. The deadliest storm of the season was Hurricane John, which killed six people after striking the Baja California Peninsula, and the costliest storm was Hurricane Lane, which caused \$203 million in damage in southwestern Mexico (2006 USD, \$ 2023 USD). Damage across the basin reached \$355.1 million (2006 USD), while 14 people were killed by the various storms. ## Seasonal forecast On May 22, 2006, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) CPC (CPC) released their forecasts for the 2006 Atlantic and Pacific hurricane seasons. The Pacific season was expected to be hindered by the decades-long cycle that began in 1995, which generally increased wind shear across the basin. NOAA predicted a below-normal level of activity in the Eastern Pacific, with 12–16 named storms, of which 6–8 were expected to become hurricanes, and 1–3 expected to become major hurricanes. The Central Pacific Hurricane Center's area of responsibility was also expected to be below average, with only two to three tropical cyclones expected to form or cross into the area. They expected that neither El Niño nor La Niña would affect conditions significantly. On May 15, the hurricane season began in the Eastern Pacific basin, which is the area of the northern Pacific Ocean east of 140°W. On June 1, the season began in the Central Pacific warning zone (between 140°W and the International Date Line); however, no storms occurred in the region until July. ## Seasonal summary The accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) index for the 2006 Pacific hurricane season as calculated by Colorado State University using data from the National Hurricane Center was 156.9 units. Broadly speaking, ACE is a measure of the power of a tropical or subtropical storm multiplied by the length of time it existed. Therefore, a storm with a longer duration, such as Hurricane Ioke, which arrived with a total of 32.2250 units and then crossed to the Western Pacific, will have high values of ACE. It is only calculated for full advisories on specific tropical and subtropical systems reaching or exceeding wind speeds of 39 mph (63 km/h). Overall, there were 19 tropical storms. In addition, 11 hurricanes developed. Furthermore, there were total of six major hurricanes, Category 3 or greater on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale. The season officially started on May 15 in the East Pacific Ocean, and on June 1 in the Central Pacific; they both ended on November 30. No tropical storms developed in June in the basin, which was unusual compared to the average of two storms forming during the month. From 1966 to 2008, there have been only three other seasons in which a tropical storm did not form in June, these being 1969, 2004, 2007 seasons. After such an inactive month, the tropics became active in July when five named storms developed, including Hurricane Daniel which was the second strongest storm of the season. During August, Hurricanes Ioke and John formed, as well as four other storms. September was a relatively quiet month with two storms, of which one was Hurricane Lane. By that time, however, El Niño conditions became established across the Pacific, which is known to enhance Pacific hurricane activity. Three storms developed in October, including Hurricane Paul. Tropical activity within the basin in November 2006 was the most active on record, based on the ACE Index. Three tropical cyclones formed, of which two became tropical storms; only one other season on record at the time, 1961, produced two tropical storms in the month of November. In addition, Mexico was struck by four tropical cyclones in 2006, none on the Atlantic coast and all along the Pacific coast. One hit Baja California Peninsula while the others made landfall on the mainland. An extratropical storm persisted in the extreme northern central Pacific Ocean in late October. It drifted over unusually warm waters up to 3.6 °F (2 °C) above normal, and gradually developed convection near the center. By November 2, QuikSCAT satellite suggested the system attained winds of up to 60 mph (95 km/h) about 900 mi (1,450 km) west of Oregon. The system also developed an eye and an eyewall. The cyclone tracked northeastward as it gradually weakened, and dissipated on November 4. NASA considered the cyclone to be a subtropical storm. However, as it formed outside of the territory of any monitoring organization, it was not named. Operationally, the United States Navy treated the system as a tropical disturbance, numbered 91C. ## Systems ### Tropical Storm Aletta The first storm of the year had its genesis from a tropical wave that crossed Central America and entered the East Pacific on May 21. The system interacted with a trough near the Gulf of Tehuantepec, causing thunderstorms to increase. A large low-pressure area formed on May 25 south of Mexico, which organized slowly due to wind shear in the region. Early on May 27, the NHC designated the system as Tropical Depression One-E about 190 mi (305 km) south of Acapulco. The nascent storm moved little, and the wind shear displaced the center west of the convection. Late on May 27, the NHC upgraded the depression to Tropical Storm Aletta. While named tropical cyclones in May are infrequent events, Aletta marked the seventh consecutive year to have a named cyclone form in May. The storm drifted for several days off the southern coast of Mexico. The NHC estimated peak winds of 45 mph (70 km/h) on May 28, as the storm presented an elongated cloud structure. Increased wind shear and dry air caused weakening on May 29, and Aletta weakened into a tropical depression. Drifting westward, the system became a remnant low on May 31, and dissipated soon afterward. The storm moved toward the Guerrero coast in southwestern Mexico, prompting the Mexican government to issue tropical storm watches between Punta Maldonado and Zihuatanejo. Aletta produced moderate rainfall across Mexico, including a 24-hour rainfall total of 100 mm (3.9 in) in Jacatepec, Oaxaca on May 30, and 96 mm (3.8 in) in La Calera, Guerrero, on the next day. High winds knocked down trees and caused minor structural damage. In Zihuatanejo, a ship with nine people was rescued after being reported as lost, which may have been a result of high seas generated by Aletta. ### Tropical Depression Two-E On the day after Aletta dissipated, a new area of disturbed weather developed off the southwest Mexican coast. High shear slowed the development of the system, although it gained enough convection and organization to be classified as a tropical depression on June 3. The depression strengthened to near tropical storm status as it approached the coast of southwestern Mexico; however, shear persisted over the system and it weakened before dissipating on June 4. Despite never becoming a named storm, heavy rain occurred, including a total of 19.13 inches (486 mm) measured in a 48‐hour period in Acapulco. Mudslides and flash flooding were reported, forcing 72 people from their homes. No deaths or serious damage was reported. ### Hurricane Bud A tropical wave exited the west coast of Africa on June 27, which reached the eastern Pacific on July 7. The system spawned a low-pressure area south of Mexico. Associated convection gradually became better organized, and the system organized into Tropical Depression Three-E early on July 11. Steered by a subtropical ridge over Mexico, the storm tracked west-northwestward for its entirety. Located over warm waters, the depression intensified into Tropical Storm Bud within six hours of its formation. The thunderstorms organized, with good outflow except to the east due to the presence of Tropical Storm Carlotta. On July 12, the NHC upgraded Bud to a hurricane, after an eye developed in the storm's center. Later on July 12, Bud was upgraded to a Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale. Early on July 13, Bud became a Category 3 hurricane, or a major hurricane. At that time, the well-defined eye was enclosed by a ring of deep thunderstorms. That day, the hurricane reached its peak intensity of 125 mph (200 km/h) and a minimum barometric pressure of 953 mbar (28.1 inHg). Bud encountered cooler waters and stable air, and a period of rapid weakening began. The eye became obscured, and core convective cloud tops began to warm, until much of the convection was lost on July 14, impeded by southeasterly wind shear. On July 15, Bud was downgraded to a tropical depression, and the next day it degenerated into a remnant low. The low fully dissipated on July 17 about 750 mi (1,210 km) east-northeast of Hawaii. The remnants of Bud produced light rainfall across Hawaii. ### Hurricane Carlotta A tropical wave exited Africa on June 30 and moved across the Atlantic Ocean without development. On July 9, while crossing Central America into the eastern North Pacific Ocean, thunderstorm activity increased, and the system organized into Tropical Depression Four-E early on July 12 about 290 mi (465 km) south of Zihuatanejo, Guerrero. The large depression moved quickly to the west-northwest to the south of a ridge over northwestern Mexico, and its outer rainbands moved across the coast. Rainfall totals were less than 1 inch (25 mm). The depression intensified into Tropical Storm Carlotta just six hours after forming. By late on July 12, the storm developed banding features, and early on July 13 Carlotta attained hurricane status about 430 mi (690 km) south of the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula. As Carlotta intensified, the system became more compact, and it reached peak winds of 85 mph (135 km/h) on July 13. An eye formed in the center, and the hurricane was briefly forecast to attain major hurricane status, or a Category 3 on the Saffir–Simpson scale. However, Carlotta weakened due to increased wind shear from Hurricane Bud to its west, and the eye and convection deteriorated. Carlotta briefly weakened to tropical storm status late on July 14, although a decrease in shear allowed it to reintensify into a hurricane. This was short-lived as the center moved into the area of cooler waters, and Carlotta again weakened to tropical storm status. Late on July 15, the circulation became separated from the convection, and Carlotta weakened to tropical depression status on July 16, and the next day generated into a remnant low. The circulation continued generally westward, dissipating on July 20 about 1,500 mi (2,415 km) east of the Hawaiian islands. ### Hurricane Daniel On July 16, a tropical disturbance formed far to the south of the Baja California Peninsula and quickly increased in convective activity and organization, becoming a tropical depression. The system continued to organize and was designated as a tropical storm the next day. On July 18, Daniel attained hurricane status, and two days later underwent rapid intensification; it reached major hurricane status and was later upgraded further to Category 4 status on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale. Its peak intensity was 150 mph (240 km/h). The hurricane underwent eyewall replacement cycles, which are internal mechanisms that occur in most intense hurricanes. Daniel later became an annular hurricane, which allowed it to maintain Category 4 status for longer than it otherwise would have. It crossed over into the Central Pacific early on July 24 and was predicted to affect Hawaii as a tropical storm; however, Daniel encountered weak steering currents in the open ocean, causing it to slow down considerably. It rapidly degenerated to a tropical depression on July 25, and the CPHC issued its last advisory on July 26 while the storm was still well to the east of Hawaii. Its remnants later moved across the Hawaiian islands, dropping heavy rainfall and causing flooding. West Wailuaiki on Maui recorded 3.87 inches (98 mm) in one day, which was the highest daily rainfall total from the hurricane. ### Tropical Storm Emilia The origins of Emilia were from a tropical wave that developed into a tropical depression on July 21, a short distance off the coast of Acapulco. It moved generally north-northwestward, reaching tropical storm status on July 22 and passing about 175 mi (280 km) southwest of Manzanillo, Colima. An eyewall began to form that day, and Emilia reached peak winds of 65 mph (105 km/h). It briefly weakened due to wind shear, although restrengthening occurred as the storm turned toward the Baja California peninsula. On July 26, Emilia again reached peak winds of 65 mph (105 km/h), and shortly thereafter it passed about 60 mi (95 km) southwest of the southern tip of Baja California. It weakened as it turned into cooler waters, first to tropical depression status on July 27 and then to a convective-less remnant low on July 28. The remnants dissipated on July 31 about 495 mi (795 km) west-southwest of San Diego, California. In southwestern Mexico, Emilia produced tropical storm force winds along the coastline. Rainfall in the southern portion of the Baja California peninsula caused minor flooding, and gusty winds caused damage to buildings and power lines. Moisture from Emilia reached the southwestern United States. Thunderstorms and rainfall occurred across Arizona, causing flooding. In southern California, the storm dropped light rainfall, which assisted firefighters in containing a wildfire. ### Tropical Storm Fabio A tropical wave crossed the west coast of Africa on July 15 and entered the Pacific on July 25. Convection increased on July 28, and at 1800 UTC on July 31 the system became Tropical Depression Seven-E about 980 miles (1,580 km) southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula. Six hours later, the depression was upgraded to Tropical Storm Fabio. It moved westward due to a ridge to its north, and on August 1 Fabio reached peak winds of 50 mph (80 km/h). Later, the storm began weakening due to increased wind shear and dry air. On August 3, Fabio deteriorated to tropical depression status, and later that day it degenerated into a remnant low-pressure area. The remnants continued westward, moving across Hawaii on August 7. Although Fabio did not impact land, its remnants produced heavy rainfall in Hawaii. In a 24-hour period, 2.89 inches (73 mm) of rainfall was recorded at Glenwood on the island of Hawaii; this was the highest daily rainfall total for the month on the island. However, the heaviest precipitation fell on Mount Waiʻaleʻale on Kauai, where 15.08 inches (383 mm) fell in 24 hours; this total alone was greater than all other monthly rainfall totals in the state. The heavy rainfall flooded the Hanalei River, which forced the closure of the Kuhio Highway when a bridge was inundated. On Oahu, the rainfall caused ponding on roadways and flooding along streams. One flooded stream stranded 24 hikers along a trail, all of whom required rescue by helicopter. ### Tropical Storm Gilma On July 17, a tropical wave exited Africa and crossed the Atlantic without developing. On July 25 it entered the Eastern Pacific, gradually developing an area of organized convection. Despite marginally favorable upper-level winds, the system organized enough to be declared a tropical depression on August 1, several hundred miles southwest of Acapulco, Mexico. Initially, the depression tracked west-northwestward. Despite wind shear in the area, the depression was upgraded to Tropical Storm Gilma later on August 1. The wind shear prevented further strengthening or organization, and Gilma weakened to a tropical depression early on August 2. The depression turned westward, and Gilma degenerated into a remnant low by August 4. ### Hurricane Hector A tropical wave exited Africa on July 31, and after no development in the Atlantic, it crossed Central America into the northeastern Pacific Ocean on August 10. Convection gradually increased, and a broad low-pressure area developed about 375 miles (604 km) south of Acapulco, Mexico on August 13. The system continued to become organized, and it developed into a tropical depression around 1800 UTC on August 15 about 650 mi (1,050 km) south-southwest of the southern tip of Baja California. It moved west-northwestward, located south of a ridge that extended westward from northern Mexico westward into the Pacific. The depression quickly intensified into Tropical Storm Hector early on August 16. Hector was able to steadily strengthen, reaching hurricane status at 0600 UTC on August 17. It is estimated that Hector reached its peak intensity of 110 mph (175 km/h) at 0600 UTC on August 18, while centered about 1,035 mi (1,666 km) southwest of the southern tip of Baja California. Hector remained a Category 2 hurricane for about 24 hours. Shortly thereafter, it encountered cooler waters and westerly shear, and Hector steadily weakened until becoming a tropical storm by August 20. Shortly thereafter, the storm reached a weakness in the subtropical ridge, which caused it to move slowly to the northwest. By August 21, deep convection was confined to the northeast portion of the circulation. The shear was not strong enough to completely weaken the tropical cyclone and Hector remained a tropical storm with 50 mph (80 km/h) winds for about 24 hours. After the remaining shower and thunderstorm activity dissipated on August 22, the cyclone turned westward in response to the low-level easterly wind flow. Hector weakened to a tropical depression at 0000 UTC on August 23, and to a remnant low six hours later. The remnant circulation of Hector dissipated on August 24 about 750 mi (1,210 km) east of the Hawaiian Islands. ### Hurricane Ioke The cyclone developed from the Intertropical Convergence Zone on August 20 far to the south of Hawaii. Encountering warm waters, little wind shear, and well-defined outflow, Ioke intensified from a tropical depression to Category 4 status within 48 hours. Late on August 22 it rapidly weakened to Category 2 status before crossing over Johnston Atoll. Two days later favorable conditions again allowed for rapid strengthening, and Ioke attained Category 5 status on August 25 before crossing the International Date Line. At the time, its barometric pressure was estimated at 915 mbar, thus becoming the strongest hurricane on record in the Central Pacific. As it continued westward its intensity fluctuated, and on August 31 it passed near Wake Island with winds of 155 mph (249 km/h). Ioke gradually weakened as it turned northwestward and northward, and by September 6 it had transitioned into an extratropical cyclone. By then, the cyclone had lasted 19 days, reaching the equivalent of Category 5 status on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale three times. The remnants of Ioke accelerated northeastward and ultimately crossed into Alaska. Ioke did not affect any permanently populated areas in the Central Pacific or Western Pacific basins as a hurricane or a typhoon. A crew of 12 people stayed in a hurricane-proof bunker on Johnston Atoll during the hurricane's passage; the crew estimated winds reached over 100 mph (160 km/h), which damaged trees on the island but did not impact the island's bird population. The hurricane left moderate damage on Wake Island totaling \$88 million (2006 USD), which resulted from blown off roofs and damaged buildings, although the infrastructure of the island was left intact. All military personnel were evacuated from the island, the first full-scale evacuation of the island since Typhoon Sarah in 1967. Later, the extratropical remnants of Ioke produced a severe storm surge along the Alaskan coastline, causing beach erosion. ### Hurricane Ileana A tropical wave exited the west coast of Africa on August 8, and entered the eastern Pacific on August 16. Three days later, a weak low-pressure area formed, and thunderstorms consolidated near that feature. On August 21, the NHC designated the system Tropical Depression Ten-E about 350 mi (565 km) south-southwest of Acapulco, Mexico. A ridge over Mexico steered the system to the northwest through an area of warm waters and low wind shear. With favorable conditions, the depression quickly intensified into Tropical Storm Ileana. An eye formed in the center of the convection, and Ileana attained hurricane status late on August 22. On August 23, about 48 hours after forming, Ileana reached major hurricane status and a peak intensity of 120 mph (195 km/h), with a minimum pressure of 955 mbar (28.2 inHg). At that time, the storm was about 60 mi (95 km) southeast of the unpopulated Socorro Island. During the storm's passage nearby, a station on the island recorded sustained winds of 59 mph (95 km/h), with gusts to 77 mph (124 km/h). As Ileana was heading north along the Mexican coastline, slight rainfall was recorded along the coast, which caused some flooding in Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima, Michoacán, and Baja California Sur. High surf killed a man near Cabo San Lucas, despite warnings not to swim in the ocean. Despite forecasts of further intensification to Category 4 status, Ileana began weakening due to cooler waters. The thunderstorms waned, and the storm slowed its forward motion. On August 26, Ileana weakened to tropical storm status as convection decreased markedly. The next day, the storm deteriorated to tropical depression status, and later a remnant low after being devoid of thunderstorms. The low continued slowly westward, dissipating on August 29 about 830 mi (1,335 km) west-northwest of Cabo San Lucas. ### Hurricane John On August 28, a persistent area of low pressure southwest of Acapulco, Mexico developed into a tropical depression. Later that day it strengthened into a tropical storm, and it reached hurricane strength 24 hours later on August 29. John underwent rapid intensification and reached Category 3 intensity later that day and Category 4 on August 30. Hours later, the hurricane underwent another eyewall replacement cycle, and subsequently weakened to Category 3 status as it paralleled the Mexican coastline a short distance offshore. Potentially due to its eyewall replacement cycle or its interaction with land, John weakened to a 105 mph hurricane by late on August 31, but restrengthened to a major hurricane shortly after. It made landfall near the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula as a Category 2 hurricane on September 1. John continued northwestward along the eastern Baja California peninsula, weakening to tropical depression status by September 3 and dissipating on September 4 in the Gulf of California. Along the southwestern coast of Mexico, John produced heavy surf, strong winds, and heavy rainfall, which flooded roads, caused mudslides, and downed trees. Along the Baja California Peninsula, the hurricane dropped heavy rainfall, with a 24-hour peak of 10.8 inches (270 mm) in Los Planes. The heavy rainfall caused flooding, closed roads, and caused a dam to overflow. The winds and rainfall destroyed thousands of flimsy houses across the region. Across Mexico, five people were killed, and damage amounted to \$663 million (2006 MXN, \$60.8 million 2006 USD). Moisture from the remnants of John produced flooding across Texas, which closed a 1⁄2 mile (800 m) portion of Interstate 10 in El Paso. In southern New Mexico, the rainfall caused widespread street flooding and some minor damage. Tropical moisture from the storm also produced rainfall in Arizona and southern California, where eight separate mudslides occurred, trapping 19 vehicles but causing no injuries. ### Hurricane Kristy A tropical wave exited western Africa on August 13, which moved across the Atlantic over the next nine days before entering the eastern Pacific. After associated convection became better organized, the system developed into Tropical Depression Twelve-E on August 30 about 600 mi (965 km) southwest of the Baja California peninsula. With light wind shear and warm waters, the depression quickly strengthened into Tropical Storm Kristy as thunderstorms increased. The small hurricane tracked slowly northwestward at first due to a ridge to its north. An eye soon developed, signaling that Kristy intensified into a hurricane early on August 31, about 30 hours after forming. Later that day, the hurricane attained peak winds of 80 mph (130 km/h). Soon after, wind shear increased due to the outflow of powerful Hurricane John to its east, and Kristy moved into an area of cooler waters and drier air. Hurricane forecast models anticipated a Fujiwhara effect, or an orbiting of two tropical cyclones, which would eventually result in Kristy being absorbed by Hurricane John. On September 1, Kristy weakened to tropical storm status, by which time the ridge to its north forced the storm southeastward. On September 2, the circulation became exposed from the convection, and Kristy fell to tropical depression status. Thunderstorms reformed and persisted over the center on the next day. Kristy re-attained tropical storm status on September 4, although it soon fell back to tropical depression status. Another burst of thunderstorms warranted Kristy being upgraded to tropical storm status again on September 5; by that time, the wind shear decreased and the track moved over warmer waters. Kristy turned back to the west, falling again to tropical depression status on September 6, after thunderstorms decreased due to dry air. Two days later, it degenerated into a remnant low, which dissipated a day later. The remnant disturbance continued westward, and initially Kristy was believed to have developed into Tropical Depression Two-C in the central Pacific Ocean; however, post-season analysis concluded the systems were separate. ### Hurricane Lane On September 13, a tropical disturbance located about 125 miles (201 km) west-southwest of Acapulco, Mexico, gradually became better organized and was designated the thirteenth tropical depression of the 2006 season. The depression intensified in a favorable environment, and was upgraded to Tropical Storm Lane later that night. As it moved parallel to the Mexican coast it continued to strengthen and became a hurricane on September 15, and a major hurricane early the next day. Hurricane Lane reached peak winds of 125 mph (200 km/h) before it made landfall on the coast of Sinaloa on September 16. It quickly weakened over land and dissipated on September 17. Tropical Storm Lane produced heavy rainfall and high seas along the west coast of Mexico, including Acapulco where flood waters reached 16 inches (41 cm) in depth. The Acapulco airport also experienced flooding, though service was not interrupted. Throughout Mexico, the hurricane caused four deaths and \$2.2 billion (2006 MXN, \$203 million 2006 USD) in damage, half of which in Sinaloa where heavy crop damage was reported. An estimated 4,320 homes were affected by the hurricane, and 19,200 miles (30,900 km) of roads and highways were damaged to some degree, including some destroyed bridges. ### Tropical Storm Miriam A disturbance associated with a northerly extension of the Intertropical Convergence Zone and a tropical wave developed a closed circulation on September 15. It moved northeastward due to the influence from nearby Hurricane Lane, and organized enough to be declared Tropical Depression Fourteen-E on September 16 while located about 500 miles southwest of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. It quickly strengthened, and organized into Tropical Storm Miriam later that day. After reaching a peak intensity of 45 mph (70 km/h), vertical wind shear and cooler waters rapidly weakened the storm, and the circulation decoupled from the convection on September 17. After turning more towards the north, Miriam weakened to tropical depression status, and on September 18 it degenerated to a remnant low. The remnant circulation turned to the northwest, then to the east, and dissipated on September 21 a short distance west of Baja California. No deaths are damage are associated with Miriam, and only one ship recorded winds of over tropical storm force near the center. ### Tropical Depression Two-C On September 19, an area of disturbed weather associated with the Intertropical Convergence Zone became sufficiently organized to be designated Tropical Depression Two-C. Initially, it was thought that the depression formed from the remnants of Kristy, although subsequent analysis confirmed they were two separate systems. Initially, the depression was in an area of favorable conditions, with little wind shear and warm waters. As a result, the CPHC predicted significant strengthening to at least hurricane status. Instead, a high-pressure system to its north increased wind shear over the depression, causing the convection to become removed from the center. The depression weakened into a remnant low on September 20, never reaching tropical storm status. ### Tropical Depression Three-C During September, El Niño conditions became established across the Pacific, which produced an area of warmer waters along the International Date Line. A few days after Tropical Depression Two-C dissipated, another area of disturbed weather formed, and although it was disorganized, it was also persistent. The CPHC initiated advisories on Tropical Depression Three-C on September 26 after a circulation was evident in the system. Strong wind shear prevented any development, and the system dissipated on September 27. ### Tropical Storm Norman Early in October, a low-pressure system began to organize to the west of the Mexican coast, and on October 9 it developed into Tropical Depression Fifteen-E. It strengthened into a tropical storm the next day, but strong wind shear and low sea-surface temperatures hindered development. Norman slowly began to weaken, and on October 11 it degenerated into a remnant low-pressure area. Turning eastward, the system combined with a new tropical disturbance off the southwest Mexican coast, and slowly began to reorganize. The system was re-designated a tropical depression on October 15 just south-southeast of Manzanillo, Colima, although within a few hours it again dissipated. The storm brought heavy rainfall to southwestern Mexico, peaking at 6.35 inches (161 mm) in La Villita, Michoacán. The rainfall caused flooding and mudslides around Acapulco, affecting 170 homes, of which 20 were destroyed. About 300 hectares (740 acres) of crop fields sustained damage. Initially there were two people missing; however, a subsequent report indicated there were no casualties associated with the storm. ### Tropical Storm Olivia On September 18, a tropical wave exited Africa and later crossed into the eastern Pacific on September 29 without development. Convection increased in the Pacific along the wave axis, spawning a broad low-pressure area on October 5. Despite the presence of wind shear, it organized enough for the NHC to initiate advisories on Tropical Depression Sixteen-E on October 9 about 1,360 miles (2,190 km) to the west-southwest of the southern tip of Baja California. Influenced by a high-pressure system, the depression drifted northward. Six hours after being upgraded to a tropical storm, Olivia attained peak winds of 45 mph (70 km/h), although the convection was limited to its northern side due to wind shear. On October 11, the convective activity diminished and Olivia weakened to tropical depression status. Olivia deteriorated into a remnant low on October 13. It moved towards the east-southeast, and on October 15 was absorbed into the remnants of Tropical Storm Norman. Olivia never affected land. ### Tropical Depression Four-C In the middle of October, the Intertropical Convergence Zone extended across the central Pacific Ocean, resembling an extension of the monsoon trough. An area of disturbed weather formed well to the southwest of Hawaii, organizing slowly for several days. Late on October 13, after the development of a low-level circulation and persistent convection, the CPHC classified the system as Tropical Depression Four-C about 750 mi (1,210 km) southwest of Honolulu, Hawaii. Upon being classified, the depression was located in an unusual steering flow that caused it to track eastward. Due to the approach of an upper-level trough, it was expected to dissipate quickly from wind shear, although forecasters noted the possibility for the trough to provide an outflow channel, which might allow strengthening. On October 14, strong wind shear removed the convection completely from the center, and the system degenerated into a remnant low. The remnant circulation continued slowly eastward, dissipating on October 16. Concurrently, the convection tracked northeastward ahead of the upper-level trough, which contributed to heavy rainfall and flooding on the island of Hawaii on October 17. The rainfall event coincided with the 2006 Kiholo Bay earthquake striking the area. ### Hurricane Paul Hurricane Paul developed from an area of disturbed weather on October 21, and slowly intensified as it moved into an area of warm waters and progressively decreasing wind shear. Paul attained hurricane status on October 23, and later that day it reached its peak intensity of 105 mph (170 km/h), a strong Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson scale. A strong trough turned the hurricane to the north and northeast into an area of strong vertical shear, and Paul weakened to a tropical storm on October 24, later passing just south of the Baja California Peninsula. Paul weakened to a tropical depression on October 25 a short distance off the coast of Mexico, and after briefly turning away from the coast it made landfall on northwestern Sinaloa on October 26. Paul was the third hurricane to threaten western Mexico in the season, the others being Hurricanes John and Lane. Rough surf killed two people along Baja California Sur, while two deaths from flooding were reported in Sinaloa. Paul dropped moderate rainfall across mainland Mexico, including a 24-hour total of 2.28 inches (58 mm) in Mazatlán, Sinaloa. Damage totaled more than \$35 million (2006 MXN, \$3.2 million 2006 USD). ### Tropical Depression Eighteen-E The origins of Tropical Depression Eighteen-E were from a tropical wave that exited the coast of Africa on October 7. It briefly spawned a low-pressure area as the wave continued westward without development. On October 20, the wave entered the Pacific Ocean, developing an area of thunderstorms about four days later. By 1200 UTC on October 26, a tropical depression formed about 155 mi (250 km) south of Manzanillo. Initially, Tropical Depression Eighteen-E was located in an area of light wind shear, and the NHC anticipated further organization and strengthening to near hurricane status. The tropical depression initially maintained a steady westward motion away from the Mexican coastline, due to a ridge north of the cyclone. By October 17, convection had decreased, and the depression was not forecast to intensify as much. Possibly due to intrusion of dry air, the circulation became exposed from the thunderstorms, and having weakened, it turned to a southward drift. By 0000 UTC on October 28, the system had weakened to a non-convective remnant low, which dissipated the following day. ### Tropical Storm Rosa A tropical wave exited western Africa on October 22 and continued westward into the Pacific on November 2, spawning a tropical depression on November 8 about 440 mi (710 km) south of Manzanillo, Colima. Environmental conditions appeared favorable, although wind shear removed the convection from the circulation. Throughout its duration, the storm maintained a northwest track through a weakness in a subtropical ridge. By November 9, a new area of convection persisted near the center, and a banding feature formed. Despite the shear, the depression was upgraded to Tropical Storm Rosa, although the shear prevented intensification beyond its peak of 40 mph (65 km/h). Rosa remained a tropical storm for only 18 hours, becoming a tropical depression early on November 10 and dissipating later that day. Rosa was the first tropical storm in the basin to develop during November since 2000, and was also the first tropical depression to form in the month since 2002's Tropical Depression Sixteen-E. No impact was reported from the storm. ### Tropical Depression Twenty-E A tropical wave moved off the western coast of Africa on October 21, briefly developing two weak low-pressure areas before the wave crossed into the Pacific Ocean on November 1. Thunderstorm activity slowly increased as the wave interacted within the Intertropical Convergence Zone. After a curved band of convection developed, it is estimated the system formed into Tropical Depression Twenty-E around 0000 UTC on November 11, about 550 mi (890 km) southwest of Manzanillo. Throughout its duration, the depression never completely separated from the Intertropical Convergence Zone. When the NHC issued its first advisory on the depression, the agency predicted slight intensification to tropical storm status and for the depression to last at least two days. This was due to a forecast of gradually increasing wind shear after the first 24 hours. Instead, the circulation became very elongated; it is estimated the cyclone degenerated into a trough by late on November 11. ### Hurricane Sergio Just days after Tropical Depression Twenty-E degenerated into an open trough, Tropical Depression Twenty One-E developed from a tropical wave on November 13 about 460 miles (740 km) south of Manzanillo, Colima. It steadily intensified as it tracked southeastward, reaching peak winds of 110 mph (175 km/h) on November 15. Subsequently, it began to weaken due to increased wind shear as it turned to the north. Sergio later turned to the west, remaining well off the coast of Mexico, and it dissipated on November 20 about 320 miles (510 km) west-northwest of where it originally formed. Sergio produced light rainfall along the coast of Mexico, though its effects were minimal. The formation of Sergio marked the 2006 season as the most active in 12 years and the second season in which more than one tropical storm formed in November, after 1961. Sergio set records for the month of November in the basin. At the time, it was considered the strongest hurricane to form in the month; although it has since dropped to third after Sandra from 2015, and Kenneth from 2011. It is however, still considered the longest-lived November Pacific tropical cyclone with a duration of seven days. ### Other system On October 28, 2006, a cut-off extratropical cyclone stalled over the northeast Pacific Ocean and began to strengthen. By October 31, the storm had acquired tropical characteristics, including an eye, convection, and a warmer-than-average core. The system reached peak intensity on November 1, before slowly weakening and looping towards the Pacific Northwest. The system made landfall in Washington state on November 3, before rapidly weakening and dissipating on the next day. During the duration of the storm, the system was known as Storm 91C (or INVEST 91C). The storm's true nature still remains controversial among meteorologists today, due to disputes over the storm's exact structure and whether or not it had obtained tropical or subtropical characteristics. Because the storm was not within the area of responsibility of the National Hurricane Center or the Central Pacific Hurricane Center, the storm was never assigned a name. ## Storm names The following names were used for named storms that formed in the northeast Pacific in 2006. The same list was used in the 2000 season. There were no names retired from the northeast Pacific list. Therefore, the same list was reused in the 2012 season. For storms that form in the Central Pacific Hurricane Center's area of responsibility, encompassing the area between 140 degrees west and the International Date Line, names are used in a series of four rotating lists. The next four names that were slated for use in 2006 are shown below, however only the name Ioke was used. ### Retirement The name Ioke was retired from the north-central Pacific list by the World Meteorological Organization in the spring of 2007 and replaced with Iopa. During the 61st Interdepartmental Hurricane Conference, the Hawaii State Civil Defense requested the retirement of the name Daniel, citing that the storm had become memorable due to threat of damage. However, the request was denied, as the name remains on the tropical cyclone naming list. ## Season effects This is a table of all the storms that formed in the 2006 Pacific hurricane season. It includes their duration, names, intensities, areas affected, damages, and death totals. Deaths in parentheses are additional and indirect (an example of an indirect death would be a traffic accident), but were still related to that storm. Damage and deaths include totals while the storm was extratropical, a wave, or a low, and all the damage figures are in 2006 USD. ## See also - Tropical cyclones in 2006 - List of Pacific hurricanes - Pacific hurricane season - 2006 Atlantic hurricane season - 2006 Pacific typhoon season - 2006 North Indian Ocean cyclone season - South-West Indian Ocean cyclone seasons: 2005–06, 2006–07 - Australian region cyclone seasons: 2005–06, 2006–07 - South Pacific cyclone seasons: 2005–06, 2006–07
1,866,473	Arthur Morris	1,165,135,884	Australian cricketer (1922–2015)	[ "1922 births", "2015 deaths", "Australia Test cricket captains", "Australia Test cricketers", "Australian Army personnel of World War II", "Australian Army soldiers", "Australian Cricket Hall of Fame inductees", "Australian Members of the Order of the British Empire", "Australian cricketers", "Cricketers from Sydney", "D. G. Bradman's XI cricketers", "International Cavaliers cricketers", "New South Wales cricketers", "People educated at Canterbury Boys' High School", "People educated at Newcastle Boys' High School", "Sport Australia Hall of Fame inductees", "Sportsmen from New South Wales", "St George cricketers", "The Invincibles (cricket)", "Wisden Cricketers of the Year" ]	Arthur Robert Morris MBE (19 January 1922 – 22 August 2015) was an Australian cricketer who played 46 Test matches between 1946 and 1955. An opener, Morris is regarded as one of Australia's greatest left-handed batsmen. He is best known for his key role in Don Bradman's Invincibles side, which made an undefeated tour of England in 1948. He was the leading scorer in the Tests on the tour, with three centuries. His efforts in the Fourth Test at Headingley helped Australia to reach a world record victory target of 404 on the final day. Morris was named in the Australian Cricket Board's Team of the Century in 2000 and was inducted into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame in 2001. In his youth, Morris excelled at rugby union as well as cricket, being selected for the state schoolboys' team in both sports. Originally trained in spin bowling, Morris developed as a batsman during his teens and during the 1940–41 season became the first player in the world to score two centuries on his first-class debut. His career was interrupted by the Second World War, during which he served in the Australian Army and gained selection in its rugby union team. Upon the resumption of cricket in 1946, Morris made his Test debut against England and quickly made himself a core member of the team. He made a century in his third match and scored twin centuries in the following Test, becoming only the second Australian to do so in an Ashes Test. His rise was such that he was made a selector during the Invincibles tour after only 18 months in the team. After the 4–0 series win over England, which was Bradman's farewell series, Morris became Australia's vice-captain and was expected to be its leading batsman. He started well, scoring two centuries during Australia's first series in the post-Bradman era, a tour to South Africa that saw Australia win the Test series 4–0. By the end of the South African tour, Morris had amassed nine Test centuries and his batting average was over 65, but thereafter his form declined. Australia increasingly fell on hard times as the core of Bradman's team aged and retired. Morris was overlooked for the captaincy and then briefly dropped as his cricketing prowess waned. His career ended after his first wife became terminally ill. Later in his life, Morris served as a trustee of the Sydney Cricket Ground for over twenty years. In 2017, Morris was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame. ## Early years The son of a schoolteacher who played for Waverley Cricket Club in Sydney as a fast bowler, Morris was born on 19 January 1922 in the Sydney seaside suburb of Bondi and spent his early years in the city. His family moved when he was five to Dungog, then to Newcastle before returning to Sydney in the suburb of Beverly Hills. By this time, Morris' parents had separated. His father encouraged him to play sports and he showed promise in a variety of ball sports, particularly cricket, rugby and tennis. Aged 12, he gained a place as a slow bowler for Newcastle Boys' High School's cricket team. On Saturday afternoons he played for Blackwall, a team in the local C-grade competition. Morris attended Canterbury Boys' High School from 1936 to 1939 where he represented the school at cricket and rugby union, and was appointed school captain (head boy) in Year 11. In his last two years of high school, he was selected for Combined High Schools teams in both crickets—as captain in both years—and rugby. At the age of 14, he made his debut for St George, and in 1937–38 he was elevated to the second XI. In a club under-16 competition, the A W Green Shield, Morris took 55 wickets at 5.23, which remains a record. The following year he was selected for the team as a batsman after captain Bill O'Reilly decided that his left-arm unorthodox spin had less potential. O'Reilly described him as "moderately skilled" in bowling and noted that he would not have many opportunities with the ball as future Test bowling world record holder Ray Lindwall was also in the team. O'Reilly quickly moved Morris up to the No. 6 position in the batting order. After scoring a century against Sydney University, O'Reilly moved him into the opening position without prior notice, where he remained. While still at high school, Morris was selected to play for the New South Wales Second XI against Victoria in January 1939, his first taste of representative cricket. However, Morris made only six and three and did not gain further honours. After finishing his secondary education at the end of 1939, Morris became a clerk in the Prosecutions Branch at Sydney Town Hall. He was chosen to make his debut, aged 18, for New South Wales against Queensland at the Sydney Cricket Ground in the 1940–41 season, a season in which there was no Sheffield Shield cricket due to the Second World War. He scored centuries in both innings, becoming the first player in the world to achieve the feat on debut. Morris made 148 in the first innings and participated in a second wicket partnership of 261 with Sid Barnes; he added 111 in the second innings, completing his feat on 28 December. He gave chances that were dropped early in both innings, but impressed observers with his ability to remain settled. New South Wales went on to win by 404 runs. He was unable to maintain the standard of his debut in later performances, but finished the war-shortened season with 385 runs at a strong average of 55.14 in four matches. ## Second World War and Test debut Morris' first-class cricket career was interrupted by the Second World War when domestic matches were cancelled at the end of the season. On 5 January 1943, he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force, and served in the South West Pacific, mostly in New Guinea with the 8th Movement Control Group, part of the Royal Australian Corps of Transport. During his time in the army, Morris spent more time playing rugby union than cricket. The coach of the Army and Combined Services rugby team, Johnny Wallace, regarded him as the "best five eighth in Australia". He remained a Private throughout his military service and was demobbed on 18 June 1946. Despite his eligibility, Morris was not selected for the Australian Services XI in 1945, something that baffled commentators, although he did play a one-off military match in 1943. He returned to his pre-war clerical job at the Sydney Town Hall, but soon switched to a job with motor parts distributor Stack & Company, which allowed him more time for cricket commitments. Morris was automatically restored to the Sheffield Shield team in 1946–47 upon the resumption of competition. He made 27 and 98 in his first match against Queensland, and was selected for an Australian XI match against Wally Hammond's touring MCC team when first-choice opener Bill Brown was injured. In what was effectively a trial for the Test team, Morris scored 115 and featured in a 196-run partnership with Test captain Don Bradman, who scored 106. It was the beginnings of a productive cricketing relationship. Morris said of Bradman: "He was marvellous. If you had a problem, you could go to him and sort it out. I found him relaxed and straightforward". After scoring 81 for New South Wales in his next match, against the MCC, Morris was selected to make his Test debut in the First Test against England in Brisbane. He failed in his first two Tests, managing just two and five, although Australia won both matches by an innings. Despite being criticised for having a "loose technique" by Neville Cardus, Bradman advised Morris to stick to his approach. Morris responded by scoring 83 and 110 in the traditional pre-Christmas match between New South Wales and Victoria at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the top score in both innings. However, he was unable to prevent an innings defeat. He was retained for the Third Test in Melbourne, but made only 21 in the first innings. If he had failed a fourth time, it could have allowed another player to claim his position, but Morris secured his place with his maiden Test century, scoring 155 in the second innings, and making the most of an ideal batting surface. After defending stoutly at the beginning of the innings, Morris accelerated his scoring, employing a wide range of strokes to reach 150 in six hours. Morris managed a century in each innings of the Fourth Test at Adelaide, making 122 and 124 not out in extremely hot weather. This made him the second Australian after Warren Bardsley to score two centuries in one Ashes Test. With Australia having fallen to 2/24 at the end of play on the second day in response to England's first innings score of 460, Morris combined with Lindsay Hassett, who scored 78, to lead a recovery. After England's Denis Compton scored his second century of the match in the second innings, Morris put in another determined effort to ensure a draw. With the match secure, Morris played more aggressively towards the end in an unbeaten 99-run partnership with Bradman. Ahead of the final Test, Morris made 44 and 47 for New South Wales in a drawn match against Hammond's men. He made 57 in the Fifth Test in Sydney to end the series with an aggregate of 503 runs, at an average of 71.85, second only to Bradman. He ended his first full first-class season with 1234 runs at 68.55, partnering Sid Barnes at the top of the order at both state and international level. E. W. Swanton wrote "Morris set himself up as a No. 1 for Australia for a while to come ... Arthur at his best looked out of the top draw, a left-hander with all the strokes ... and what the figures do not say is that few more charming men have played for Australia , and I cannot name one who was more popular with his opponents". ## Invincibles tour Morris started the 1947–48 Australian season strongly, scoring 162 in his second match as New South Wales crushed the touring Indians by an innings ahead of the Tests. He played in the first four Tests, scoring 45 and an unbeaten 100 in the Third Test victory in Melbourne. In that match, he dropped down the order as Bradman used the tail-enders to protect the batsmen from a sticky wicket. Morris then came in and combined with Bradman in a double century stand. The selectors wished to trial other possible choices for the 1948 tour of England, including Brown in the opening position, so wither Barnes or Morris had to sit out. This was decided by a coin toss. Morris lost and did not play; he was given 10 pounds as compensation. Morris thus ended the series with 209 runs at an average of 52.25. Australia won the final Test to seal the series 4–0, and Morris ended the season with 772 runs at 55.14. He scored four consecutive half-centuries for his state as they reclaimed the Sheffield Shield from Victoria. For the first two Tests, Morris was paired with the recovered Brown, before the latter was replaced by Barnes. Morris, the recently appointed co-captain of New South Wales, had greatly impressed Australia captain Don Bradman, to the extent that Bradman made Morris one of the three selectors for the 1948 tour of England. Morris was a key part of Bradman's inner circle in planning for the tour. Bradman had long harboured the ambition of touring England without losing a match. Morris marked his first-class debut on English soil with a fluent 138 against Worcestershire, which was scored in only four hours and made him the first Australian centurion on tour. Morris found batting difficult for the first few weeks as he adapted to the alien batting conditions, reaching 50 only twice in his next nine innings with a total of 223 runs at 24.77; Morris sometimes attempted to drive balls pitched just short of a good length, and if they reared suddenly he was liable to be caught. Morris was worried about edging the ball to the slips cordon and had become fidgety and shuffled across the crease. He rectified this, and success followed with 184 against Sussex in the final match before the First Test. Five more centuries before the end of the season. Morris' Test form peaked in the series, heading the Test averages with 696 runs at 87.00, and he was the only player to compile three Test centuries. After scoring 31 and 9 in the First Test victory at Trent Bridge, he was criticised by former Australian Test opener Jack Fingleton, who believed Morris was shuffling across the crease too much instead of playing from the back foot. Morris scored 60 against Northamptonshire, before scoring 105 and 62 in the Second Test at Lord's to help Australia take a 2–0 series lead. Fingleton called the innings "a pretty Test century in the grandest of all cricket settings"; the knock was noted for powerful, well-placed cover drives. Morris featured in century partnerships with Bradman in the first innings and Barnes in the second innings, laying the foundation of a lead of 595 runs. After being rested against Surrey, the following match was against Gloucestershire at Bristol, where in only five hours, Morris scored his career best of 290. Having lost the opening two games of the series, England were contemplating changes to their team: Tom Goddard was tipped to replace Jim Laker as the off spinner, having been in prolific form in county cricket. The English hoped that he would be the weapon to cut through Australia's strong batting line-up. Morris' assault ended Goddard's hopes of Test selection. His innings was highlighted by his quick assessment of the pitch of the ball, followed by decisive footwork. Morris confidently went out of his crease when the ball was of a full length and rocked onto the back foot to drive and cut if it was short. On many occasions, he hit Goddard on the full. Unable to contain Morris, Goddard packed the leg side field and bowled outside leg stump. Morris stepped down the wicket, repeatedly lofting the ball over the off side. Morris reached his century by lunch and was 231 by the tea interval. By the time he was dismissed, he had struck 40 fours and a six. Fingleton said that "Morris flayed it [the home team's bowling] in all directions", while former English Test paceman Maurice Tate said "Tom [Goddard] is not used to batsmen using their feet to him ... the county batsmen diddle and diddle [shuffle about indecisively instead of quickly moving into position and attacking] to him and that gets him many wickets." Australia promptly crushed the locals by an innings. Morris followed his effort in Bristol with two half centuries, 51 and 54 not out in the drawn Third Test. He then struck 108 against Middlesex in a tour match. Morris' century meant that he had amassed 504 runs in just over a week of cricket. The Fourth Test at Headingley in Leeds saw Morris at his finest; England started well with 496 in the first innings and took a 38-run lead as Australia replied with 458, Morris contributing only six. England declared at 8/365, leaving Australia to chase 404 runs for victory. At the time, this would have been the highest ever fourth innings score to result in a Test victory for the batting side. Australia had only 345 minutes to reach the target, and the local press wrote them off, predicting that they would be dismissed by lunchtime on a deteriorating wicket expected to favor the spin bowlers. Morris and Hassett started slowly, with only six runs in the first six overs. When Laker was introduced to exploit the spin, 13 runs were taken from his first over, but only 44 runs came in the first hour, leaving 360 runs needed in 285 minutes. Just 13 runs were added in the next 28 minutes before Hassett was dismissed. Bradman joined Morris with 347 runs needed in 257 minutes. Bradman signalled his intentions on his first ball by driving Laker against the spin for a boundary. Morris promptly joined Bradman in the counter-attack, hitting three consecutive fours off Len Hutton's bowling as Australia reached lunch at 1/121. Upon resumption, Morris severely attacked Denis Compton's bowling. Morris struck seven fours in two overs of what Fingleton called "indescribably bad bowling". He reached the 90s just 14 minutes after the interval and hit another boundary to reach his century in just over two hours. Morris had added 37 runs in the 15 minutes since lunch. He had become the first Australian to hit 20 boundaries in his reaching his century in a Test in England. This forced English captain Norman Yardley to replace Compton, and Australia reached 202—halfway to the required total—with 165 minutes left. When Bradman suffered a fibrositis attack, Morris had to shield him from the strike until it subsided. Morris passed his century and Australia reached tea at 1/288 with Morris on 150. The pair had added 167 during the session. Morris was eventually dismissed for 182, having survived multiple chances and partnered Bradman in a partnership of 301 in 217 minutes. He struck 33 fours in 290 minutes of batting. Australia proceeded to accumulate the remaining 46 runs to secure the victory by seven wickets. Morris was the batsman at the other end of the pitch in the Fifth Test at The Oval when Bradman was famously bowled by Eric Hollies for a duck in his final Test innings. Morris went on to score 196 in an innings noted for his hooking and off-driving before finally being removed by a run out as Australia reached 389. He scored more than half the runs as the rest of the team struggled against the leg spin of Hollies, who took five wickets. With England having been bowled out for 52 in their first innings, Australia sealed the series 4–0 with an innings victory. Morris took four catches, including a famous dismissal of Compton, who hooked the ball. Morris ran from his position at short square leg to take a difficult catch, described by Fingleton as "one of the catches of the season". In recognition of his performances, Morris was named as one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1949, described as "one of the world's best left-hand batsmen". Neville Cardus, his former critic, praised Morris' performance during the Invincibles tour as "masterful, stylish, imperturbable, sure in defence, quick and handsome in stroke play. His batting is true to himself, charming and good mannered but reliant and thoughtful." Morris ended the first-class tour with 1,922 runs at 71.18, despite being troubled by a split between the first and second fingers of his left hand caused by constant jarring from the bat as he played the ball. The wound often opened while he was batting, forcing him to undergo a minor operation, which sidelined him from some matches in the latter part of the tour. ## Vice-captain of Australia With the retirement of Bradman following the 1948 tour, Morris was regarded by commentators as Australia's leading batsman. In the 1948–49 season, he scored 1,049 runs at 66.81 in nine matches with six centuries and two fifties, taking his tally for the previous twelve months to 2,991 runs at 69.56, with 13 centuries. He scored a century in each of his first three matches for the season, making 120 against Queensland, 108 in Bradman's Testimonial and 163 against Western Australia. After a match without triple figures, he added 177 against Victoria. In a low-scoring match against Queensland, New South Wales started the final day needing 142 to win. Morris scored 108 in only 80 balls, steering his team to victory before lunch. Previously, only Bradman had scored a century before lunch in a Shield match. The innings took only 82 minutes and Morris promptly returned to his work as a salesman. Morris rounded off his Shield campaign with 110 against South Australia. The Western Australian Cricket Association attempted to lure Morris to switch states, but he declined. Morris was appointed Australian vice-captain under Lindsay Hassett for a five-Test tour of South Africa in 1949–50, narrowly missing out on the captaincy after a 7–6 vote by the board. He scored two centuries in six tour matches before the Tests. In his first Test in his new leadership role, Morris was out for a duck in Australia's only innings as the team won by an innings. He made starts in the next two Tests, passing twenty but failing to reach a half-century on all four occasions. In the second innings of the Third Test, Morris played fluently to reach 42 on a sticky wicket before stepping on his stumps. Australia looked set for their first Test defeat to South Africa, but an unbeaten Neil Harvey century salvaged a win. Morris returned to form by making 111 and 19 in the drawn Fourth Test in Johannesburg. In between, Morris struck two further centuries in the tour matches, against Border and Transvaal. He finished with a score of 157 in the Fifth Test in Port Elizabeth, laying the foundation for an innings victory and a 4–0 series result. He ended the series with 422 runs at 52.75. On either side of the final Test, Morris added centuries against Griqualand West and Western Province, and for the entire tour had amassed eight centuries, equal to Neil Harvey. At this stage of his career, he had amassed 1,830 runs in 19 Tests at an average of 67.77, with nine centuries. Following the tour, Morris received an invitation from the New South Wales branch of the ruling Liberal Party asking him to stand as a candidate in the forthcoming state elections, an offer that he declined. England toured Australia for the 1950–51 Ashes series and Morris started the season strongly. He scored 74, 101 and 78 not out as New South Wales won consecutive matches against Queensland. Morris then warmed up the Tests by amassing 168 for New South Wales against England. However, he made a poor start to the Test series by aggregating only 45 runs in the first three Tests, which included two ducks. Four of his five dismissals came at the hands of Alec Bedser, leading commentators to claim that Bedser had a "hoodoo" on Morris and he was called "Bedser's Bunny". In contrast to his struggles in the Tests, Morris played for an Australian XI and New South Wales in two matches against England during this period, and scored 100 and 105. In a match against arch-rivals Victoria, Morris hammered 182 and targeted Test teammate Jack Iverson, who responded poorly to being attacked. The match ended in a draw but stopped Victoria's challenge for interstate supremacy. The attack effectively ended Iverson's run at the top of cricket. However, on his 29th birthday, Morris again fell cheaply to Bedser in a tour match and he found himself eating at table 13 ahead of the next Test. Facing omission from the side, Morris recovered in the Fourth Test at the Adelaide Oval, where Hassett shielded him from Bedser. This helped Morris to settle in before batting for a day and a half to score 206, his highest Test score and only double century at the highest level. It constituted the majority of Australia's total of 371, which set up 274-run victory and a 4–0 series lead, and was his seventh Ashes century, ranking him second only to Bradman at the time for Ashes centuries. Bradman described the innings as "faultless – a terrific Test double hundred", comparing it to Morris's 182 and 196 at Headingley and The Oval during the 1948 Invincibles tour. Morris ended the series with a half-century in Melbourne in Australia's only loss, to give him a series aggregate of 321 runs at 35.66. It was the first Test loss he had played in after 24 matches for Australia. In contrast to his below par Test series, Morris was in strong form during the first-class season; he scored three centuries against England in the tour matches and compiled six in all to finish with 1,221 runs at 58.14. Despite these performances, the press continued to emphasise his perceived difficulties against Bedser. ## Difficulties against the West Indies The 1951–52 season saw the second tour to Australia by the West Indies. Morris experimented with his stance during the winter in response to criticism about his footwork when facing Bedser. Morris felt that his problems had arisen because he attempted to play excessively on the leg side. He opened his season by punishing the Queenslanders with a score of 253 in a Shield match and then scored 210 against Victoria. In the first of these innings, Morris had been ill but he struck 253 of his team's 400, with the last 50 coming in only 17 minutes of batting. His Test form was unimpressive though; he started steadily, with 122 runs in the first two Tests, which were won by Australia. The Third Test in Adelaide was Morris's first Test as captain, after Hassett withdrew on match eve due to a strained hip muscle. Australia were already one batsman short after the Australian Board of Control had earlier vetoed the selection of Barnes "for grounds other than cricketing ability", which was widely believed to be a result of Barnes' previous clashes with authority. Under board's regulations at the time, a replacement player needed the approval of the entire board. Since it was the weekend, some of the members could not be contacted by phone, and as a result Hassett could not be replaced by another specialist batsman from outside the twelve man squad. Instead, his place was taken by a specialist bowler already in the squad. This left Morris leading an extremely unbalanced team with four specialist batsmen and Miller as the all-rounder. Morris had a long tail with wicketkeeper Gil Langley and five specialist bowlers all with batting averages less than 23, and was reportedly "in a state of shock". Morris won the toss and elected to bat on a sticky wicket. Because of a leak in the covers, one end of the pitch was dry and the other was wet. Australia were bowled out for a low score of 82 but managed to restrict the West Indies to 105. In all 22 wickets fell on the first day, the most in a Test on Australian soil in 50 years. Morris proceeded to reverse the batting order in the second innings, with bowler Ian Johnson and Langley opening the batting. They were followed by bowlers Geff Noblet and Doug Ring, in order to protect the batsmen from a wicket that was still wet. Ring made an unexpected 67 and Morris scored 45 as Australia compiled 255, but it was not enough; the West Indies reached the target with six wickets in hand. After scores of 6 and 12 in the Fourth Test, he missed the final Test due to injury, ending an unproductive Test summer in which he managed only 186 runs at 23.25. The series was noted for Morris' difficulties against the spin duo of Alf Valentine and Sonny Ramadhin, who bowled left-arm orthodox and leg spin respectively. The pair was responsible for five of his eight dismissals on the tour. Morris did not play a match after the new year and ended the season with 698 runs at 53.69. He topped his state's Shield batting averages, leading from the front as New South Wales regained the title. ## Australia's decline The 1952–53 season started poorly for Morris. He was replaced by Keith Miller as state captain, despite having scored almost 700 runs at a fast rate in the previous Shield season at an average above 50, and leading his state to another title. As was the norm for the era, Morris was not informed personally and learned of his demotion second-hand. No official reason was given by the New South Wales Cricket Association, but it was speculated among the media that his penchant for wearing brightly coloured rubber-soled shoes could have upset the conservative administrators, and that Morris was too genial to be captain. The media made Morris a scapegoat for dwindling public attendances following the retirement of Bradman and lobbied for Miller, who they deemed to be more appealing to the public. Morris had led his state to two Shield triumphs, but remained national vice-captain ahead of Miller. Richie Benaud said that Morris "led the side just as well as Miller but in a less flamboyant manner". In spite of this, Morris started the new season consistently, scoring four fifties in his first five innings, including 55 and 39 in his state's victory over the touring South Africans ahead of the Tests. The on-field action against the South Africans brought no immediate upturn in Morris' Test fortunes. He made only one half-century and a total of 149 runs in the first three Tests as Australia took the series lead 2–1. In the Second Test, he had progressed to 42 when he drove Hugh Tayfield into a close fielder. The ball ballooned to mid-off and Tayfield ran back and dived parallel to the ball's trajectory and caught it. By the standards of the era, the catch was regarded as miraculous. He ended the series strongly, with 77 in the second innings of the Fourth Test in Adelaide, before making his best performances of 99 and 44 in Melbourne in the Fifth Test, which Australia lost by six wickets. Morris' 99 occurred when he was involved in a mix-up while batting with debutant Ian Craig, Australia's youngest ever Test cricketer. Morris decided to sacrifice his wicket for Craig's in a run out. His action meant that he had not scored a Test century for two years, and would have to wait another two years to reach the milestone again. Morris was widely praised for his unselfishness and his sacrifice for his new teammate. He ended the series with 370 runs at 41.11 and took his maiden Test wicket in Adelaide, that of John Watkins. The series ended 2–2, the first Test series in Morris' career that Australia had not won. Morris ended the season with 105 in a warm-up match before the tour of England and totalled 913 runs at 45.65 for the summer. In 1953, Morris returned to England, the setting for his three Test centuries five years earlier, for another Ashes series. In a tour opening festival match against East Molesey, Morris made 103 in eighty minutes. After the modest run-scoring of the previous three Test seasons, Morris warmed up in 10 lead-in matches that yielded a moderate return of 347 runs at 34.70. However, his performances in the first two drawn Tests, in which he struck three half-centuries, indicated that might be returning to his earlier form. He was unable to maintain his form however, and did not pass 40 in the last three Tests, ending the series with 337 runs at a modest average of 33.70. The teams were locked at 0–0 heading into the Fifth Test, and Hassett and Morris thought that the pitch at The Oval would favour fast bowling. However, they were mistaken, and Morris could manage only 16 and 26 as the hosts' spinners cut down the tourists, while their Australian counterparts watched from the stands. Denis Compton pulled Morris' spin for four to seal an English win by eight wickets. This meant that the hosts regained the Ashes for the first time in two decades with a 1–0 triumph, and Morris thus tasted a series defeat for the first time in his career. It was a low-scoring series, and Morris placed third in the Australian Test averages and aggregates, behind Hassett with 365 at 36.50. Morris' batting was regarded by commentators as being more carefree than during the Invincibles tour. He took his second and final wicket in Test cricket, that of Alec Bedser, in the Third Test at Old Trafford. Morris also struggled in the first-class matches, making 1,302 runs at 38.09 with only one century, which did not come until almost four months had elapsed on tour, against the Gentlemen of England. Morris placed third in the aggregates but only ranked sixth in the averages. He made many starts, with 11 fifties, but was only able to capitalise and reached triple figures only once. Speculation linked his difficulties on the field to his personal relationships: during the tour Morris had fallen in love with English showgirl Valerie Hudson; he spotted her when she was performing in the Crazy Gang vaudeville show at London's Victoria Palace. The team was also hindered by tension brought on by a generational divide. The senior players, Morris among them, were retired servicemen who were drinkers, while the younger players tended to abstain from alcohol. The seniors frequently stopped the team bus to drink at pubs, leaving their younger colleagues disgruntled at the fact that the squad travelled at around 10 miles per hour (16 km/h). ## Career twilight With the retirement of Hassett following the 1953 England tour, the Australian captaincy was open for competition. No international cricket was scheduled until 1954–55, so there was a full domestic season in 1953–54 for players to stake their claims. Morris started strongly with consecutive centuries against Queensland and South Australia, but was unable to maintain his form, passing fifty only twice in his remaining eight innings. He ended with 487 runs at 54.11 as New South Wales won the Sheffield Shield under Miller's leadership. Nevertheless, the Australian selectors indicated that they were considering Morris as a captaincy option by making him captain of Morris' XI, which played Hassett's XI in a testimonial match. Morris' XI won by 121 runs. ### 1954–55 Ashes At the start of the next season, Morris was not made Australian captain despite being the incumbent vice-captain. Instead, he remained as deputy as Victoria's Ian Johnson was recalled to the team and assumed the captaincy. There was speculation that the two Queensland board members voted for Morris, the three New South Wales delegates voted for Miller, while the remainder voted Johnson. When England returned to Australia in 1954–55, Morris made his first Test century in almost four years during the opening Test at Brisbane. After English skipper Len Hutton won the toss and controversially sent Australia in, Morris made 153 to lay the foundation for a score of 8/601 declared and an innings victory. This included a partnership of 202 runs with Neil Harvey. The pair scored at a rate of nearly four runs per over, despite both players being repeatedly struck by the bowling of Frank Tyson, who was regarded as the fastest bowler of his era. Those were the only centuries made by Australian batsmen for the entire series, and Morris was covered in bruises; he deliberately used his body to fend off short-pitched balls rather than risk a catch. In the Second Test in Sydney, Johnson and Miller were both unavailable due to injury; Morris led the team for the second and final time in Tests. The Australian Board of Control made the surprising move of appointing the young and inexperienced Richie Benaud as Morris' vice-captain for the match. Benaud, selected as a batsman, had scored just 195 runs at 13.92 in ten Test matches and was not a regular member of the team. Benaud noted that the situation was embarrassing and that Morris had asked him not to be offended if he sought advice from veteran players Ray Lindwall and Harvey, who had been Test regulars for seven years. Morris won the toss and elected to bat on a green pitch, in a match marred by time-wasting. Although Australia took a first innings lead, they lost the low-scoring match by 38 runs after a batting collapse in the face of a Tyson pace barrage on the final day. Aided by a powerful tailwind, Tyson bowled at extreme pace and the slips cordon stood 45 m away from the wicket. Morris had a poor personal performance, scores of 12 and 10, a disappointment amidst his team's defeat. He failed to pass 25 in either of the following Tests as Australia fell 3–1 behind with a hat-trick of losses and he was dropped for the Fifth Test, ending the series with 223 runs at 31.86. Aside from the First Test century, Morris struggled throughout the entire season, passing fifty on only one other occasion and managing only 382 runs at 31.83. ### 1954–55 West Indies tour Morris' international farewell was the 1954–55 tour of the West Indies. Prior to the tour, Miller replaced him as Australian vice-captain. He struck 157 against Jamaica in his first tour match, earning a recall to the Test team. He made 65 in the First Test victory in Kingston, Jamaica, before making his final Test century (111) in the drawn Second Test in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He made 44 and 38 in the Third Test win and then missed the Fourth Test with dysentery. He scored seven in his final Test innings in the Fifth Test, which Australia won by an innings to seal the series 3–0. Morris ended the Test series with 266 runs at 44.33. In his final tour in Australian colours, Morris totalled 577 runs at 57.45 in seven first-class matches. ### Retirement Returning to Sydney after the West Indian tour, Morris learned that his new wife Valerie had been diagnosed with breast cancer in his absence. She had concealed her illness until his return, fearing that it would distract him from his cricket. With his wife's condition deteriorating over the following year despite the removal of a breast, Morris retired at the age of 33, as he realised that his wife's condition was terminal and that their marriage would soon be over. Morris scored centuries on his first first-class appearances in four countries: England, South Africa, the West Indies and Australia, a record not equalled as of 1997. In general, he was known for scoring centuries in his debut appearance at many grounds. His eight centuries against England was second only to Bradman. He was a popular player, highly lauded by Australian and English commentators for both his character, goodwill and ability. His childhood mentor O'Reilly said that he was a "man worth knowing", while Tyson called him "one of cricket's patricians...endowed with a genteel equanimity, without seeming aloof or less than cordial and friendly". The English commentator John Arlott, known for rarely praising an Australian, said that Morris "was one of the best-liked cricketers of all time – charming, philosophical and relaxed". ## Later life With his wife's death imminent, Morris organised the couple's return to Britain with financial help from Hassett. He worked as a cricket reporter for London's Daily Express during the 1956 Ashes tour while his wife was reunited with her family for the last time. She died soon after they returned to Australia at the end of the tour, aged just 33. They had been married only 18 months. In the wake of his personal loss, Morris, known for his sincerity and high personal values, received many offers of work and financial assistance. With a reference from English cricketer Doug Insole, Morris joined British engineering company George Wimpey for a few years. He then moved back to Sydney to take up a public relations job with security group Wormald International where he worked until his retirement in the late 1980s. He was appointed to the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust in 1965 and served there for 22 years, eight of them as deputy chairman. During this time, the ground was modernised and the Bradman Stand erected. In 1968, Morris met and married his second wife Judith Menmuir. He was awarded the MBE in 1974 for services to sport. In late 1989, Morris and his wife retired to the town of Cessnock in the Hunter Region, north of Sydney. He continued to play tennis into his late seventies and enjoyed watching Test cricket although he refused to watch one-day cricket, introduced after his playing days, due to his preference for tradition. He was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1992. In 2001, he was inducted into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame alongside Bill Woodfull, the fourteenth and fifteenth players to be inducted. In 2000, he was named in the Australian Cricket Board's Team of the Century. Morris was named as an opening batsman in Bradman's selection of his greatest team in Test history. Bradman described him as the "best left-hand option to open an innings" and characterised his temperament as "ideal". Following the death of Sam Loxton in December 2011, Morris became Australia's oldest living Test cricketer, and after Norman Gordon's death in 2014 he became the third oldest surviving Test cricketer. Morris died on 22 August 2015 at the age of 93. His former Australian teammate Neil Harvey, the last surviving Australian member of the "Invincibles" tour, paid tribute to him as "one of the best players this country has produced" and said that "you wouldn't find a nicer bloke in the world". ## Playing style Morris was seen as an elegant and aggressive player, and is regarded alongside Clem Hill, Neil Harvey and Allan Border as one of Australia's greatest left-handed batsmen. Adept at playing against both pace and spin bowling, he was known for the variety of his shots on both sides of the wicket. Despite standing only five feet nine inches (1.75 m), opponents spoke of his imposing appearance and his apparent air of complete composure at the crease. He had the ability to decide on his stroke early in the ball's flight and employed an unusual defensive technique, shuffling across the stumps to get behind the ball. This created a perception that he was vulnerable to leg before wicket decisions and was vulnerable to losing his leg stump. Deft placement allowed him to pierce the gaps between fielders, and he was especially noted for his cover driving, square cutting and on-driving. Most of all, he was known for his back foot play, especially his pulling and hooking. According to cricket writer Ray Robinson, "no other post-war batsman has rivalled his smashing counter-attacks on bowling swift enough to give the toughest team the tremors...A menacing bouncer colliding with Morris' bat was like a rocky fist against an iron jaw." While many batsmen tended to evade deliveries aimed at the head, Morris was known for standing and hooking. In one interstate match, Miller, one of the world's leading pacemen, bowled an entire eight-ball over of bouncers. Morris hooked the five balls that he faced in the over for 4, 4, 4, 4 and 3. According to Bradman, Morris' success was due to his powerful wrists and forearms. Bradman interpreted Morris' unorthodox methods—he often defended with his bat not straight—as a sign of genius. Ian Johnson believed that Morris' idiosyncratic technique was a strength, as it disrupted any plans made by the opposition. Contrary to the accepted wisdom of the day, Morris had a penchant for lofting his drives, backing his ability to clear the infield. Benaud rated Morris alongside Neil Harvey as having the best footwork against spin bowling among batsmen after the Second World War. Morris was particularly known for his fast analysis of the length of the ball, and as a result, he quickly and decisively moved forward or back. Morris' productivity declined in the latter half of his career, something he put down to the break-up of his opening pairing with Barnes. Morris' partnerships with his later partners yielded less runs, leading him to remark that "When Siddy [Barnes] went, I lost a lot of support because he'd always get ones." Morris was also known for his unselfishness, often sacrificing his wicket after being involved in mix-ups while running between wickets, and he had a reputation for not attempting to finish not out to inflate his average. However, Morris was regarded as the "bunny" of English medium pace bowler Alec Bedser, who dismissed him 20 times in first-class cricket, including 18 times in Test matches. Bedser dismissed Morris more than any other bowler. Typically, Bedser took Morris' wicket with deliveries pitched on leg stump that moved across him. This perceived dominance is not borne out by statistics; Morris' average was 57.42 in the 37 Test innings in which he faced Bedser, and more than sixty in the 46 first-class innings when the two met. In their last meeting at Test level in 1954–55, Morris scored 153. The pair were very close friends, and Bedser frequently made the point of rebutting criticism of Morris' performance against him. Bedser noted Morris' gracious demeanour despite his struggles, recalling an incident during the 1950–51 season when Morris reached his century during a tour match against the English. Instead of thinking of his difficulties against Bedser, Morris commented on the plight of his English opponents who had suffered harder times. Morris stated that "Bob Berry hasn't got a wicket and John Warr hasn't taken a catch all tour so I'll see what can be done." Morris was then caught by Warr from Berry's bowling without adding to his score. Morris took only two wickets in Tests, one of them Bedser in 1953; he was rarely used as a bowler and was a reliable catcher. Despite his success, he was a pessimist who claimed to be low on self-confidence, saying that he was always surprised not to be dismissed for a duck. In an interview in 2000, he said, "I wish I had the confidence of some of the players today." After reaching Test cricket, Morris began smoking to relieve tension ahead of an innings. ## Test match performance
28,882,162	Dredd	1,172,333,758	2012 film directed by Pete Travis	[ "2010s British films", "2010s English-language films", "2010s dystopian films", "2012 3D films", "2012 science fiction action films", "Articles containing video clips", "British 3D films", "British science fiction action films", "Cyberpunk films", "DNA Films films", "English-language South African films", "Films about the illegal drug trade", "Films based on 2000 AD (comics)", "Films based on British comics", "Films directed by Pete Travis", "Films scored by Paul Leonard-Morgan", "Films set in apartment buildings", "Films set in the United States", "Films set in the future", "Films shot in Gauteng", "Films shot in the Western Cape", "Films with screenplays by Alex Garland", "IM Global films", "Judge Dredd", "Lionsgate films", "Live-action films based on comics", "Megacities in fiction", "Reboot films", "Reliance Entertainment films", "Science fiction crime films", "South African science fiction action films" ]	Dredd is a 2012 science fiction action film directed by Pete Travis and written and produced by Alex Garland. It is based on the 2000 AD comic strip Judge Dredd and its eponymous character created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. Karl Urban stars as Judge Dredd, a law enforcer given the power of judge, jury and executioner in a vast, dystopic metropolis called Mega-City One that lies in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Dredd and his apprentice partner, Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), are forced to bring order to a 200-storey high-rise block of apartments and deal with its resident drug lord, Ma-Ma (Lena Headey). Garland began writing the script in 2006, although the development of a new Judge Dredd film adaptation, unrelated to the 1995 film Judge Dredd, was not announced until December 2008. Produced by British studio DNA Films, Dredd began principal photography, using 3D cameras throughout, in November 2010. Filming took place on practical sets and locations in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Dredd was released on 7 September 2012 in the United Kingdom and on 21 September worldwide. Critics were generally positive about the film's visual effects, casting and action sequences, while criticism focused on excessive violence as well as a perceived lack of the satirical elements that are found in the source comic. Despite the positive critical response, the film earned just over \$41 million at the box office on an estimated budget of \$30–45 million. Dredd saw greater success following its home release, and has since been recognised as a cult film. The theatrical gross made a sequel unlikely, but home media sales and fan efforts endorsed by 2000 AD's publisher Rebellion Developments have maintained the possibility of a second film. ## Plot In 2080, most of the United States is a dystopic post nuclear war wasteland known as the Cursed Earth. On the east coast lies Mega-City One, a violent metropolis with 800 million residents and 17,000 serious crimes reported daily. The only force for order are the Judges, who act as judge, jury, and executioner. Judge Dredd is tasked by the Chief Judge with evaluating new recruit Cassandra Anderson, a powerful psychic who marginally failed the aptitude tests to become a Judge. In a 200-storey slum tower block called Peach Trees, drug lord Madeline "Ma-Ma" Madrigal executes three rogue drug dealers by having them skinned alive. They are infused with Slo-Mo (an addictive new drug that reduces the user's perception of time to 1% of normal) and thrown down to the atrium from the top floor. Dredd and Anderson are sent in to investigate and learn of a drug den, which they raid. They arrest a thug named Kay, whom Anderson's mind probe reveals to be the one that carried out the executions, and Dredd decides to take him in for questioning. In response, Ma-Ma's forces seize the tower's security control room and seal the building (closing its blast shield doors under the pretext of a security test) to prevent the Judges from leaving or summoning help. Ma-Ma orders Dredd and Anderson killed, forcing the Judges to fight their way through dozens of armed thugs. Arriving at the 76th floor, the Judges are assaulted by Ma-Ma and her men with rotary cannons that rip through the walls, killing numerous residents. The Judges breach an outer wall and call for backup. Meanwhile, Ma-Ma sends her henchman Caleb to search for the Judges. When they meet, Dredd throws Caleb off the tower in full view of Ma-Ma. Dredd suspects Ma-Ma is desperate to keep Kay quiet and beats him for information. Anderson reads Kay's mind and learns Peach Trees is the center of Slo-Mo production and distribution. Anderson suggests they hide while awaiting assistance, but Dredd insists they move up the tower and pursue Ma-Ma. Judges Volt and Guthrie respond to Dredd's call, but Ma-Ma's computer expert denies them entry by persuading them the security system is malfunctioning. A pair of armed teens confront Dredd and Anderson, allowing Kay to disarm and overpower Anderson. Kay then escapes with her as a hostage and takes her to Ma-Ma's base on the top floor. While Dredd works his way toward Ma-Ma, she calls in the corrupt Judges Lex, Kaplan, Chan, and Alvarez. The four relieve Volt and Guthrie from duty and are allowed into the building. Dredd encounters Chan and is suspicious that he does not ask about Anderson's status. Seeing his cover blown, Chan attacks Dredd but is killed. Meanwhile, Kay tries to execute Anderson with her own weapon, but the pistol's DNA scanner does not recognize him and explodes, taking his hand off. She escapes and later encounters Kaplan, whom she promptly kills after reading her mind. Elsewhere, Dredd kills Alvarez but runs out of ammunition. He is subsequently shot and injured by Lex, but Dredd stalls him long enough for Anderson to arrive and kill Lex. Anderson and Dredd obtain the code to Ma-Ma's apartment from her computer expert and confront her. Ma-Ma tells Dredd that if she dies, a device on her wrist will detonate explosives on the top floors, destroying the building. Because of this, Dredd predicts that the detonator's signal could not reach the explosives from the ground floor. He forces Ma-Ma to inhale Slo-Mo and throws her down the atrium to her death. In the aftermath, Anderson accepts that she has failed her evaluation by getting disarmed and leaves. The Chief Judge asks Dredd about Anderson's performance; he responds that she has passed. ## Cast - Karl Urban as Dredd: A famed and feared Judge. Producer Allon Reich described Dredd as "an extreme character, and he administers justice with an extreme lack of prejudice". Urban approached the producers about joining the film. He found the role challenging because the character never removes his helmet, requiring Urban to convey emotion without using his eyes. He viewed the character as an average man with an insanely tough job in a fragmenting society and likened Dredd's heroism to that of a fireman. The role also demanded physical preparation; Urban undertook intensive physical training to become a "beast of a man". He also underwent weapons and technical training to learn how to operate under fire, arrest criminals and breach doors. He insisted on performing his own motorcycle stunts for the film. He played Dredd with a raspy and harsh vocal tone akin to "a saw cutting through bone", which he found difficult to sustain. - Olivia Thirlby as Cassandra Anderson: A rookie Judge and genetic mutant with powerful psychic abilities. Anderson can sense the thoughts and emotions of others. Thirlby contrasted her character with Dredd's "black and white" perspective, describing Anderson as existing "in a grey area where everything is enhanced or clouded by the fact [that] she knows what is going on in the very interior of a person". She undertook weapons and combat training, learning to perform a roundhouse kick to make her believably physically commanding. The character was partially inspired by singer Debbie Harry. - Lena Headey as Madeline "Ma-Ma" Madrigal: A former prostitute turned drug lord and criminal kingpin who is the sole supplier of Slo-Mo, a new and addictive drug. Headey's performance was inspired by punk-rock singer Patti Smith. Reich described the character as someone who does "not care at all about what anybody thinks or feels and she will do, and behave, as she wants". Headey said: "I think of [Ma-Ma] like an old great white shark who is just waiting for someone bigger and stronger to show up and kill her ... she's ready for it. In fact, she can't wait for it to happen ... She's an addict, so she's dead in that way, but that last knock just hasn't come." Before Headey's casting, the character was described as a heavily made-up, scarred and obese older woman. - Wood Harris as Kay: Ma-Ma's clansman. Harris described the character as a villain, but one that sees himself as no worse than the Judges. Harris said: " ... Dredd goes around literally judging and killing people if they do wrong ... Anyone who goes against the system might end up the bad guy. So I think Kay has justified fighting that in his mind." The cast also includes: Domhnall Gleeson as the gang's unnamed computer expert; Warrick Grier as Ma-Ma's right-hand man Caleb; DeObia Oparei as TJ, Peach Trees' medic; Francis Chouler as Judge Guthrie, Daniel Hadebe as Judge Volt, and Rakie Ayola as the Chief Judge. Langley Kirkwood, Edwin Perry, Karl Thaning, and Michele Levin portray, respectively, the corrupt Judges Lex, Alvarez, Chan, and Kaplan. Dredd also features Junior Singo as Amos and Luke Tyler as Freel, young boys who confront Dredd; Jason Cope as Zwirner, the thug executed by Dredd during the opening scene; Joe Vaz as Big Joe, the thug that leads the confrontation outside of the med station; Scott Sparrow as Japhet, Anderson's first execution; and Nicole Bailey as Cathy, Japhet's wife, in whose apartment the Judges take refuge. ## Production ### Development Development of the film was announced on 20 December 2008, although writer Alex Garland had begun working on the script in 2006. British studio DNA Films produced the film, and partnered with sales agency IM Global to sell the worldwide distribution rights. By May 2010, this partnership saw IM Global and its owner Reliance Big Pictures agree to co-finance the 3-D project with a \$45 million production budget, and a schedule to begin filming in Johannesburg, South Africa in late 2010. Pete Travis was named as the film's director and Garland, Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich would produce it. Duncan Jones had previously been offered the role of director. In a 2010 interview, Jones said that his vision for the film was unconventional—describing it as weird, dark, and funny—and it did not mesh well with Garland's script. In September 2010, it was reported that the film would be titled Dredd. Pre-production commenced on 23 August 2010 at Cape Town Film Studios in Cape Town, South Africa. During the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con International in July, Urban confirmed that he had been offered the role of Judge Dredd, and on 18 August 2010, it was reported that Urban officially had the role. In September 2010, it was announced that Thirlby would play Dredd's telepathic rookie Cassandra Anderson. In the same month during the Toronto International Film Festival, the film attracted \$30 million in worldwide pre-sales to distributors in 90% of theatrical markets. The sales included a \$7 million deal with British distributor Entertainment Film Distributors. On 2 November 2010, Lions Gate Entertainment secured the North American distribution rights to Dredd. Headey joined the cast as drug-dealer Ma-Ma in January 2011. Judge Dredd creator John Wagner acted as a consultant on the film. In 2012, he confirmed that it was a new adaptation of the comic material and was not a remake of the 1995 adaptation Judge Dredd, which starred Sylvester Stallone. ### Writing Garland began writing Dredd during post-production of his other writing credit Sunshine, and completed his first draft while serving as an executive producer during filming of 28 Weeks Later. Garland's draft revolved around one of Dredd's main enemies, the undead Judge Death. He described the story as a "riff on the whole Judge system", but that it did not work because the Judge system had not yet been established and required too much knowledge about the Judge Dredd comic from the audience. He also considered the end result too surreal and extreme. From this script, Garland decided that the story needed to be more focused and grounded. He instead considered adapting some of the notable Judge Dredd storylines, including "Democracy" (1986) and "Origins" (2006). He decided to avoid these lengthy tales in favour of a shorter, day-in-the-life story about Dredd and his function as a cop in the dystopian environment of Mega-City One. When developing the Judge Dredd character, Garland tried to closely follow that of the comic-book character, who undergoes only small personality changes over a lengthy period of time. He said: "I didn't think Dredd could have a great epiphany, but there is definitely a change in him over the course of the movie. He makes a very clear statement at the beginning of the film which he then contradicts at the end. That's about as far as the shift goes." Garland intentionally gave the traditional character development to Anderson to compensate for Dredd's character stability. Discussing the film's setting within the Peach Trees Block tower, Garland said the buildings were "like micro city states ... you could live and die in those buildings". He also considered that the setting met Wagner's suggestion that the future portrayed in Dredd should relate to modern ways of living. Garland named the tower after a restaurant called "The Peach Tree" in Shrewsbury, England, where he first met with Wagner. The budget limited his ability to represent some of the comic aspects of Mega-City One, such as robots and aliens. Throughout the production, Garland would send his script to Wagner, who would revise some of the dialogue. Urban would then further revise the script during his performance. ### Design The filmmakers decided that Dredd should appear lean and fast like a boxer rather than bulky like "someone who spends hours sort of steroiding himself up." His Judge uniform was altered from the comic version; an extruded eagle statuette was removed from his shoulder pad to emphasise the outfit's functionality and give it a sense of realism. Garland said: "If you did a very faithful adaptation of the uniform you'd have someone who if he got stabbed in the stomach he'd be in big trouble. Dredd is out there on the frontline so he needed protection." Remaining faithful to the comic, Dredd's face, except for his mouth, is never shown and his helmet is not removed throughout the film. Urban said: "He is supposed to be the faceless representative of the law and I think that is part of his enigma ... You wouldn't get to the end of a Sergio Leone Western and go, 'God, I didn't even know the character's name!' It's irrelevant." Dredd's signature weapon, the "Lawgiver" was developed as a fully operational weapon based on a 9mm firing system, capable of firing ammunition and being changed from automatic to semi-auto fire. His motorcycle "Lawmaster" was a modified 500cc motorcycle. A large fairing was added over the motorcycle with machine guns, an extended wheel base and the largest functional tyres possible. The vehicle was also operational and Urban insisted on riding it himself rather than relying on green-screen visual effects. Wagner described the necessity of adaptation from the source material and said that the 1995 film's attempt to directly replicate the comic's motorcycle was unable to steer because the tyres were too large. Garland and VFX supervisor Jon Thum began developing the Slo-Mo concept sequences in 2009 during filming for Never Let Me Go. They experimented with an effect to replicate the visual effects of hallucinogenic drugs to see how long it could be used before it distracted the viewer from the story or action sequence. They continued to develop and modify the effect until the end of post-production, tweaking colours, colour saturation, image framing and camera motion. Slo-Mo scenes also feature a rainbow colour scheme and sparkle highlights to create an unreal and otherworldly effect. The filmmakers experimented with blood bags, prosthetics, shooting real bullets, and compressed air to see the effect of direct body hits in slow motion. In the finished film, compressed air was used to create impact ripples on flesh. Garland said the concept was inspired by nature documentaries that used high-speed photography to capture animals in slow motion. He said, "You see a whale or a shark breach the water ... then you'd stop thinking about the animal and you get transfixed by ... how water droplets connect and touch against each other. Somehow like a real [drug] trip, sort of stepping outside it but staying attached at the same time." He questioned whether the technique could be used with violence to make it purely aesthetic. He said: "Can it be so abstract that it becomes genuinely beautiful? ...really aesthetically beautiful even if someone is having their cheek blown out or their head crushing into concrete." Comic artist Jock provided concept art for the film design. ### Filming With a \$30–45 million production budget, filming began on 12 November 2010 in Cape Town and took approximately 13 weeks, with second unit photography occurring over seven weeks. Filming locations included Johannesburg and Cape Town Film Studios (Dredd was the first project filmed at the studio). The project involved a majority of Cape Town crew members and about 40 imported crew. The producers chose to film in South Africa because of the lowered cost of employing cast and crew compared to locations in Europe and North America, and government incentives that offered to rebate up to 25% of the production costs. The film was shot digitally and primarily in 3D using RED MX, SI2K and Phantom Flex high-speed cameras for the Slo-Mo sequences, producing 4,000 frames per second. Multiple camera rigs were used. Some 2D elements were converted to 3D in post-production. DNA Films' co-founder Andrew Macdonald engaged cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to manage the shoot; it was the first time Mantle had worked with 3D. The filmmakers wanted Dredd to have a realistic, visceral look, and drew inspiration from crime and gangster films. For scenes conveying the time and space altering effects of Slo-Mo, Mantle aimed to create images that would be beautiful but disorienting. Mega-City One and its high rise towers were created in Cape Town Film Studios. Finding a suitable set for the expansive Peach Trees atrium proved difficult, and the producers did not want to build an expensive set. While observing scouting photos of Cape Town, the filmmakers noticed a large three-walled external space that looked like an interior when filmed at night. A key sequence involving Ma-Ma and her gang firing rotary cannons across the atrium in their attempt to kill Judge Dredd required ten days of filming and eight different sets inside and outside the studio which were blended together with visual effects. Visual effects supervisor Jon Thum was unable to accompany a helicopter flight to obtain planned aerial shots of Johannesburg due to last-minute flight permissions; the resulting shots were non-specific and Thum had to pick out ones that could tell the story. Mantle had to develop new rigs to obtain close-up shots. Describing the aesthetic he aimed to achieve, he said: "I hope it will be more painterly. If we get it right, it will be a cross between Blade Runner and Clockwork Orange." Garland was a constant presence on the shoot; Urban turned to Garland for direction instead of Travis. ### Post-production The filmmakers experimented with the visuals of Mega-City One, including the design and positioning of the city's tower blocks, to create the impression that the city had risen out of the remains of another. They found that replicating the comic visuals of blocks close together made the blocks appear small. Instead they allowed more space between the buildings to emphasise the larger buildings and allow for the presence of roads and cars to allow for extrapolation outside of the picture. Outcrops and appendages were added to break up the buildings' straight lines. On 7 October 2011, the Los Angeles Times reported that Travis was prohibited from participating in the editing process following creative disagreements between producers and executives. Garland took over the editing process; his contribution was considered significant enough for him to seek a co-director credit—a situation considered unusual as Garland had never directed a film before and had not been in charge of any filming. The disagreement concerned a disapproval over the footage that Travis was providing. Although Travis was removed from the editing process, he was monitoring the progress of the film. On 10 October, Travis and Garland released a joint statement saying that they had agreed on an "unorthodox collaboration" before production began, that Travis was still involved in the film and that Garland was not seeking a co-director credit. In March 2018, Urban said that he believed Dredd should be considered Garland's directorial debut. ## Music Paul Leonard-Morgan wrote the film's industrial music score. Leonard-Morgan created music to suit the film's futuristic setting. He experimented with band-based music, but decided it sounded over-produced and too safe. He turned to electronic music and used 1980s-style synthesisers and modern sound modules to create various combinations and applied distortion and other effects to the result. Leonard-Morgan said, "I was looking to create a timeless score which couldn't be placed in any particular era. So it's ended up being a cross between a modern dance track and evocative soundscapes." For scenes conveying the effect of the Slo-Mo narcotic, he composed new music with real instruments and then slowed the songs down to match the visuals, such that one second of his composed score could last ten minutes (slowed to 0.17% of original). He then added additional real-time score to the slowed track. An unofficially altered Justin Bieber song served as inspiration for the Slo-Mo theme. Garland said that Portishead instrumentalist Geoff Barrow "sent me a link to a Justin Bieber song slowed down 800 times and it became this stunning trippy choral music." Morgan recreated the effect based on the modified track, which was used in the finished film. The film used Bieber's music as a temporary placeholder during editing before the score was finalised. The film also features songs by artists including: "Poison Lips" by Vitalic; "Dubstride" by Yann McCullough and Gemma Kicks; "Snuffbox" by Matt Berry; "Pontiac Moon" by Robert J. Walsh; and "Jubilee (Don't Let Nobody Turn You Around)" by Bobby Womack. ## Marketing In August 2012, the viral advertising site "Dredd Report" was launched, satirising the Drudge Report. The site featured a video condemning the use of Slo-Mo, and links to news about the film. A tie-in comic book was published; its plot serves as a prequel to the film's narrative and follows Ma-Ma's life as a prostitute, controlled by her pimp Lester Grimes. Ma-Ma forms a relationship with Eric—the creator of Slo-Mo. Lester kills Eric for interfering with his business, Ma-Ma castrates Lester with her teeth in retaliation and Ma-Ma takes over the Slo-Mo operation. The comic was written by Judge Dredd Megazine editor Matt Smith, drawn by 2000 AD artist Henry Flint and was released on 5 September 2012. An exclusive film poster featuring artwork by Jock was released by Mondo to promote the film's appearance at the 2012 Fantastic Fest in September 2012. Dredd's marketing campaign won a Golden Trailer Award for Best Thriller TV Spot for the trailer "Big Addicted", and received nominations for: Best Action TV Spot, Most Original TV Spot, Best Graphics in a TV Spot, Best Music TV Spot, and Best Action Poster and Most Original Poster for the Dredd motion poster. Reports indicate that Lionsgate contributed \$25 million to advertising and print costs. Urban has criticised the film's marketing campaign, saying that the film had "zero audience awareness. Nobody knew the movie was being released. Dredd represents a failure in marketing, not filmmaking." ## Release Dredd premiered at the San Diego Comic-Con International on 11 July 2012. It was also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on 6 September, and at the Fantastic Fest in late September. The film was first theatrically released on 7 September in the UK and on 21 September worldwide. A South African release followed on 28 September. ### Box office Dredd earned \$27.6 million from markets outside of North America and \$13.4 million from North America, for a total of \$41 million. In the UK, Dredd grossed £1.05 million (\$1.7 million) from 415 cinemas during its opening weekend. This made it the weekend's number-one film, the first film restricted to audiences over 18 years of age to do so since Saw 3D in 2010. In its second weekend, the film placed number five, earning £769,381. Dredd was primarily shown in 3D in the UK, and 2D screenings were notoriously limited as the distributor denied cinemas' requests for 2D prints; the decision was considered to have limited the film's audience where 2D was their preferred format. Dredd earned a total of \$6.9 million in the UK. In North America, pre-release tracking estimated that the film would gross between \$8 and \$10 million during its opening weekend based on its adult rating and the poor reputation of the 1995 adaptation. The film earned \$2.2 million on its opening day and finished the weekend in sixth place, grossing \$6.3 million from 2,506 cinemas—an average of \$2,514 per cinema. The largest demographic of the opening weekend audience was over the age of 25 (69%) and male (75%). The film's North American run ended on 1 November 2012, after 42 days. Outside of the UK and North America, Dredd had its most successful total gross takings in China (\$4.5 million), Russia (\$4 million), and Australia (\$2 million). ## Reception Since its premiere screening at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con International, Dredd received positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 80%, based on 171 reviews, with an average rating of 6.6/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Fueled by bombastic violence and impressive special effects, rooted in self-satire and deadpan humor, Dredd 3D does a remarkable job of capturing its source material's gritty spirit." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 60 out of 100, based on 30 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "B" on a scale of A+ to F. Some reviewers enjoyed its take on the titular character, IGN praising it as a "character study". Urban's acting was frequently praised, particularly his ability to perform a characterless figure. Entertainment Weekly's Darren Franich enjoyed his "credibly wry performance using little more than his gravelly, imitation-[Clint] Eastwood voice—and his chin". Indiewire argued that with the film, he "continues to distinguish himself as a versatile performer who turns mimicry into emotional meaning". Variety's Geoff Berkshire wrote the actor "does a fine job embodying the more mythic qualities of Dredd as an upright law enforcer no lowlife would want to confront". Thirlby's Anderson was also highlighted, such as by Berkshire for carrying the film's emotional story and said, "one of the film's true thrills comes in watching Thirlby effortlessly balance the conflict between a Judge's merciless duties and a psychic's compassionate understanding." The New Statesman's Laura Sneddon noted that Dredd passed the Bechdel test, lacking in sexism or misogyny and positively portraying female characters who are no weaker, more sexualised or shown less than their male counterparts. Sneddon described Anderson as repeatedly shown to have power over men who underestimate her, while Ma-Ma displays more intelligence and sadism than any of her male gang members, and neither woman interacts with the other on the basis of their gender. Many US newspaper critics were less taken with the film. Mark Olsen of the Los Angeles Times called it "a clunk-headed action picture" that "simply becomes a monotonous series of bad-guy confrontations". Frank Lovece of Newsday described it as a "soullessly gritty" film, which apart from one believable scene involving Thirlby, is "all tough-guy talk and humorless cynicism". Stephen Whitty of The Star-Ledger called it a "gray and ugly film", said that there was little to draw viewers in, and wrote that apart from the drug-induced slow-motion sequences, the film offers nothing new. The Hollywood Reporter's Stephen Dalton wrote that the "dark, ironic, very British humour of the original strip" was largely absent from the film and that "[t]he limited location, computer game-style plot and muted humour" of the film might disappoint some fans of the comic. Dalton also said that Urban's performance, while close to the comic, lacked something. Overall Dalton said, "[p]itched at the right level to please original fans, but still slick and accessible enough to attract new ones, [Dredd] feels like a smart and muscular addition to the sci-fi action genre." The visual effects and slow-motion sequences induced by Slo-Mo received broad praise. Berkshire said that they are notable and eye-catching with "impressively utilised 3D." Hewitt said the visuals were "genuinely surreal splashes of heightened colour that ... don't outstay their welcome. The film's use of 3D is often excellent (including the credits) and it really comes to life in the Slo-mo scenes". Dalton said the film "constantly impresses on a visual level, with a gritty style more akin to cult hits like District 9 or 28 Days Later than to standard Hollywood comic-book blockbusters." Dalton said, "[Mantle's] first venture into 3D is a blaze of saturated colours, gorgeous high-resolution close-ups and dazzling slow-motion sequences." Dredd won The Art of 3D award at the 2013 Empire Awards, and was nominated for Best British Film and Best Science-fiction/Fantasy. Judge Dredd creator John Wagner, who had been critical of the 1995 adaptation, gave a positive review of Dredd. He said: "I liked the movie. It was, unlike the first film, a true representation of Judge Dredd ... Karl Urban was a fine Dredd and I'd be more than happy to see him in the follow-up. Olivia Thirlby excelled as Anderson ... The character and storyline are pure Dredd." Dredd has been recognised as a cult film since its release. Some reviewers drew comparisons between Dredd and The Raid: Redemption, another action film released a few months earlier, noting that similar elements in setting, story, and characters made Dredd appear derivative. However, Garland and Urban explained that the timing of when the films were shot would have made plagiarism impossible. ### Accolades ## Home media Dredd was released on DVD, Blu-ray and Digital Download on 8 January 2013 in North America, and 14 January in the UK. The Blu-ray edition contains the 2D and 3D versions of the film and a digital copy. The DVD and Blu-ray editions contain seven featurettes: "Mega-City Masters: 35 Years of Judge Dredd", "Day of Chaos: The Visual Effects of Dredd 3D", "Dredd", "Dredd's Gear", "The 3rd Dimension", "Welcome to Peachtrees", and a "Dredd Motion Comic Prequel" narrated by Urban. During its first week on sale in the UK, Dredd was the number 1 selling DVD and Blu-ray. During the week of its release in North America, it was the number 1 selling DVD and Blu-ray with approximately 650,000 units sold, and Blu-ray units accounting for nearly 50% of that figure. It was also the best-selling digital download for that period. Sales spiked in the United Kingdom in June 2013, following a reported rumour that it could influence DNA Films' decision to pursue a sequel. By September 2013, Dredd was estimated to have earned approximately \$10 million in home media sales in North America, while in the UK it marked over 270 days in online-retailer Amazon's top 100 selling home media. By July 2017, this sales figure was estimated to have increased to \$20 million. ## Future At the London Film and Comic Con in July 2012, Garland said that a North American gross of over \$50 million for Dredd would make sequels possible and that he had plans for a trilogy of films. A second film would focus on the origins of Dredd and Mega-City One, and a third would introduce Dredd's nemeses, the undead Judge Death and his Dark Judges. In August 2012, Garland said that a Judge Dredd television series would be a positive future step for the series. In September 2012, Garland said that he would explore the "Origins" and "Democracy" storylines, would introduce characters Judge Cal and Chopper, and would pursue the concept that Judge Dredd is a fascist. That same month, Macdonald said that further films would be made in partnership with IM Global and would likely be shot in South Africa. In March 2013, executive producer Adi Shankar said that a sequel was unlikely. In May 2013, Urban said that a sequel was still possible, noting that the film had found an audience, and the response of fans could resurrect the project. Dredd fans on Facebook launched a petition calling for a sequel. In July 2013, 2000 AD endorsed the fan petition, supporting the campaign by printing advertisements in their publications, and by September 2013 it had attracted over 80,000 signatures. In April 2013, 2000 AD released an image teasing a continuation of the film in comic book form with a release date scheduled for September 2013. The comic, titled Dredd: Underbelly, was made available in Judge Dredd Megazine \#340 which was released on 18 September 2013. In October 2014, Shankar announced the production of an unofficial spinoff online series based on the Dark Judges that would be released later that month. The animated miniseries was titled Judge Dredd: Superfiend and all its six episodes were released on 27 October 2014 on YouTube. In March 2015, Garland said that a direct sequel would likely not happen in the near future, at least not with the crew involved in the original film. In 2016, Urban said that "conversations are happening" regarding a Dredd continuation on streaming services Netflix or Amazon Prime. In an interview in May 2016, Urban said that while the film's "mishandled" marketing strategy and "unfortunate" box office performance meant that it was "problematic" to try to make a sequel, "the success it has achieved in all post-theatrical mediums has definitely strengthened the argument in favour of a sequel." In May 2017, a television series named Judge Dredd: Mega-City One was announced to be in development by IM Global Television and Rebellion. In August 2017, Urban stated he was in discussion to star in the series.
35,742,993	Oerip Soemohardjo	1,149,449,711	Indonesian general (1893–1948)	[ "1893 births", "1948 deaths", "Commanders of the Indonesian National Armed Forces", "Indonesian generals", "National Heroes of Indonesia", "People from Purworejo Regency", "Royal Netherlands East Indies Army officers", "Royal Netherlands East Indies Army personnel of World War II", "World War II prisoners of war held by Japan" ]	General Raden Oerip Soemohardjo (; Perfected Spelling: Raden Urip Sumoharjo, 22 February 1893 – 17 November 1948) was an Indonesian general, the first chief of staff of the Indonesian National Armed Forces, and the interim Commander of the Indonesian National Armed Forces. He received several awards from the Indonesian government, including the title National Hero of Indonesia in 1964. He was also a recognized Catholic by the Holy See, by which Pope Paul VI dedicated a memorial chalice for him with a Latin inscription acknowledging his legacy. Born in Purworejo, Dutch East Indies, Raden Oerip Soemohardjo exhibited leadership skills from an early age. As his parents wanted him to become a regent, after elementary school Oerip was sent to the School for Native Government Employees in Magelang. His mother died during his second year at the school, and Oerip left to undertake military training in Meester Cornelis, Batavia (modern-day Jatinegara, Jakarta). Upon graduating in 1914, he became a lieutenant in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army; during almost 25 years of service he was stationed on three different islands and promoted several times, eventually becoming the highest-ranking Native officer in the country. Raden Oerip Soemohardjo resigned from his position in about 1938 after a disagreement with the regent of Purworejo, where he had been stationed. He and his wife Rohmah then moved to a village near Yogyakarta, where they established a large garden and villa. After Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940 Oerip was recalled to active duty. When the Empire of Japan occupied the Indies less than two years later, Oerip was arrested and detained in a prisoner-of-war camp for three and a half months. He spent the rest of the occupation at his villa. On 14 October 1945, several months after Indonesia proclaimed its independence, Oerip was declared the chief of staff and interim leader of the newly formed army. Working to build a united force from the fractured former military groups in the country, Oerip received little oversight owing to irregularities in the chain of command. On 12 November 1945 General Sudirman was selected as leader of the armed forces, while Oerip remained as chief of staff. The two oversaw almost three years of development during the Indonesian National Revolution, until Oerip resigned in early 1948 because of the political leadership's lack of trust in the army. His health deteriorated; he was already suffering from a weak heart, and he died of a heart attack a few months later. He was posthumously promoted to full general. ## Early life Oerip Soemohardjo was born Moehammad Sidik ("Little Muhammad") in his family's home in Sindurjan, Purworejo, Dutch East Indies (a colony of the Netherlands), on 22 February 1893. He was the first son born to Soemohardjo, a headmaster and son of a local Muslim leader, and his wife, the daughter of Raden Tumenggung Widjojokoesoemo, the regent of Trenggalek; the family later had two more sons, Iskandar and Soekirno, as well as three daughters. The boys were raised partly by servants, and at a young age Sidik began showing leadership qualities, commanding groups of neighbourhood children in fishing and games of football. The brothers attended the school for Javanese headed by their father, and as a result received special treatment; this led to them becoming complacent and frequently misbehaving. In his second year of school, Sidik fell from a candlenut tree and lost consciousness. After he awoke, his mother sent a letter to Widjojokoesoemo, who decided that Sidik's name was the cause of his misbehaviour. In reply, Widjojokoesoemo wrote that Sidik should be renamed Oerip, which means "alive". When he recovered fully, his family decided that the newly renamed Oerip – who continued to misbehave – should study at the local Dutch School for Girls (Europese Lagere Meisjesschool); the schools for boys were full and they hoped that the girls' school would improve Oerip's skill in Dutch, the language of the regime, as well as his temperament. After a year in the girls' school, in which Oerip became calmer, he was sent to a Dutch-run school for boys. However, his academic results continued to be poor. Beginning in his final year of elementary school, he often visited his friend's father, an ex-soldier who had served in Aceh for twenty years, to listen to the old man's stories, which inspired Oerip to join the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger, or KNIL). After passing an exam for would-be state employees and several months of preparations, Oerip moved to Magelang in 1908 to attend the School for Native Government Employees (Opleidingsschool Voor Inlandse Ambtenaren, or OSVIA); his parents intended for him to become a regent like his grandfather. The following year his brothers joined him. After his mother died in 1909, Oerip sank into a months-long bout of depression and became withdrawn. After finishing the year at OSVIA, he decided to enrol at the military academy in Meester Cornelis, Batavia (modern-day Jatinegara, Jakarta). He went there directly from Magelang, and told his brothers to inform their father, who disapproved of his son's choice. Soemohardjo initially attempted to bribe his son with 1,000 gulden to return to OSVIA, but eventually agreed to pay for Oerip's tuition. After his training, during which he found military life enjoyable, Oerip graduated from the academy in October 1914 and became a second lieutenant in the KNIL. ## Royal Netherlands East Indies Army After several days visiting his father in Purworejo, Oerip returned to Meester Cornelis where he took up a posting to Battalion XII. Even though he was the smallest man in the unit and the only native, he was placed in a position of leadership. A year and half later he was sent to Banjarmasin, Borneo. After a period patrolling the jungles outside Puruk Cahu and Muara Tewe, he was sent to Tanah Grogot, followed by Balikpapan. While stationed there Oerip was promoted to first lieutenant but faced discrimination as a native in the Dutch forces. In Banjarmasin he had convinced his commander to strike an ordinance forbidding non-Dutch officers from joining the football team, and by 1917 Oerip had received equal legal status with Dutch officers. After Balikpapan Oerip was further sent to Samarinda, Tarakan, and ultimately Malinau. In Malinau, Oerip patrolled the border between the Dutch East Indies and the British-controlled Kingdom of Sarawak (part of modern-day Malaysia); he also worked to prevent conflicts and headhunting among Dayak tribes. One day, seven years after arriving in Borneo, Oerip returned from patrol to find his home had been burned down. Upon the recommendation of a passing doctor, Oerip went back to Java, via Tarakan and Surabaya, to Cimahi, where he spent several months in recovery from fatigue. Fully recovered, in 1923 Oerip was stationed in his hometown, Purworejo. In September 1925 Oerip was transferred to Magelang to serve in the Maréchaussée te Voet (Foot Marshalry), a gendarmerie. Initially known to avoid women and under pressure to marry quickly, in Magelang Oerip became involved with Rohmah Soebroto, the daughter of his former Javanese and Malay language teacher Soebroto and a distant relative of female emancipation figure Kartini. The pair were engaged on 7 May 1926 and married on 30 June of the same year. Also in Magelang, Oerip took on his father's name, which he used as a family name for dealing with the Dutch. Afterwards he began referring to himself by the full name of Oerip Soemohardjo, although others continued to call him Oerip. The year after his marriage, Oerip and his wife were stationed in Ambarawa, where Oerip was tasked with rebuilding a previously disbanded unit. While training local recruits in place of the Dutch commander who had yet to arrive, Oerip was promoted to captain. After the Dutch commander arrived, in July 1928 Oerip was given a year's leave, which he used to travel throughout Europe on a sightseeing trip with his wife. Upon his return to the Indies, he was stationed at Meester Cornelis. In Meester Cornelis, Oerip began running training exercises; while stationed in Batavia, his father died. In 1933, he was sent to Padang Panjang in Sumatra to deal with unrest that had already killed several Dutch officers. His time in Padang Panjang passed uneventfully, and in July 1935 he was given leave to go to Europe again. He was also promoted to major at that time, which made him the highest-ranking native officer in the KNIL. The following year, upon his return to the Indies, he was stationed in Purworejo. In mid-1938, after a disagreement with the local regent, Oerip was told to transfer to Gombong; he refused, then left the KNIL and moved to his parents-in-law's home in Yogyakarta. ## Civilian life and Japanese occupation In Yogyakarta, the unemployed Oerip took up orchid gardening. Soon after arriving, he and his wife bought a villa in Gentan, north of the city. Although the villa was small, the couple used its 2 hectares (4.9 acres) of land to open a large flower garden, with their income subsidised by Oerip's pension from the KNIL. At his villa, named KEM (for Klaarheid en Moed, or "Purity and Bravery"), Oerip often received guests, both military and civilian, from whom he received information about current events and to whom he gave advice regarding military matters and politics. In 1940, the pair adopted a four-year-old Dutch girl named Abby from an orphanage in Semarang. Shortly thereafter, on 10 May 1940, when Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, Oerip was recalled to active service. Three days after reporting to Colonel Pik in Magelang, he went to the KNIL headquarters in Bandung, where he was the first retired officer to report. Afterwards, he and his family – who had joined him – were transferred to Cimahi, where Oerip was tasked with establishing a new battalion depot. Several native officers were stationed in northern parts of the Indies during 1941 in preparation for an expected attack by the Empire of Japan, although Oerip stayed in Cimahi. After the Japanese occupied the Indies in early 1942, Oerip was held in a mixed prisoner of war camp in Cimahi. Upon his release three and a half months later, Oerip refused an offer to form a new, Japanese-backed police force and returned to KEM, where he and his wife rented paddy fields to grow rice while continuing to operate their flower garden. To protect their land, they surrounded their property and home with a high bamboo fence. Although no longer active in the military, Oerip occasionally received former KNIL members, including Abdul Haris Nasution and Sunarmo, who brought news of events outside the village. The couple continued their work, harassed and surveilled by the Japanese and pro-Japanese Indonesians, until the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945 signified that Japan would soon withdraw. It was during this period that Oerip began having heart problems. ## Indonesian National Revolution and death After the Proclamation of Indonesian Independence on 17 August 1945, Oerip and his family left KEM for Rohma's parents' home in Yogyakarta. When the People's Safety Body (Badan Keamanan Rakjat, or BKR) was formed on 23 August, Oerip led a group of military commanders who petitioned for it to be set up as a national military formation; a separate group, led by politician Oto Iskandar di Nata, wanted the BKR to fulfil the functions of a police organisation. The political leadership, consisting of President Sukarno and Vice President Mohammad Hatta, agreed to a compromise: it became a police-style organisation, but most of its members had served in the military, either with the Defenders of the Homeland (PETA; Pembela Tanah Air) or the Heiho. On 14 October 1945 – nine days after the Indonesian National Armed Forces was formally established – Oerip was declared its Chief of Staff and interim leader, and left immediately for Jakarta. In a cabinet meeting the following day, he was ordered to build a national army, headquartered in Yogyakarta, in preparation for an expected assault by Dutch troops coming to reclaim the Indies. He departed for Yogyakarta on 16 October, and arrived the following day. He first established the headquarters in a room at Hotel Merdeka, which he used until the Sultan of Yogyakarta Hamengkubuwono IX donated land and a building for the army to use. With the BKR scattered under independent leadership throughout the country, the newly formed People's Security Army (Tentara Keamaanan Rakjat or TKR, now known as the Tentara Nasional Indonesia) drew officers mainly from the native members of the former KNIL. However, these officers were poorly received by Indonesian nationalists, who viewed them as mercenaries for having served in the Dutch forces. Meanwhile, rank and file members of the TKR were drawn from numerous groups, including former PETA, current Pemuda (young Indonesian revolutionaries), and the BKR. Although Oerip set out a command structure, in reality the army's hierarchy was provisional and depended heavily on the strength of local units. Following a government decree on 20 October Oerip became subordinate to both the acting Minister of Defence Soeljoadikoesoemo and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces Soeprijadi. However, neither man showed up to assume his duties. Soeprijadi, a PETA soldier who had led an uprising against Japanese forces in Blitar in February 1945, was thought dead. While Soeljohadikosomo's position remained unfilled, the guerrilla leader Moestopo declared himself Minister of Defence. As such, Oerip had little oversight and felt pressured to quickly establish a stable command structure. On 2 November, he appointed leaders for military operations in various parts of the country: Didi Kartasasmita for western Java, Soeratman for central Java, Mohammad for eastern Java, and Soehardjo Hardjowardojo for Sumatra; each of these sub-commanders was given the rank of major general. Oerip also began appropriating weapons to different TKR commands. He took confiscated Japanese weapons from well-equipped forces and distributed them as needed. However, the results were less successful than he had hoped. PETA had been organised locally during the Japanese occupation, and as such its members were unable to accept a centralised leadership. On 12 November 1945, at the first general meeting of army leadership, General Sudirman – the leader of the Fifth Division in Purwokerto, who had two years military experience and was 23 years younger than Oerip – was elected leader of the army following two deadlocked votes. In the third round, Oerip had 21 votes to Sudirman's 22. Divisional commanders from Sumatra, who had voted unanimously, swayed the vote in Sudirman's favour; Oerip had lost votes because some of the division leaders distrusted his history with the KNIL and the oath he had taken to the Dutch motherland upon graduation. Although Sudirman was surprised at his selection and offered to surrender the leadership position to Oerip, the meeting did not allow it; Oerip himself was glad to no longer be in charge of the army. Sudirman kept Oerip, by then a lieutenant general, to serve as chief of staff under him. While Sudirman remained unconfirmed, Oerip remained de jure leader; however, the Indonesian journalist Salim Said writes that Oerip's orders were at times unintelligible owing to the leader's poor command of Indonesian and often ignored unless approved by Sudirman. When General Sudirman was approved on 18 December, he began working to consolidate and unite the army. Meanwhile, Oerip handled day-to-day organisational and technical issues. Many of the details, such as company uniforms, he left to regional commanders. However, to deal with more important issues, such as establishing a military police and preventing enemy paratroopers from landing, he passed edicts that applied nationally. Together, Sudirman and Oerip were able to address many of the differences between former KNIL and PETA troops. The government also renamed the army twice in January 1946, first to the People's Safety Army (Tentara Keselamatan Rakjat), then to the Republic of Indonesia Military Forces(Tentara Repoeblik Indonesia, or TRI). On 23 February 1946, Oerip was appointed head of the 11-member Committee to Reorganise the Army (Panitia Besar Reorganisasi Tentara), formed by presidential decree. After four months of discussion, on 17 May the committee gave its recommendations to Sukarno. Oerip was set to handle day-to-day operations of a downsized army, while the Ministry of Defence was given greater bureaucratic power. Sudirman was kept as commander of the young armed forces. As Minister of Defence Amir Sjarifuddin began establishing pro-leftist groups within the military, Oerip became distrustful of the political leadership and vehemently decried the government's attempts to use soldiers' political affiliations to control the military. Still, he and Sudirman continued to work to ensure that paramilitary troops (laskar), which had arisen from the general populace, were included in the military. This was realised on 3 June 1947, when the government declared the union of the laskar and TRI into a new military organisation, the Indonesian National Armed Forces (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, or TNI). Meanwhile, Oerip established a military academy in Yogyakarta. To meet the Dutch threat, Oerip intended to attack while the former colonists were still consolidating their forces, a plan that was quashed by the government's attempts at diplomacy. He preferred guerrilla tactics to formal military conflicts, once telling a subordinate that the best attack would be one with a hundred snipers hidden behind enemy lines. Oerip was strongly against the Renville Agreement, an ultimately unsuccessful treaty that led to the withdrawal of 35,000 troops from western Java and the formalisation of the Van Mook Line between Dutch and Indonesian forces. He saw the agreement, ratified on 17 January 1948, as a stalling tactic, giving the Dutch the chance to strengthen their forces. Meanwhile, Amir Sjarifuddin – by then also serving as prime minister – began culling the army, predominantly keeping leftist-leaning troops. Disgusted with what he perceived as the government's lack of trust in the military, Oerip tendered his resignation, although he continued to serve as an advisor to the Minister of Defence, Vice President Hatta. After several months of growing steadily weaker and undergoing treatment from Dr Sim Ki Ay, on the evening of 17 November 1948 Oerip collapsed and died from a heart attack in his room in Yogyakarta. After a night-long viewing he was buried the next day in Semaki Heroes' Cemetery and posthumously promoted to general. When Sudirman threatened to resign in 1949, he blamed Oerip's death – as well as his own tuberculosis – on the government's inconsistency during the revolution. Oerip was survived by his wife and adopted daughter. Abby died of malaria in January 1951, and Rohmah died on 29 October 1977 in Semarang; she was buried in Ungaran. ## Legacy Oerip received numerous awards from the national government posthumously, including the Bintang Sakti (1959), Bintang Mahaputera (1960), Bintang Republik Indonesia Adipurna (1967), and Bintang Kartika Eka Pakçi Utama (1968). On 10 December 1964 he was declared a National Hero of Indonesia through Presidential Decree 314 of 1964. Sudirman was also declared a National Hero by the same decree. On 22 February 1964 the Indonesian military academy in Magelang dedicated a memorial to him, which described the military leader as "a son of Indonesia who valued work over words, who prioritised his Duty over his wants." During Christmas 1964, Justinus Darmojuwono, who was the Military Ordinary of Indonesia and the Archbishop of Semarang at the time (later became the first Indonesian to be a Cardinal), returned from the Vatican. He brought a chalice dedicated for Oerip from Pope Paul VI with an inscription ′′In memorium ducis militum, Benedicti Oerip Soemohardjo, Pro aede sacra, Academiae militaris, Indonesianae, D.D., Anno MCMLXIV′′ inscribed at the lower part. Since 1965, the chalice has been kept in the Catholic chapel of the Indonesian military academy in Magelang. The academy's Catholic chapel also includes a dedication to him from 1965, prompted by a discussion between Rohmah (Oerip's wife) and a missionary friend of hers. Several streets are named after Oerip, including in his hometown of Purworejo, nearby Yogyakarta, and the capital at Jakarta.
228,564	Jeremy Thorpe	1,172,483,630	British politician (1929–2014)	[ "1929 births", "2014 deaths", "20th-century British military personnel", "20th-century English LGBT people", "20th-century English memoirists", "21st-century English LGBT people", "Alumni of Trinity College, Oxford", "Anti-apartheid activists", "Deaths from Parkinson's disease", "English LGBT politicians", "English expatriates in the United States", "English male non-fiction writers", "LGBT members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom", "Leaders of the Liberal Party (UK)", "Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies", "Members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for English constituencies", "Members of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom", "Military personnel from London", "Neurological disease deaths in England", "People acquitted of crimes", "People educated at Eton College", "People educated at Hazelwood School", "People from Kensington", "Presidents of the Oxford Union", "UK MPs 1959–1964", "UK MPs 1964–1966", "UK MPs 1966–1970", "UK MPs 1970–1974", "UK MPs 1974", "UK MPs 1974–1979" ]	John Jeremy Thorpe (29 April 1929 – 4 December 2014) was a British politician who served as the Member of Parliament for North Devon from 1959 to 1979, and as leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 to 1976. In May 1979 he was tried at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend Norman Scott, a former model. Thorpe was acquitted on all charges, but the case, and the furore surrounding it, ended his political career. Thorpe was the son and grandson of Conservative MPs, but decided to align with the small and ailing Liberal Party. After reading Law at Oxford University he became one of the Liberals' brightest stars in the 1950s. He entered Parliament at the age of 30, rapidly made his mark, and was elected party leader in 1967. After an uncertain start during which the party lost ground, Thorpe capitalised on the growing unpopularity of the Conservative and Labour parties to lead the Liberals through a period of notable electoral success. This culminated in the general election of February 1974, when the party won 6 million votes. Under the first-past-the-post electoral system this gave them only 14 seats, but in a hung parliament, no party having an overall majority, Thorpe was in a strong position. He was offered a cabinet post by the Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, if he would bring the Liberals into a coalition. His price for such a deal, reform of the electoral system, was rejected by Heath, who resigned in favour of a minority Labour government. The February 1974 election was the high-water mark of Thorpe's career. Thereafter his and his party's fortunes declined, particularly from late 1975 when rumours of his involvement in a plot to murder Norman Scott began to multiply. Thorpe resigned the leadership in May 1976, when his position became untenable. When the matter came to court three years later, Thorpe chose not to give evidence to avoid being cross-examined by counsel for the prosecution. This left many questions unanswered; despite his acquittal, Thorpe was discredited and did not return to public life. From the mid-1980s he was disabled by Parkinson's disease. During his long retirement he gradually recovered the affections of his party, and by the time of his death was honoured by a later generation of leaders, who drew attention to his record as an internationalist, a supporter of human rights, and an opponent of apartheid. ## Family background and early childhood Thorpe was born in South Kensington, London, on 29 April 1929. His father was John Henry Thorpe, a lawyer and politician who was the Conservative MP for Manchester Rusholme between 1919 and 1923. His mother, Ursula Norton-Griffiths (1903–1992), was the daughter of another Conservative MP, Sir John Norton-Griffiths, widely known as "Empire Jack" because of his passionate imperialism. The Thorpe family claimed kinship with distant forebears carrying the name, including Sir Robert Thorpe, who was briefly Lord Chancellor in 1372, and Thomas Thorpe, who was Speaker of the House of Commons in 1453–54. There is no direct evidence of any link between these figures and Jeremy Thorpe's family. The more recent Thorpe ancestors were Irish, stemming from the elder of two brothers who were, according to family tradition, soldiers under Cromwell during the re-conquest of Ireland. Both were rewarded with land; the descendants of the younger brother—from County Carlow—prospered in Dublin as High Sheriffs and Lord Mayors, but those of the elder lost their land and became tenant farmers and tradesmen. Jeremy Thorpe's great-grandfather, William Thorpe, was a Dublin policeman who, having been a labourer, joined the police as a constable and rose to the rank of superintendent. One of his many sons, John Thorpe, became an Anglican priest and served as Archdeacon of Macclesfield from 1922 to 1932. The archdeacon's marriage in 1884 to a daughter of the prosperous Anglo-Irish Aylmer family brought considerable wealth to the Thorpes, as did his elder daughter Olive's marriage into the influential Christie-Miller family of Cheshire. Both John Henry and Jeremy Thorpe would benefit from this connection, as the Christie-Millers paid the costs of their education. Jeremy was his parents' third child, following two sisters. His upbringing was privileged and protected, under the care of nannies and nursemaids until, in 1935, he began attending Wagner's day school in Queen's Gate. He became a proficient violinist, and often performed at school concerts. Although John Henry Thorpe was no longer in parliament, he had maintained many of his political contacts and friendships, and leading politicians were regularly entertained at the Thorpe home. Among the strongest of these friendships was that with the Lloyd George family—Ursula Thorpe was a close friend of the former Liberal prime minister's daughter, Megan, who became Jeremy's godmother. The former prime minister David Lloyd George, an occasional visitor, became Jeremy's political hero and role model, and helped form his ambitions for a political career in the Liberal Party. ## Education ### Schooling In January 1938 Jeremy went to Cothill House, a school in Oxfordshire that prepared boys for entry to Eton. By summer 1939 war looked likely, and the Thorpe family moved from London to the Surrey village of Limpsfield where Jeremy attended Hazelwood School. War began in September 1939; in June 1940, with invasion threatening, the Thorpe children were sent to live with their American aunt, Kay Norton-Griffiths, in Boston. In September that year Jeremy began at the Rectory School in Pomfret, Connecticut. He remained there for three generally happy years; his main extracurricular task, he later recalled, was looking after the school's pigs. In 1943 it was thought safe for the children to return to England, and John Henry used his political connections to secure for Jeremy a passage in the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Phoebe. Thorpe started at Eton in September 1943. He proved an indifferent scholar, he lacked sporting aptitude, and although superficially a rebel against conformity, his frequent toadying to authority earned him the nickname "Oily Thorpe". He also annoyed his fellow-pupils by parading his acquaintance with a range of famous and important people. He offended the school's traditionalists by resigning from the school's cadet force, and shocked others by expressing his intention to marry Princess Margaret, then second in line to the British throne. Thorpe revealed little about his Eton years, beyond his membership of the school orchestra and his winning a cup for his violin playing—he briefly considered the possibility of a career as a professional violinist. His time at Eton was marred by the death of his father in 1944, at the age of 57. ### Oxford Having secured a place at Trinity College, Oxford, Thorpe left Eton in March 1947. In September he began 18 months' National Service, but within six weeks was discharged on medical grounds after collapsing while attempting an assault course. As his place at Oxford was unavailable until the following year, Thorpe worked as a temporary preparatory school teacher before his admission to Trinity on 8 October 1948. Thorpe was reading Law, but his primary interests at Oxford were political and social. From his earliest undergraduate days he drew attention to himself by his flamboyant behaviour; according to Thorpe's biographer, Michael Bloch, his "pallid appearance, dark hair and eyes and angular features, gave him a diabolonian air". He was quick to seek political office, initially in the Oxford University Liberal Club (OULC) which, despite the doldrums affecting the Liberal Party nationally, was a thriving club with over 800 members. Thorpe was elected to the club's committee at the end of his first term; in November 1949 he became its president. Outside Oxford, Thorpe showed a genuine commitment to Liberalism in his enthusiastic contributions to the party's national election campaigns, and on reaching his 21st birthday in April 1950, applied to have his name added to the party's list of possible parliamentary candidates. Beyond the OULC, Thorpe achieved the presidency of the Oxford University Law Society, although his principal objective was the presidency of the Oxford Union, an office frequently used as a stepping-stone to national prominence. Normally, would-be presidents first served in the Union's junior offices, as Secretary, Treasurer or Librarian, but Thorpe, having impressed as a confident and forceful debater, decided early in 1950 to try directly for the presidency. He was easily defeated by the future broadcaster Robin Day. His single-minded pursuit of office, and the dubious strategies he sometimes employed, led to some acrimonious campaigns, but he gained many supporters, and later in 1950 beat two formidable contenders—the socialist Dick Taverne and the Conservative William Rees-Mogg—to secure the presidency for the Hilary term of 1951. Thorpe's term as president was marked by the range of distinguished guest speakers that he recruited, among them the future Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham, the barrister and former Liberal MP Norman Birkett, and the humorist Stephen Potter. The time-consuming nature of his various offices meant that Thorpe required a fourth year to complete his law studies, which ended in the summer of 1952 with a third-class honours degree. At Oxford Thorpe enjoyed numerous friendships with his contemporaries, many of whom later achieved distinction. These were almost exclusively with men; even so, he was not identified as a member of any of Oxford's homosexual sets. He confided to a friend that politics provided him with the necessary level of emotional excitement, thus making sexual relationships unnecessary. Thus, Bloch suggests, he was accepted by his fellow-students as "a basically asexual character, wrapped up in politics and his career". ## Early career ### Parliamentary candidate Having been accepted as a potential Liberal parliamentary candidate, Thorpe looked for a constituency. The general elections of 1950 and 1951 had seen the party's MPs fall, first to nine, then six; some commentators saw little future except "further attrition and further losses to the two major parties". The journalist Julian Glover writes that Thorpe's determination to stay with the party, despite its woes, showed a more principled commitment to Liberalism than many critics have acknowledged; his prospects of reaching parliament would have been considerably greater within either the Conservative or Labour parties. Initially the young would-be candidate was offered the opportunity of succeeding the party leader, Clement Davies, in the Welsh seat of Montgomeryshire, when Davies decided to retire. There being no immediate prospect of that, Thorpe looked elsewhere, in particular to Devon and Cornwall, where the party had long-standing traditions and had polled respectably in 1950 and 1951. In these elections Thorpe had assisted the Liberal candidate for North Cornwall, Dingle Foot, whose agent recommended him to the neighbouring North Devon constituency. The Torrington local party was also anxious to adopt Thorpe as their candidate, while Foot saw him as a possible successor in North Cornwall. Thorpe chose to fight North Devon, a seat once held by the Liberals although, in 1951, the party had finished in third place behind Conservative and Labour, with less than 20% of the vote. Thorpe was adopted as North Devon's Liberal candidate in April 1952. His political stance matched that of other young activists, who believed that the party should offer a radical non-socialist alternative to the Conservative government. He and others founded the Radical Reform Group, to drive the party in that direction. He spent much of his spare time cultivating the voters in North Devon; at rallies and on the doorstep he mixed local concerns with conspicuously liberal views on larger, international issues such as colonialism and apartheid. When Anthony Eden, who had succeeded Winston Churchill as prime minister, called a snap general election in April 1955, Thorpe fought an energetic local campaign. He succeeded in halving the Conservative majority in the constituency, and restoring the Liberals to second place. ### Barrister-at-law and television journalist In need of a paid occupation Thorpe opted for the law, and in February 1954 was called to the bar in the Inner Temple. Initially he found it difficult to earn a living from his fees; he needed another source of income, and found it in television journalism. Thorpe was employed by Associated-Rediffusion, at first as chairman of a science discussion programme, The Scientist Replies, and later as an interviewer on the station's major current affairs vehicle This Week. Among various assignments for This Week, he travelled to Ghana in 1957 to cover the country's independence celebrations, and in 1958 he reported from Jordan on a plot to assassinate King Hussein. Thorpe was a skilled broadcaster, and in addition to his television work he became a regular guest on the BBC radio programme Any Questions? In 1959 he was offered the post of chief commentator by Associated Rediffusion, but as the condition was that he gave up his parliamentary candidature, he declined. Through the later 1950s Thorpe juggled his legal and television work with his political duties in North Devon, where he worked tirelessly to build up support. From September 1956 the Liberal Party was led by Jo Grimond, a more up-to-date figure than his elderly predecessor Davies, and more in tune with the ideas of Thorpe and the Radical Reform Group. After an uncertain beginning—the Liberals lost one of their six seats to Labour in a February 1957 by-election—Grimond's leadership began to produce results. The party polled well in a series of by-elections during 1957 and 1958, culminating in a victory at Torrington in March 1958—a seat which the party had not contested in the 1955 general election. Thorpe, who had figured prominently in the Torrington campaign, saw this victory in an adjoining Devon constituency as a harbinger of his own future success. Thorpe's television and radio work had brought him a measure of celebrity, and his colourful and individualistic campaigning style was widely admired. The journalist Christopher Booker recalled: "He had an extraordinary ability both to cheer up his followers and send up his opponents". Throughout the 1950s Thorpe was leading a secret homosexual life, at a time when all such activity was illegal in the United Kingdom, and subject to heavy penalties; exposure would have ended his political prospects instantly. This sexual orientation, concealed from the wider public, was known and tolerated in North Devon, and was at least suspected by many in the wider Liberal Party. ## Member of Parliament Thorpe's efforts in North Devon came to fruition in the October 1959 general election, when he won the seat with a majority of 362 over his Conservative opponent—the Liberal Party's solitary gain in what was generally an electoral triumph for Harold Macmillan's Conservative government. On 10 November 1959, he made his maiden speech, during a debate on the government's local employment bill. He highlighted poor communications as the principal reason for the lack of employment opportunities in North Devon, and called for urgent government action. Thorpe was a diligent MP, active in promoting local issues—a new general hospital, and a link road to the Exeter-Taunton motorway—and campaigned successfully to save the Barnstaple-to-Exeter railway line from the "Beeching axe". On broader questions he made no secret of his anti-hanging, pro-immigrant, pro-Europe opinions, largely not shared by his constituents. He championed freedom from colonial and minority rule, and was an outspoken opponent of regimes he considered oppressive such as those in South Africa and the short-lived Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. He was also noted for his verve and wit; when in 1962, after a series of by-election disasters, Macmillan sacked a third of his cabinet, Thorpe's reported comment, an inversion of the biblical verse John 15:13, was "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life". Within the Liberal Party, Thorpe helped to found an informal organisation known as "Winnable Seats", which directed energy and funding to selected target constituencies. This strategy led to some notable by-election performances during 1961–62, culminating in March 1962 with victory in Orpington, where a 14,760 Conservative majority was turned into a Liberal majority of 7,855. These results were accompanied by substantial Liberal gains in municipal elections; national opinion polls briefly showed the party on equal terms with the Labour and Conservative parties. This advance was barely reflected in the results of the October 1964 general election; the party nearly doubled its share of the national vote, to 11.2%, but secured a net gain of only two seats. One of the new Liberals was Peter Bessell, who won the Cornish seat of Bodmin. In North Devon, Thorpe increased his personal majority to over 5,000. After the election, which Labour won with a small majority, Thorpe was seen by many as Grimond's natural successor; his speeches were generally the highlights of the party's annual assemblies, and he strengthened his position when, in 1965, he secured the important post of party treasurer. He proved to be an excellent fund-raiser, although his insistence on personal control of much of the party's funds aroused criticism and resentment. In July 1965, after the end of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Thorpe toured Central and East Africa, visiting both Zambia and Rhodesia. On his return he advised the prime minister, Harold Wilson, that the all-white Rhodesian government under Ian Smith would make a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) before the end of the year, unless deterred by the threat of armed intervention. Wilson would not countenance the use of troops; the UDI took place on 11 November. In a speech to the Liberal Assembly in September 1966, Thorpe condemned Wilson's handling of the Rhodesia issue ("misjudged and misplanned"), and called for the bombing by United Nations aircraft of the rail link through which the post-UDI Rhodesian government received its oil supplies. The speech delighted the more radical elements in the Liberal Party but outraged many Conservatives, who used the derisive nickname "Bomber Thorpe" for the rest of Thorpe's parliamentary career. In March 1966 Wilson called an election, hoping to improve his tiny parliamentary majority. He did so, increasing it to almost 100. The Liberals, although their overall share of the vote fell to 8.5%, increased their number of MPs from nine to 12, an indication of success in targeted campaigning under the "Winnable Seats" strategy. Thorpe suffered a personal disappointment in North Devon, where his majority dropped to 1,166. ## Party leader ### 1967–1970 Following the 1966 election, Grimond confided to senior party officials that he wished soon to step down from the leadership. Thorpe was now the senior Liberal MP after Grimond, and the party's highest-profile member, although Tim Beaumont, chairman of the party's organising committee, noted in his diary: "I am pretty certain that he has little popularity within the Parliamentary Party". When Grimond finally resigned, on 17 January 1967, an election to replace him was arranged to take place within 48 hours, leaving little time for manoeuvring. The 12 Liberal MPs formed the whole electorate; after the first ballot, Thorpe had secured six votes against three each for Eric Lubbock, the Orpington MP, and Emlyn Hooson who had succeeded to the Montgomeryshire seat. On 18 January Lubbock and Hooson withdrew their candidacies, and Thorpe was declared the winner. As Liberal leader, Thorpe provided a clear contrast with the pedestrian images of Wilson and Edward Heath, the Conservative leader since March 1965. He was considerably younger, and much more telegenic. His first years of leadership were problematic; he found himself at odds with the Young Liberals, who were advocating policies far to the left of the Liberal mainstream. Their demands for workers' control in nationalised industries, British withdrawal from NATO, and massive cuts in the defence budget, caused bitter disputes within the party and damaged its public image. At this time the political climate was not conducive to radical policies; the Wilson government's rapid descent into unpopularity brought a sharp swing to the right among voters. The beneficiaries were the Conservatives, who made spectacular by-election gains at Labour's expense while the Liberals failed to make any real impact. Discontent against Thorpe's leadership was being voiced within a year of his election, culminating in June 1968 when disaffected senior party members combined with Young Liberals in an attempt to depose him. Thorpe had just married Caroline Allpass, and was abroad on honeymoon when the plotters struck. The timing of their attempted coup, widely seen in and out of the party as treachery, ensured that on Thorpe's return the party executive backed him by 48 votes to 2. Thorpe's marriage provided him with a period of emotional stability; a son, Rupert, was born in April 1969. Shortly afterwards, Thorpe received a political boost when the Liberals unexpectedly won a by-election at Birmingham Ladywood, in a previously safe Labour seat. This was a solitary success, and the party faced the general election of June 1970 with little confidence. The results justified their gloomy premonitions; the party's share of the vote fell to 7.5%, and seven of its thirteen seats, including Ladywood, were lost. Thorpe barely hung on in North Devon, his majority reduced to 369. Three of his colleagues had comparably small majorities; only Grimond, Hooson and Russell Johnston were relatively safe. Heath's Conservatives secured a 30-seat majority. ### 1970–1974 Following the Liberals' poor election performance Thorpe came under fire, but such criticisms were stifled when, ten days after the election, Caroline Thorpe was killed in a car crash. For the rest of 1970 and for much of 1971, Thorpe was preoccupied with his loss and his plan for a permanent memorial to Caroline. Meanwhile, the party began to recover, chiefly through its adoption of "community politics"—engagement with local rather than national issues—and achieved modest gains in the 1971 local elections. By early 1972, with the monument to Caroline erected on Codden Hill, Thorpe was fully re-engaged in political life. In February he assisted the passage through the House of Commons of Heath's European Communities Bill, approving the United Kingdom's accession to the European Economic Community. The bill was opposed by Labour and by some Conservatives. By aligning his party with the government, Thorpe ensured a majority of eight for the bill's second reading, and it duly became law. By mid-1972 the Liberals' fortunes were rising significantly; the public was equally disenchanted with both major parties, and community politics were proving popular. Impressive local election results were followed by sensational by-election results. In October 1972 Rochdale was won from Labour, and in the next year four victories were achieved over the Conservatives: Sutton, Isle of Ely, Ripon and Berwick-upon-Tweed. On 14 March 1973, Thorpe married Marion Stein, a concert pianist and the former wife of George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood. The couple had been brought together a year earlier by a mutual acquaintance, the pianist Moura Lympany. The year ended less happily for Thorpe, when the secondary banking firm of London & County Securities, of which he had been a director since May 1971, collapsed amid rumours of mismanagement and fraud, marking the start of the Secondary banking crisis of 1973–1975; the details were not revealed until 1976. In February 1974, Heath, whose government had been plagued by industrial unrest, called a general election on the issue of "Who governs Britain?". During the election campaign there was evidence of disaffection with both Heath and Wilson, and of a surge in Liberal support. Thorpe was confident that the party would make a significant breakthrough; on election day, 28 February, it secured its highest national vote to date, 6 million, and its highest share of the vote (19.3%) since 1929. Under the first-past-the-post voting system, these figures translated into just 14 seats. Thorpe's majority in North Devon rose to 11,072. ### Coalition negotiations The February 1974 general election produced a hung parliament; neither Labour, with 301 seats, nor the Conservatives, with 297 seats, achieved an overall majority. As was his right as the sitting Prime Minister, Heath did not resign, hoping to persuade the Liberals into a Conservative-led coalition. He met Thorpe on 2 March to discuss possible bases for co-operation, Heath's preferred option being a formal coalition in which Thorpe would be given a cabinet post, and junior ministries would be allocated to other senior Liberals. As the combined Conservative-Liberal vote amounted to 57% of the electorate, such a government would, Heath thought, have some moral legitimacy. If Thorpe would not accept coalition, a less formal basis of inter-party co-operation might be agreed which would enable the Conservative government to retain office. The next day, following discussions with senior colleagues, Thorpe advised Heath that a commitment to electoral reform would be a prerequisite to any arrangement between the two parties. Thorpe proposed that Heath establish a Speaker's Conference whose recommendations on electoral reform would, if acceptable to the Liberals, form the basis of subsequent legislation with full cabinet approval. Following further consultations with their parties, the two leaders met again; Heath reported that while his party would not object to a Speaker's Conference, they could not commit themselves in advance to accepting its recommendations, which would be subject to a free House of Commons vote. This was unacceptable to Thorpe, who then made a separate proposal that an all-party "Government of national unity" be formed to tackle the urgent economic problems facing the country. This idea was rejected by Heath, who resigned on Monday 4 March. Thorpe later admitted that a coalition agreement would have torn the party apart; the more radical elements, in particular the Young Liberals, would never have accepted it. Furthermore, Thorpe said that "even with our support Heath wouldn't have had a parliamentary majority"; without some arrangements with the Scottish Nationalists or the Ulster Unionists, the coalition could have been brought down by the first vote on the Queen's Speech. Following Heath's resignation, Wilson formed a Labour minority government. ### Declining fortunes As Harold Wilson did not have an overall majority following the February 1974 election, he was widely expected to call another election before too long; he did so in September 1974. Thorpe anticipated a turning point in the Liberals' fortunes and campaigned under the slogan "one more heave", aiming for a complete breakthrough with entering a coalition a last resort. The phrase is attributed to advertising agent and Liberal parliamentary candidate Adrian Slade. Future Liberal Party leader David Steel called the whole campaign "a slightly less successful re-run of February." In the October 1974 general election, the Liberals received over 700,000 fewer votes and returned 13 MPs, down one, with Wilson achieving an overall majority of three. Thorpe and the Liberals were deflated by the outcome of the October 1974 election. Wilson's majority, albeit slim, denied Thorpe the role of kingmaker, leaving the Liberals without a clear role; as Dutton observes, apart from being neither Conservative or Labour, the Liberals lacked a distinctive identity and their policies were largely unknown to the public. A further problem for the party was the divergence between its activists, who were radicals well to the left of the official party, and a large section of its recent supporters who were disgruntled Conservatives. Thorpe, whose personal majority in North Devon had fallen to under 7,000 in October, confided to an associate that, unless the party were soon to make a significant impact, his days as leader might be numbered. During 1975 Thorpe campaigned for electoral reform, citing the "Great Vote Robbery" of the year before. He argued that electoral reform on a proportional basis would bring about a centrist stability to British politics that would favour British business. In the June 1975 referendum on the UK's continuing membership of the EEC, Thorpe campaigned for a "yes" vote alongside the pro-Europeans of both major parties, appearing with Heath (recently replaced as Conservative leader by Margaret Thatcher) at the Oxford Union. The referendum resulted in a two-to-one approval of the UK's membership, but Thorpe failed to stem the decline in his party's electoral fortunes. In the Woolwich West by-election on 26 June 1975 the party lost more than two-thirds of its October 1974 vote, a "major humiliation" according to The Guardian. ### Relationship with Norman Scott Thorpe's homosexual activities from time to time came to the attention of the authorities, and were investigated by the police; information was added to his MI5 file, but in no case was action taken against him. In 1971 he survived a party inquiry after a complaint against him by Norman Scott, a riding instructor and would-be model. Scott maintained that in the early 1960s he had been in a sexual relationship with Thorpe, who had subsequently mistreated him. The inquiry dismissed the allegations. but the danger represented by Scott continued to preoccupy Thorpe who, according to his confidant David Holmes, felt "he would never be safe with that man around". Scott (known then as Norman Josiffe) had first met Thorpe early in 1961 when the former was a 20-year-old groom working for one of Thorpe's wealthy friends. The initial meeting was brief, but nearly a year later Scott, by then in London and destitute, called at the House of Commons to ask the MP for help. Thorpe later acknowledged that a friendship had developed, but denied any physical relationship; Scott claimed that he had been seduced by Thorpe on the night following the Commons meeting. Over the following years Thorpe made numerous attempts to help Scott find accommodation and work, but Scott became increasingly resentful towards Thorpe, threatening him with exposure. In 1965 Thorpe asked his parliamentary colleague Peter Bessell to help him resolve the problem. Bessell met Scott and warned him that his threats against Thorpe might be considered blackmail; he offered to help Scott obtain a new National Insurance card, the lack of which had been a long-running source of irritation. This quietened matters for a while, but within a year Scott came calling again. With Thorpe's agreement, Bessell began paying Scott a "retainer" of £5 a week, supposedly as compensation for the welfare benefits that Scott had been unable to obtain because of his missing card. Bessell later stated that by 1968 Thorpe was considering ways in which Scott might be permanently silenced; he thought David Holmes might organise this. Holmes had been best man at Thorpe's wedding, and was completely loyal to him. When Scott unexpectedly married in 1968, it appeared that the problem might be over, but by 1970 the marriage had ended. Early in 1971 Scott moved to the village of Talybont, in North Wales, where he befriended a widow, Gwen Parry-Jones, to whom he recounted his tale of ill-treatment at the hands of Thorpe. She passed the information to Emlyn Hooson, who was MP for the adjoining Welsh constituency; Hooson precipitated the party inquiry which cleared Thorpe. After Parry-Jones's death the following year, Scott fell into a depression and for a while was quiescent. In time, he began to tell his story to anyone who would listen. By 1974 Thorpe, at the crest of the Liberal revival, was terrified of exposure that might lose him the Liberal leadership. As Dominic Sandbrook observes in his history of the times: "The stakes had never been higher; silencing Scott had never been more urgent". ### Resignation Over the years Scott made several attempts to publicise his story, but no newspapers were interested. The satirical magazine Private Eye decided in late 1972 that the story "was defamatory, unproveable, and above all was ten years old". From late 1974 Holmes took the lead in furthering plans to silence Scott; through various intermediaries he found Andrew Newton, an airline pilot, who said he would dispose of Scott for a fee of between £5,000 and £10,000. Meanwhile, Thorpe procured £20,000 from Sir Jack Hayward, the Bahamas-based millionaire businessman who had previously donated to the Liberal Party, stating that this was to cover election expenses incurred during 1974. Thorpe arranged for these funds to be secretly channelled to Holmes rather than the party. He later denied that this money had been used to pay Newton, or anyone else, as part of a conspiracy. In October 1975, Newton made a bungled attempt to shoot Scott that resulted in the killing of Scott's Great Dane. Newton was arrested on charges of possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life, yet the press remained muted, possibly awaiting the bigger story that they hoped would break. Their reticence ended in January 1976 when Scott, in court on a minor social security fraud charge, claimed he was being hounded because of his previous sexual relationship with Thorpe. This statement, made in court and thus protected from the libel laws, was widely reported. On 29 January the Department of Trade published its report into the collapse of London & County Securities. The report criticised Thorpe's failure to investigate the true nature of the company before involving himself, "a cautionary tale for any leading politician". Thorpe received some relief when his former colleague Peter Bessell, who had resigned from parliament and relocated to California to escape from a string of business failures, re-emerged in early February after discovery by the Daily Mail. Bessell gave muddled accounts of his involvement with Scott, but insisted that his former chief was innocent of any wrongdoing. On 16 March 1976 Newton's trial began at Exeter Crown Court, where Scott repeated his allegations against Thorpe despite the efforts of the prosecution's lawyers to silence him. Newton was found guilty and sentenced to two years' imprisonment, but did not incriminate Thorpe. The erosion of public support for the Liberal Party continued with several poor by-election results in March, which the former leader Grimond attributed to increasing lack of confidence in Thorpe. On 14 March, The Sunday Times printed Thorpe's answer to Scott's various allegations, under the heading "The Lies of Norman Scott". Nevertheless, many of the party's senior figures now felt that Thorpe should resign. Thorpe's problems multiplied when Bessell, alarmed by his own position, confessed to the Daily Mail on 6 May that in his earlier statements he had lied to protect his former leader. Scott was threatening to publish personal letters from Thorpe who, to forestall him, arranged for The Sunday Times to print two letters from 1961. Although these did not conclusively indicate wrongdoing, their tone indicated that Thorpe had not been frank about the true nature of his friendship with Scott. On 10 May 1976, amid rising criticism, Thorpe resigned the party leadership, "convinced that a fixed determination to destroy the Leader could itself result in the destruction of the Party". ## Post-resignation ### Interlude Thorpe's resignation brought him a period of temporary calm. The new Liberal leader, David Steel, made him party spokesman on foreign affairs, with responsibility for European issues. Wilson had by this time retired as prime minister, and been replaced by James Callaghan. Thorpe lobbied the government hard for legislation to introduce direct elections to the European Parliament; at that time MEPs were appointed by member nations' parliaments. By-election losses eroded and finally removed Labour's small parliamentary majority, and in March 1977 Callaghan was in danger of losing a confidence vote that would have precipitated a general election. Opinion polls indicated that an election at that time would have been equally disastrous for the Labour and Liberal parties; to ensure mutual survival, a "Lib–Lab pact" was agreed, whereby in return for certain policy concessions the Liberals would support the Government. Thorpe used his influence to insist that legislation for direct elections to the European Parliament was part of the pact, but was unable to secure his principal objective, a commitment to a proportional basis in these elections. In parliament, Thorpe spoke in favour of Scottish and Welsh devolution, arguing that there was no alternative to home rule except total separation. In the various debates related to the unresolved issue of Rhodesia, Thorpe pressed for the involvement of representatives from the African nationalists, in the form of the Patriotic Front, in negotiations for a peaceful settlement to the long-running Rhodesian Bush War. Although the press was generally quiet following Thorpe's resignation, reporters were still investigating him. The most persistent of these were Barry Penrose and Roger Courtiour, collectively known as "Pencourt", who had begun by believing that Thorpe was a target of South African intelligence agencies, until their investigations led them to Bessell in California. Bessell, no longer covering for Thorpe, gave the reporters his version of the conspiracy to murder Scott, and Thorpe's role in it. Pencourt's progress was covered in Private Eye, to Thorpe's extreme vexation; when the pair attempted to question him outside his Devon home early in 1977, he threatened them with prosecution. Thorpe's relatively peaceful interlude ended in October 1977 when Newton, released from prison, sold his story to the London Evening News. Newton's claim that he had been paid "by a leading Liberal" to kill Scott caused a sensation, and led to a prolonged police investigation. Throughout this period Thorpe endeavoured to continue his public life, in and out of parliament. In the House of Commons on 1 August 1978, when it appeared certain he would face criminal charges, he asked the Attorney-General what sum of capital possessed by an applicant would prevent him from receiving legal aid. The next day he made his final speech in the House, during a debate on Rhodesia. On 4 August, Thorpe, along with Holmes and two of Holmes's associates, was charged with conspiracy to murder Scott. Thorpe was additionally charged with incitement to murder, on the basis of his alleged 1968 discussions with Bessell and Holmes. After being released on bail, Thorpe declared his innocence and his determination to refute the charges. Although he remained North Devon's MP he withdrew almost completely from public view, except for a brief theatrical appearance at the Liberals' 1978 annual assembly on 14 September—to the annoyance of the party's leaders who had asked him to stay away. ### Committal, electoral defeat In November 1978, Thorpe, Holmes and two of the latter's business acquaintances, John le Mesurier (a carpet salesman, not to be confused with the actor of that name) and George Deakin, appeared before magistrates at Minehead, Somerset, in a committal hearing to determine whether they should stand trial. The court heard evidence of a conspiracy from Scott, Newton and Bessell; it also learned that Bessell was being paid £50,000 by The Sunday Telegraph for his story. At the conclusion, the four defendants were committed for trial at the Old Bailey. This was set to begin on 30 April 1979, but when in March the government fell, and a general election was called for 3 May, the trial was postponed until 8 May. Thorpe accepted the invitation of his local party to fight the North Devon seat, against the advice of friends who were certain he would lose. His campaign was largely ignored by the national party; of its leading figures only John Pardoe, the MP for North Cornwall, visited the constituency. Thorpe, supported by his wife, his mother and some loyal friends, fought hard, although much of his characteristic vigour was missing. He lost to his Conservative opponent by 8,500 votes. Overall, the Conservatives obtained a majority of 43 seats, and Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. The Liberal Party's share of the national vote fell to 13.8%, and its total seats from 13 to 11. Dutton attributes much of the fall in the Liberal vote to the lengthy adverse publicity generated by the Thorpe affair. ## Trial and acquittal The trial, which lasted for six weeks, began on 8 May 1979, before Mr Justice Cantley. Thorpe was defended by George Carman. Carman quickly undermined Bessell's credibility by revealing that he had a significant interest in Thorpe's conviction; in the event of an acquittal, Bessell would receive only half of his newspaper fee. During his cross-examination of Scott on 22 May, Carman asked: "You knew Thorpe to be a man of homosexual tendencies in 1961?" This oblique admission of his client's sexuality was a stratagem to prevent the prosecution from calling witnesses who would testify to Thorpe's sex life. Nevertheless, Carman insisted, there was no reliable evidence of any physical sexual relationship between Thorpe and Scott, whom Carman dismissed as "this inveterate liar, social climber and scrounger". Following weeks in which the court heard the prosecution's evidence from the committal hearings, the defence opened on 7 June. Deakin testified that although he introduced Newton to Holmes, he had thought that this was to help deal with a blackmailer—he knew nothing of a conspiracy to kill. Deakin was the only defendant to testify; Thorpe and the others chose to remain silent and call no witnesses, on the basis that the testimonies of Bessell, Scott and Newton had failed to make the prosecution's case. On 18 June, following closing speeches from prosecution and defence counsel, the judge began his summing-up. While emphasising Thorpe's distinguished public record, he was scathing about the principal prosecution witnesses: Bessell was a "humbug", Scott a fraud, a sponger, a whiner, a parasite—"but of course he could still be telling the truth." Newton was "determined to milk the case as hard as he can." On 20 June the jury retired; they returned two days later and acquitted the four defendants on all charges. In a brief public statement, Thorpe said that he considered the verdict "a complete vindication." Scott said he was "unsurprised" by the outcome, but was upset by the aspersions on his character made by the judge from the safety of the bench. ## Later life Following his acquittal, Thorpe announced that he proposed to attend the 1979 Liberal assembly and the forthcoming Liberal International Congress in Canada. His failure to explain himself under oath was widely criticised in the press, and the public perception was that he had been fortunate to have "got off". Reluctantly, Thorpe accepted that there was no future role for him within the Liberal Party, and informed the North Devon association that he would not seek to fight the seat again. Steel expressed the hope that Thorpe would, "after a suitable period of rest and recuperation ... find many avenues where his great talents may be used." In his search for a new career Thorpe applied unsuccessfully for the posts of administrator of the Aldeburgh Festival, and race relations adviser to the Greater London Council. His attempts to restart a career in television also came to nothing. In February 1982, it was announced that he was to become director of the British section of Amnesty International, but the appointment was opposed by many of the organisation's membership, and he withdrew from the post after a month of controversy. He kept his position as chairman of the political committee of the United Nations Association, but in 1985 the progression of Parkinson's disease, which had first been diagnosed in 1979, led to the curtailment of most of his public activity. He continued to live in North Devon, and in 1987 accepted the honorary presidency of the North Devon Liberal Democrat association, formed after the Liberal–SDP merger. He thought he might return to parliament via a life peerage in the House of Lords, but although friends lobbied on his behalf, the merged party's leadership refused to recommend him. Within the party generally, feelings towards him warmed, and when he attended the 1997 annual conference he received a standing ovation. In 1999 Thorpe published an anecdotal memoir, In My Own Time, an anthology of his experiences in public life. In the book he repeated his denial of any sexual relationship with Scott, and maintained that the decision not to offer evidence was made to avoid prolonging the trial, since it was clear that the prosecution's case was "shot through with lies, inaccuracies and admissions". In the 2005 general election campaign Thorpe appeared on television, attacking both the Conservative and Labour parties for supporting the Iraq War. Three years later, in 2008, he gave interviews to The Guardian and to the Journal of Liberal History. York Membery, the Liberal journal's interviewer, found Thorpe able to communicate only in a barely audible whisper, but with his brain power unimpaired. Thorpe asserted that he "still had steam in my pipes"; reviewing the current political situation, he considered the Labour prime minister Gordon Brown "dour and unimpressive", and dubbed the Conservative leader David Cameron "a phoney ... a Thatcherite trying to appear progressive". Some of Thorpe's pro-Europeanism had been eroded over the years; In his final years, he thought that the European Union had become too powerful, and insufficiently accountable. ## Final years and death Thorpe's last public appearance was in 2009, at the unveiling of a bust of himself in the Grimond Room at the House of Commons. Thereafter he was confined to his home, nursed by Marion until she became too infirm. She died on 6 March 2014; Thorpe survived for nine more months, dying from complications of Parkinson's disease on 4 December, aged 85. His funeral was at St Margaret's, Westminster, on 17 December. ## Appraisal Most assessments of Thorpe's career emphasise his downfall rather than his political achievements, "a fall unparalleled in British political history", according to the Daily Telegraph obituarist. While Thorpe hoped that acquittal would ensure he would be remembered primarily for his revival of Liberal fortunes in the 1960s and 1970s, the trial shattered his reputation irretrievably. The prosecuting counsel at the Old Bailey likened the case to "a tragedy of truly Greek or Shakespearian proportions—the slow but inevitable destruction of a man by the stamp of one defect." After Thorpe's death, sympathetic commentators drew attention to his internationalism and social liberalism, highlighting his long involvement with the Anti-Apartheid Movement, his denunciations of dictators, his opposition to the death penalty, and his rejection of racism. There is wide agreement that he was an outstanding political campaigner—persuasive, witty, and warm: "his astonishing memory for faces persuaded voters that they were intimate friends ... his resourceful mind afforded quips and stunts for every occasion." A different perspective on Thorpe, quoted by Michael Bloch, was given by a former friend, the art expert David Carritt, at the time of the trial: "Self-centred ...Mildly entertaining, slightly sinister. Said to be witty, but ... if one doesn't care for impersonations, he's really a bit of a bore". In assessing Thorpe's 10 years as party leader, Nick Clegg credited him with providing "the driving force that continued the Liberal revival that began under Jo Grimond", and Douglas Murray, writing for The Spectator, recognised his strategy of identifying and concentrating on winnable seats as the basis for the major Liberal Democrat breakthrough in the 1997 election. Dutton, in his party history, took a more qualified view, suggesting that in spite of Thorpe's bold style and charisma, "the party drifted without a sense of conviction and underlying purpose ... [and was] dominated by tactics rather than ideas". Thorpe positioned the Liberals in the "moderate centre", equidistant from Labour and Conservative, a strategy which was very successful in February 1974 when dissatisfaction with the two main parties was at its height, but which left the party's specific identity obscure, and its policies largely unknown. The political journalist Andrew Rawnsley described Thorpe as a "dandy, exhibitionist, superb showman, shallow thinker, wit and mimic, cunning opportunist, sinister intriguer, idealistic internationalist and a man with a clandestine homosexual life". Thorpe never discussed his sexuality publicly, although throughout his political career he led a double life—responsible politician by day while, according to Murray, "by night he was not only very gay but rather carefree about being so." The writer and broadcaster Jonathan Fryer, who was a gay activist within the Liberal Party in the 1970s, maintained that in the repressive climate of the time Thorpe "couldn't have come out, even if he'd wanted to". His double standard irritated and alienated the gay Liberals: "He wanted the best of both worlds—his fun and a family." In his review of Michael Bloch's biography, Murray writes: "Jeremy Thorpe had hoped to be remembered as a great political leader. I suppose they all do. And perhaps he will be remembered longer than many other politicians of his age or ours. But it will always be for the same thing. Jeremy, Jeremy, bang, bang, woof, woof." ## In popular media In 2009, the BBC attempted to film a TV biopic of Thorpe's life, with Rupert Everett in the title role, but this was subsequently abandoned after legal threats from Thorpe. A Very English Scandal, a true crime account covering the Thorpe/Scott affair, by John Preston, was published on 5 May 2016 by Viking Press. The book was described as "a political thriller, with urgent dialogue, well-staged scenes, escalating tension and plenty of cliffhangers, especially once the trial begins". A British three-part television series, also titled ''A Very English Scandal, based on Preston's book, aired on the BBC in May 2018, directed by Stephen Frears, with actor Hugh Grant starring as Thorpe and Ben Whishaw as Norman Scott.
490,071	Juan Manuel de Rosas	1,173,648,961	Argentine politician and general	[ "1793 births", "1877 deaths", "Argentine Roman Catholics", "Argentine brigadiers", "Argentine people of Spanish descent", "Burials at La Recoleta Cemetery", "Federales (Argentina)", "Governors of Buenos Aires Province", "Juan Manuel de Rosas", "People from Buenos Aires", "Politicians from Buenos Aires" ]	Juan Manuel José Domingo Ortiz de Rosas (30 March 1793 – 14 March 1877), nicknamed "Restorer of the Laws", was an Argentine politician and army officer who ruled Buenos Aires Province and briefly the Argentine Confederation. Although born into a wealthy family, Rosas independently amassed a personal fortune, acquiring large tracts of land in the process. Rosas enlisted his workers in a private militia, as was common for rural proprietors, and took part in the disputes that led to numerous civil wars in his country. Victorious in warfare, personally influential, and with vast landholdings and a loyal private army, Rosas became a caudillo, as provincial warlords in the region were known. He eventually reached the rank of brigadier general, the highest in the Argentine Army, and became the undisputed leader of the Federalist Party. In December 1829, Rosas became governor of the province of Buenos Aires and established a dictatorship backed by state terrorism. In 1831, he signed the Federal Pact, recognising provincial autonomy and creating the Argentine Confederation. When his term of office ended in 1832, Rosas departed to the frontier to wage war on the indigenous peoples. After his supporters launched a coup in Buenos Aires, Rosas was asked to return and once again took office as governor. Rosas reestablished his dictatorship and formed the repressive Mazorca, an armed parapolice that killed thousands of citizens. Elections became a farce, and the legislature and judiciary became docile instruments of his will. Rosas created a cult of personality and his regime became totalitarian in nature, with all aspects of society rigidly controlled. Rosas faced many threats to his power during the late 1830s and early 1840s. He fought a war against the Peru–Bolivian Confederation, endured a blockade by France, faced a revolt in his own province and battled a major rebellion that lasted for years and spread to five northern Argentine provinces. Rosas persevered and extended his influence in the provinces, exercising effective control over them through direct and indirect means. By 1848, he had extended his power beyond the borders of Buenos Aires and was ruler of all of Argentina. Rosas also attempted to annex the neighbouring nations of Uruguay and Paraguay. France and Great Britain jointly retaliated against Argentine expansionism, blockading Buenos Aires for most of the late 1840s, but were unable to halt Rosas, whose prestige was greatly enhanced by his string of successes. When the Empire of Brazil began aiding Uruguay in its struggle against Argentina, Rosas declared war in August 1851, starting the Platine War. This short conflict ended with Rosas being defeated and absconding to Britain. His last years were spent in exile living as a tenant farmer until his death in 1877. Rosas garnered an enduring public perception among Argentines as a brutal tyrant. Since the 1930s, an authoritarian, anti-Semitic, and racist political movement in Argentina called Revisionism has tried to improve Rosas's reputation and establish a new dictatorship in the model of his regime. In 1989, his remains were repatriated by the government in an attempt to promote national unity, seeking to rehabilitate Rosas and the 1970s military dictatorship. Rosas remains a controversial figure in Argentina in the 21st century. ## Early life ### Birth Juan Manuel José Domingo Ortiz de Rosas was born on 30 March 1793 at his family's town house in Buenos Aires, the capital of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. He was the first child of León Ortiz de Rosas and Agustina López de Osornio. León Ortiz was the son of an immigrant from the Spanish Province of Burgos. A military officer with an undistinguished career, León Ortiz had married into a wealthy Criollo family. The young Juan Manuel de Rosas's character was heavily influenced by his mother Agustina, a strong-willed and domineering woman who derived these character traits from her father Clemente López de Osornio, a landowner who died defending his estate from an Indian attack in 1783. As was common practice at the time, Rosas was schooled at home until the age of 8, and then enrolled in what was regarded the best private school in Buenos Aires. Though befitting the son of a wealthy landowner, his education was unremarkable. According to historian John Lynch, Rosas' education "was supplemented by his own efforts in the years that followed. Rosas was not entirely unread, though the time, the place, and his own bias limited the choice of authors. He appears to have had a sympathetic, if superficial, acquaintance with minor political thinkers of French absolutism." In 1806, a British expeditionary force invaded Buenos Aires. A 13-year-old Rosas served distributing ammunition to troops in a force organised by Viceroy Santiago Liniers to counter the invasion. The British were defeated in August 1806, but returned a year later. Rosas was then assigned to the Caballería de los Migueletes (a militia cavalry), although he was probably barred from active duty during this time due to illness. ### Estanciero After the British invasions had been repelled, Rosas and his family moved from Buenos Aires to their estancia (ranch). His work there further shaped his character and outlook as part of the Platine region's social establishment. In the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, owners of large landholdings (including the Rosas family) provided food, equipment and protection for families living in areas under their control. Their private defence forces consisted primarily of labourers who were drafted as soldiers. Most of these peons, as such workers were called, were gauchos. The landed aristocracy of Spanish descent considered the illiterate, mixed-race gauchos, who comprised the majority of the population, to be ungovernable and untrustworthy. The gauchos were tolerated because there was no other labour force available, but were treated with contempt by the landowners. Rosas got along well with the gauchos in his service, despite his harsh, authoritarian temperament. He was known to dress like them, joke with them, take part in their horse-play, and pay them well, but he never allowed them to forget that he was their master rather than their equal. Shaped by the colonial society in which he lived, Rosas was conservative, an advocate of hierarchy and authority, like the other great landowners in the region. Rosas acquired a working knowledge of administering ranch lands and, beginning in 1811, took charge of his family's estancias. In 1813, he married Encarnación Ezcurra, daughter of a wealthy family from Buenos Aires. He soon afterwards sought to establish a career for himself, leaving his parents' estate. He produced salted meat and acquired landholdings in the process. As the years passed he became an estanciero (rancher) in his own right, accumulating land while establishing a successful partnership with second cousins from the politically powerful Anchorena clan. His hard work and organisational skills in deploying labour were key to his success, rather than creating new or applying nontraditional approaches to production. ## Rise to power ### Caudillo The May Revolution of 1810 marked the early stage of a process which later led to the disintegration of Spain's Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, independence and the eventual formation of Argentina. Rosas, like many landowners in the countryside, was suspicious of a movement advanced primarily by merchants and bureaucrats in the city of Buenos Aires. Rosas was specially outraged by the execution of Viceroy Santiago de Liniers at the hands of the revolutionaries. Rosas felt nostalgic about colonial times, seeing them as stable, orderly and prosperous. When the Congress of Tucumán severed all remaining ties with Spain in July 1816, Rosas and his peers accepted independence as an accomplished fact. Independence resulted in a breakup of the territories that had formed the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. The province of Buenos Aires fought a civil war with the other provinces over the degree of autonomy which the provincial governments were to have. The Unitarian Party supported the preeminence of Buenos Aires, while the Federalist Party defended provincial autonomy. A decade of strife over the issue destroyed the ties between capital and provinces, with new republics being declared throughout the country. Efforts by the Buenos Aires government to quash these independent states were met with determined local resistance. In 1820 Rosas and his gauchos, all dressed in red and nicknamed "Colorados del Monte" ("Reds of the Mount"), enlisted in the army of Buenos Aires as the Fifth Regiment of Militia. They repulsed invading provincial armies, saving Buenos Aires. At the end of the conflict, Rosas returned to his estancias having acquired prestige for his military service. He was promoted to cavalry colonel and was awarded further landholdings by the government. These additions, together with his successful business and fresh property acquisitions, greatly boosted his wealth. By 1830, he was the 10th largest landowner in the province of Buenos Aires (in which the city of the same name was located), owning 300,000 cattle and 420,000 acres (170,000 ha) of land. With his newly gained influence, military background, vast landholdings and a private army of gauchos loyal only to him, Rosas became the quintessential caudillo, as provincial warlords in the region were known. ### Governor of Buenos Aires National unity crumbled under the weight of a continuous round of civil wars, rebellions and coups. The Unitarian–Federalist struggle brought perennial instability while caudillos fought for power and laid waste to the countryside. By 1826, Rosas had built a power base, consisting of relatives, friends and clients, and joined the Federalist Party. He remained a strong advocate of his native province of Buenos Aires, with little concern for political ideology. In 1820, Rosas fought alongside the Unitarians because he saw the Federalist invasion as a menace to Buenos Aires. When the Unitarians sought to appease the Federalists by proposing to grant the other provinces a share in the customs revenues flowing through Buenos Aires, Rosas saw this as a threat to his province's interests. In 1827, four provinces led by Federalist caudillos rebelled against the Unitarian government. Rosas was the driving force behind the Federalist takeover of Buenos Aires and the election of Manuel Dorrego as provincial governor that year. Rosas was awarded with the post of general commander of the rural militias of the province of Buenos Aires on 14 July, which increased his influence and power. In December 1828 Juan Lavalle, the Unitarian governor of Buenos Aires had Dorrego seized and executed without trial. With Dorrego gone, Rosas filled the vacant Federalist leadership and rebelled against the Unitarians. He allied with Estanislao López, caudillo and ruler of Santa Fe Province, and they defeated Lavalle at the Battle of Márquez Bridge in April 1829. When Rosas entered the city of Buenos Aires in November of that year, he was hailed both as a victorious military leader and as the head of the Federalists. Rosas was considered a handsome man, standing 1.77 meters (5 ft 10 in) tall with blond hair and "piercing blue eyes". Charles Darwin, who met Rosas during the Beagle survey expedition, assessed him as "a man of extraordinary character". British diplomat Henry Southern said that in "appearance Rosas resembles an English gentleman farmer—his manners are courteous without being refined. He is affable and agreeable in conversation, which however nearly always turns on himself, but his tone is pleasant and agreeable enough. His memory is stupendous: and his accuracy in all points of detail never failing." On 6 December 1829, the House of Representatives of Buenos Aires elected Rosas governor and granted him facultades extraordinarias (extraordinary powers). This marked the beginning of his regime, described by historians as a dictatorship. He saw himself as a benevolent dictator, saying: "For me the ideal of good government would be paternal autocracy, intelligent, disinterested and indefatigable ... I have always admired the autocratic dictators who have been the first servants of their people. That is my great title: I have always sought to serve the country." He used his power to censor his critics and banish his enemies. He later justified these measures, stating: "When I took over the government I found the government in anarchy, divided into warring factions, reduced to pure chaos, a hell in miniature ..." ### Desert Campaign Rosas' early administration was preoccupied with the severe deficits, large public debts and the impact of currency devaluation which his government inherited. A great drought that began in December 1828, which would last until April 1832, greatly impacted the economy. The Unitarians were still at large, controlling several provinces that had banded together in the Unitarian League. The capture of José María Paz, the main Unitarian leader, in March 1831 resulted in the end of the Unitarian–Federalist civil war and the collapse of the Unitarian League. Rosas was content, for the moment, to agree to recognize provincial autonomy in the Federal Pact. In an effort to alleviate the government's financial problems, he improved revenue collection while not raising taxes and curtailed expenditure. By the end of his first term, Rosas was generally credited with having staved off political and financial instability, but he faced increased opposition in the House of Representatives. All members of the House were Federalists, as Rosas had restored the legislature that had been in place under Dorrego, and which had subsequently been dissolved by Lavalle. A liberal Federalist faction, which accepted dictatorship as a temporary necessity, called for the adoption of a constitution. Rosas was unwilling to govern constrained by a constitutional framework and only grudgingly relinquished his dictatorial powers. His term of office ended soon after, on 5 December 1832. While the government in Buenos Aires was distracted with political infighting, ranchers began moving into territories in the south inhabited by indigenous peoples. The resulting conflict with native peoples necessitated a government response. Rosas steadfastly endorsed policies which supported this expansion. During his governorship he granted lands in the south to war veterans and to ranchers seeking alternative pasture lands during the drought. Although the south was regarded as a virtual desert at the time, it had great potential and resources for agricultural development, particularly for ranching operations. The government gave Rosas command of an army with orders to subdue the Indian tribes in the coveted territory. Rosas was generous to those Indians who surrendered, rewarding them with animals and goods. Although he personally disliked killing Indians, he relentlessly hunted those who refused to yield. The Desert Campaign lasted from 1833 to 1834, with Rosas subjugating the entire region. His conquest of the south opened many possibilities for further territorial expansion, which led him to state: "The fine territories, which extend from the Andes to the coast and down to the Magellan Straits are now wide open for our children." ## Second governorship ### Absolute power While Rosas was away on the Desert Campaign in October 1833, a group of Rosistas (Rosas's supporters) laid siege to Buenos Aires. Inside the city, Rosas's wife, Encarnación, assembled a contingent of associates to aid the besiegers. The Revolution of the Restorers, as the Rosista coup came to be known, forced the provincial governor Juan Ramón Balcarce to resign. In quick succession, Balcarce was followed by two others who presided over weak and ineffective governments. The Rosismo (Rosism) had become a powerful faction within the Federalist Party, and pressured other factions to accept a return of Rosas, endowed with dictatorial powers, as the only way to restore stability. The House of Representatives yielded, and on 7 March 1835, Rosas was reelected governor and invested with the suma del poder público (sum of public power). A plebiscite was held to determine whether the citizens of Buenos Aires supported Rosas's reelection and resumption of dictatorial powers. During his governorship from 1829 to 1832, Rosas had reduced the election process to a farce. He had installed loyal associates as justices of the peace, powerful officeholders with administrative and judicial functions who were also charged with tax collection, leading militia and presiding over elections. Through the exclusion of voters and intimidation of the opposition, the justices of the peace delivered any result Rosas favored. Half of the members of the House of Representatives faced reelection each year, and the opposition to Rosas had quickly been eliminated through rigged elections, allowing him to control the legislature. Control over finances had been stripped from the legislature, and its approval of legislation turned into a rubber stamp to preserve a semblance of democracy. The result of the 1835 election was a predictable 99.9 per cent "yes" vote. Rosas believed that the manipulation of elections were necessary for political stability, because most of the country's population was illiterate. He acquired absolute power over the province with the assent and support of most estancieros and businessmen, who shared his views. The estancia formed the power base on which Rosas relied. Lynch said that there "was a great deal of group cohesion and solidarity among the landed class. Rosas was the center of a vast kinship group based on land. He was surrounded by a closely knit economic and political network linking deputies, law officers, officials, and military who were also landowners and related among themselves or with Rosas." ### Totalitarian regime Rosas's authority and influence spread far beyond the House of Representatives. He exercised tight control over the bureaucracy as well as his cabinet, stating: "Do not imagine that my Ministers are anything but my Secretaries. I put them in their offices to listen and report, and nothing more." His supporters were rewarded with positions within the state apparatus, and anyone he deemed a threat was purged. Opposition newspapers were burned in public squares. Rosas created an elaborate cult of personality, presenting himself as an almighty and fatherlike figure who protected the people. His portraits were carried in street demonstrations and placed on church altars to be venerated. Rosismo was no longer a mere faction within the Federalist ranks; it had become a political movement. As early as 1829, Rosas had confided to an Uruguayan diplomatic envoy: "I tell you I am not a Federalist, and I have never belonged to that party." During his governorship, he still claimed to have favoured Federalism against Unitarianism, although in practice Federalism had by that time been subsumed into the Rosismo movement. Rosas established a totalitarian regime, in which the government sought to dictate every aspect of public and private life. It was mandated that the slogan "Death to the Savage Unitarians" be inscribed at the head of all official documents. Anyone on the state payroll—from military officers, priests, to civil servants and teachers—was obliged to wear a red badge with the inscription "Federation or Death". Every male was required to have a "federal look", i.e., to sport a large moustache and sideburns, leading many to wear false moustaches. The red colour—symbol of both the Federalist Party and of Rosismo—became omnipresent in the province of Buenos Aires. Soldiers wore red chiripás (blankets worn as trousers), caps and jackets, and their horses sported red accoutrements. Civilians were also required to wear the colour. A red waistcoat, red badge and red hat band were required for men, while women wore ribbons in that colour and children donned school uniforms based upon Rosismo paradigms. Building exteriors and interiors were also decorated in red. Most Catholic clergy in Buenos Aires willingly backed Rosas' regime. The Jesuits, the only ones who refused to do so, were expelled from the country. The lower social strata in Buenos Aires, which formed the vast majority of its populace, experienced no improvement in the conditions under which they lived. When Rosas slashed expenditures, he cut resources from education, social services, general welfare and public works. None of the lands confiscated from Indians and Unitarians were turned over to rural workers, including gauchos. Black people did not experience any improvement in their conditions either. Rosas was a slave-owner, and helped revive the slave trade. Despite doing little to promote their interests, he remained popular among blacks and gauchos. He employed blacks, patronized their festivities and attended their candombles. The gauchos admired his leadership and willingness to fraternize with them to some extent. ### State terrorism In addition to purges, banishments and censorship, Rosas took measures against the opposition and anyone else he deemed a threat that historians have considered state terrorism. Terror was a tool used to intimidate dissident voices, to shore up support among his own partisans and to exterminate his foes. His targets were denounced, sometimes inaccurately, as having ties to Unitarians. Those victimised included members of his government and party who were suspected of being insufficiently loyal. If actual opponents were not at hand, the regime found other targets that were punished to make an example. A climate of fear was used to create unquestioning conformity to Rosas' dictates. State terrorism was carried out by the Mazorca, an armed parapolice unit of the Sociedad Popular Restauradora political organization. The Sociedad Popular Restauradora and the Mazorca were creations of Rosas, who retained tight control over both. The tactics of the mazorqueros included neighborhood sweeps in which houses would be searched and occupants intimidated. Others who fell into their power were arrested, tortured and killed. Killings were generally by shooting, lance-thrusting or throat-slitting. Many were castrated, or had their beards scalped or their tongues cut out. Modern estimates report around 2,000 people were killed from 1829 until 1852. Although a judicial system still existed in Buenos Aires, Rosas removed any independence the courts might have exercised, either by controlling appointments to the judiciary, or by circumventing their authority entirely. He would sit in judgement over cases, issuing sentences which included fines, service in the army, imprisonment, or execution. The exercise of state terror as a tool of intimidation was restricted to Rosas himself; his subordinates had no control over it. It was used against specific targets, rather than randomly. Terrorism was orchestrated rather than a product of popular zeal, was targeted for effect rather than indiscriminate. Anarchic demonstrations, vigilantism and disorderliness were antithetical to a regime touting a law and order agenda. Foreigners were exempted from abuses, as were people too poor or inconsequential to serve as effective examples. Victims were selected for their usefulness as tools of intimidation. ## Struggle for dominance ### Rebellions and foreign threat Throughout the late 1830s and early 1840s, Rosas faced a series of major threats to his power. The Unitarians found an ally in Andrés de Santa Cruz, the ruler of the Peru–Bolivian Confederation. Rosas declared war against the Peru–Bolivian Confederation on 19 March 1837, joining the War of the Confederation between Chile and Peru–Bolivia. The Rosista army played a minor role in the conflict, which resulted in the overthrow of Santa Cruz and the dissolution of the Peru–Bolivian Confederation. On 28 March 1838, France declared a blockade of the Port of Buenos Aires, eager to extend its influence over the region. Unable to confront the French, Rosas increased internal repression to forestall potential uprisings against his regime. The blockade caused severe damage to the economy across all the provinces, as they exported their goods through the port of Buenos Aires. Despite the 1831 Federal Pact, all provinces had long been discontent with the de facto primacy that Buenos Aires province held over them. On 28 February 1839, the province of Corrientes revolted and attacked both Buenos Aires and Entre Ríos provinces. Rosas counterattacked and defeated the rebels, killing their leader, the governor of Corrientes. In June, Rosas uncovered a plot by dissident Rosistas to oust him from power in what became known as the Maza conspiracy. Rosas imprisoned some of the plotters and executed others. Manuel Vicente Maza, president of both the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court, was murdered by Rosas's Mazorca agents within the halls of the parliament on the pretext that his son was involved in the conspiracy. In the countryside, estancieros, including a younger brother of Rosas, revolted, beginning the Rebellion of the South. The rebels attempted to ally with France, but were easily crushed, many losing their lives and properties in the process. In September 1839, Juan Lavalle returned after ten years in exile. He allied with the governor of Corrientes, which revolted once again, and invaded Buenos Aires province at the head of Unitarian troops armed and supplied by the French. Emboldened by Lavalle's actions, the provinces of Tucumán, Salta, La Rioja, Catamarca and Jujuy formed the Coalition of the North and also rebelled against Buenos Aires. Great Britain intervened on behalf of Rosas, and France lifted the blockade on 29 October 1840. The struggle with his internal enemies was hard-fought. By December 1842, Lavalle had been killed and the rebellious provinces subdued, except for Corrientes, which was only defeated in 1847. Terrorism was also employed on the battlefield, as the Rosistas refused to take prisoners. The defeated men had their throats cut and their heads put on display. ### Ruler of Argentina Around 1845, Rosas managed to establish absolute dominance over the region. He exercised complete control over all aspects of society with the solid backing of the army. Rosas was raised from colonel to brigadier general (the highest army rank) on 18 December 1829. On 12 November 1840 he declined the newly created and higher rank of grand marshal (gran mariscal), which had been bestowed on him by the House of Representatives. The army was led by officers who had backgrounds and values similar to his. Confident of his power, Rosas made some concessions by returning confiscated properties to their owners, disbanding the Mazorca and ending torture and political assassinations. The inhabitants of Buenos Aires still dressed and behaved according to the set of rules Rosas had imposed, but the climate of constant and widespread fear greatly diminished. When Rosas was elected governor for the first time in 1829, he held no power outside the province of Buenos Aires. There was no national government or national parliament. The former Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata had been succeeded by the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, which by 1831, following the Federal Pact and officially from 22 May 1835, had increasingly been known as the Argentine Confederation, or simply, Argentina. Rosas's victory over the other Argentine provinces in the early 1840s turned them into satellites of Buenos Aires. He gradually put in place provincial governors who were either allied or too weak to have real independence, which allowed him to exercise dominance over all the provinces. By 1848, Rosas began calling his government the "government of the confederacy" and the "general government", which would have been inconceivable a few years before. The next year, with acquiescence of the provinces, he named himself "Supreme Head of the Confederacy" and became the indisputable ruler of Argentina. As Rosas aged and his health declined, the question of who would succeed him became a growing concern among his supporters. His wife Encarnación had died in October 1838 after a long illness. Although devastated by his loss, Rosas exploited her death to raise support for his regime. Not long after, at the age of 47, he began an affair with his fifteen-year-old maid, María Eugenia Castro, with whom he had five illegitimate children. From his marriage to Encarnación, Rosas had two children: Juan Bautista Pedro and Manuela Robustiana. Rosas established a hereditary dictatorship, naming the children from his marriage as his successors, stating that "[t]hey are both worthy children of my beloved Encarnación, and if, God willing, I die, then you will find that they are capable of succeeding me." It is unknown whether Rosas was a closet monarchist. Later during his exile, Rosas declared that Princess Alice of the United Kingdom would be the ideal ruler for his country. Nonetheless, in public he stated that his regime was republican in nature. ## Apogee and downfall ### Anglo-French blockade The breakup of the old Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata during the 1810s eventually resulted in the emergence of independent nations of Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay in the northern portion of the Viceroyalty, while its southern territories coalesced into the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. Rosas planned to restore, if not all, at least a considerable part of the former borders of the old Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. He never recognized the independence of Paraguay and regarded it a rebel Argentine province that would inevitably be reconquered. He sent an army under Manuel Oribe who invaded Uruguay and conquered most of the country, except for its capital Montevideo that endured a long siege starting in 1843. When pressed by the British, Rosas declined to guarantee Uruguayan independence. In South America, all potential foreign threats to Rosas's plans of conquest collapsed, including Gran Colombia and the Peru–Bolivian Confederation, or were troubled by internal turmoil, as was the Empire of Brazil. To reinforce his claims over Uruguay and Paraguay, and maintain his dominance over the Argentine provinces, Rosas blockaded the port of Montevideo and closed the interior rivers to foreign trade. The loss of trade was unacceptable to Britain and France. On 17 September 1845 both nations established the Anglo-French blockade of the Río de la Plata and enforced the free navigation in the Río de la Plata Basin (or Platine region). Argentina resisted the pressure and fought back to a standstill. This undeclared war caused more economic harm to France and Britain than to Argentina. The British faced increasing pressure at home once they realised that the access gained to the other ports within the Platine region did not compensate for the loss of trade with Buenos Aires. Britain ended all hostilities and lifted the blockade on 15 July 1847, followed by France on 12 June 1848. Rosas had successfully resisted the two most powerful nations on Earth; his standing, and Argentina's, increased among Hispanic American nations. The Venezuelan humanist Andrés Bello, summarizing the prevailing opinion, considered Rosas among "the leading ranks of the great men of America". Although his prestige was on the rise, Rosas made no serious attempts to further liberalise his regime. Every year he presented his resignation and the pliant House of Representatives predictably declined, claiming that maintaining him in office was vital for the nation's welfare. Rosas also allowed exiled Argentines to return to their homeland, but only because he was so confident of his control and that no one was willing to risk defying him. The execution in August 1848 of the pregnant Camila O'Gorman, charged with a forbidden romance with a priest, caused a backlash throughout the continent. Nonetheless, it served as a clear warning that Rosas had no intention of loosening his grip. ### Platine War Rosas failed to realize that discontent was steadily growing throughout the country. Throughout the 1840s he became increasingly secluded in his country house in Palermo, some miles away from Buenos Aires. There he ruled and lived under heavy protection provided by guards and patrols. He declined to meet with his ministers and relied solely on secretaries. His daughter Manuela replaced his wife at his right hand and became the link between Rosas and the outside world. The reason for Rosas's increasing isolation was given by a member of his secretariat: "The dictator is not stupid: he knows the people hate him; he goes in constant fear and always has one eye on the chance to rob and abuse them and the other on making a getaway. He has a horse ready saddled at the door of his office day and night". Meanwhile, Brazil, now ascendant under Emperor Dom Pedro II, provided support to the Uruguayan government that still held out in Montevideo, as well as to the ambitious Justo José de Urquiza, a caudillo in Entre Ríos who rebelled against Rosas. Once one of Rosas' most trusted lieutenants, Urquiza now claimed to fight for a constitutional government, although his ambition to become head of state was barely disguised. In retaliation, Rosas declared war on Brazil on 18 August 1851, beginning the Platine War. The army under Oribe in Uruguay surrendered to Urquiza in October. With arms and financial aid given by Brazil, Urquiza then marched through Argentine territory heading to Buenos Aires. Uncharacteristically, Rosas remained passive throughout the conflict. The Argentine ruler lost heart once he realized that he had fallen into a trap. Even if he defeated Urquiza, his forces would probably be weakened enough to prevent him from challenging the Brazilian army that was ready to invade Argentina. With no other alternative, Rosas remarked: "There is no other way; we have to play for the high stakes and go for everything. Here we are, and from here there is no retreat." After an unsuccessful battle against Urquiza on 3 February 1852, Rosas fled to Buenos Aires. Once there, he disguised himself and boarded a ship that took him to Britain to live in exile. Embittered, he remarked: "It is not the people who have overthrown me. It is the monkeys, the Brazilians." ## Later years ### Exile and death Rosas arrived in Plymouth, Great Britain, on 26 April 1852. The British gave him asylum, paid for his travel and welcomed him with a 21-gun salute. These honours were granted because, according to the British Foreign Secretary James Harris, 3rd Earl of Malmesbury, "General Rosas was no common refugee, but one who had shown great distinction and kindness to the British merchants who had traded with his country". Months before his fall, Rosas had arranged with the British chargé d'affaires Captain Robert Gore for protection and asylum in the event of his defeat. Both his children by Encarnación followed him into exile, although Juan Bautista soon returned with his family to Argentina. His daughter Manuela married the son of an old associate of Rosas, an act which the former dictator never forgave. A domineering father, Rosas wanted his daughter to remain devoted to him alone. Although he forbade her from writing or visiting, Manuela remained loyal to him and maintained contact. The new Argentine government confiscated all of Rosas' properties and tried him as a criminal, later sentencing him to death. Rosas was appalled that most of his friends, supporters and allies abandoned him and became either silent or openly critical of him. Rosismo vanished overnight. "The landed class, supporters and beneficiaries of Rosas, now had to make their peace—and their profits—with his successors. Survival, not allegiance, was their politics", argued Lynch. Urquiza, a one-time ally and later an enemy, reconciled with Rosas and sent him financial assistance, hoping for political support in return—although Rosas had scant political capital left. Rosas followed Argentina's developments while in exile, always hoping for an opportunity to return, but he never again insinuated himself into Argentine affairs. In exile Rosas was not destitute, but he lived modestly amid financial constraints during the remainder of his life. A very few loyal friends sent him money, but it was never enough. He sold one of his estancias before the confiscation and became a tenant farmer in Swaythling, near Southampton. He employed a housekeeper and two to four labourers, to whom he paid above-average wages. Despite constant concern over his shortage of funds, Rosas found joy in farm life, once remarking: "I now consider myself happy on this farm, living in modest circumstances as you see, earning a living the hard way by the sweat of my brow". A contemporary described him in final years: "He was then eighty, a man still handsome and imposing; his manners were most refined, and the modest environment did nothing to lessen his air of a great lord, inherited from his family." After a walk on a cold day, Rosas caught pneumonia and died at 07:00 on the morning of 14 March 1877. Following a private mass attended by his family and a few friends, he was buried in the town cemetery of Southampton. ## Legacy Serious attempts to reassess Rosas's reputation began in the 1880s with the publication of scholarly works by Adolfo Saldías and Ernesto Quesada. Later, a more blatant "Revisionist" movement would flourish under Nacionalismo (Nationalism). Nacionalismo was a political movement that appeared in Argentina in the 1920s and reached its apex in the 1930s. It was the Argentine equivalent of the authoritarian ideologies that arose during the same period, such as Nazism, Fascism and Integralism. Argentine Nationalism was an authoritarian, anti-Semitic, racist and misogynistic political movement with support for racially based pseudo-scientific theories such as eugenics. Revisionismo (Revisionism) was the historiographical wing of Argentine Nacionalismo. The main goal of Argentine Nacionalismo was to establish a national dictatorship. For the Nacionalismo movement, Rosas and his regime were idealized and portrayed as paragons of governmental virtue. Revisionismo served as a useful tool, as the main purpose of the revisionists within the Nacionalismo agenda was to rehabilitate Rosas's image. Despite a decades-long struggle, Revisionismo failed to be taken seriously. According to Michael Goebel, the revisionists had a "lack of interest in scholarly standards" and were known for "their institutional marginality in the intellectual field". They also never succeeded in changing mainstream views regarding Rosas. William Spence Robertson said in 1930: "Among the enigmatical personages of the 'Age of Dictators' in South America none played a more spectacular role than the Argentine dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas, whose gigantic and ominous figure bestrode the Plata River for more than twenty years. So despotic was his power that Argentine writers have themselves styled this age of their history as 'The Tyranny of Rosas'." In 1961, William Dusenberry said: "Rosas is a negative memory in Argentina. He left behind him the black legend of Argentine history—a legend which Argentines in general wish to forget. There is no monument to him in the entire nation; no park, plaza, or street bears his name." In the 1980s, Argentina was a fractured, deeply divided nation, having faced military dictatorships, severe economic crises and a defeat in the Falklands War. President Carlos Menem decided to repatriate Rosas's remains and take advantage of the occasion to unite the Argentines. Menem believed that if the Argentines could forgive Rosas and his regime, they might do the same regarding the more recent and vividly remembered past. On 30 September 1989, an elaborate and enormous cortege organized by the government was held, after which the remains of the Argentine ruler were interred in his family vault at La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires. Closely allied with neorevisionists, Menem (and his fellow Peronist presidential successors Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) have honoured Rosas on banknotes, postage stamps and monuments, causing mixed reactions among the public. Rosas remains a controversial figure among Argentines, who "have long been fascinated and outraged" by him, as historian John Lynch noted.
654,565	William de Longchamp	1,172,822,581	12th-century Chancellor and Justiciar of England, Bishop of Ely	[ "1197 deaths", "12th-century English Navy personnel", "12th-century English Roman Catholic bishops", "12th-century births", "Anglo-Normans", "Bishops of Ely", "Diplomats of the Holy See", "High Sheriffs of Essex", "High Sheriffs of Hertfordshire", "Lord chancellors of England", "Year of birth unknown" ]	William de Longchamp (died 1197) was a medieval Lord Chancellor, Chief Justiciar, and Bishop of Ely in England. Born to a humble family in Normandy, he owed his advancement to royal favour. Although contemporary writers accused Longchamp's father of being the son of a peasant, he held land as a knight. Longchamp first served Henry II's illegitimate son Geoffrey, but quickly transferred to the service of Richard I, Henry's heir. When Richard became king in 1189, Longchamp paid £3,000 for the office of Chancellor, and was soon named to the see, or bishopric, of Ely and appointed legate by the pope. Longchamp governed England while Richard was on the Third Crusade, but his authority was challenged by Richard's brother, John, who eventually succeeded in driving Longchamp from power and from England. Longchamp's relations with the other leading English nobles were also strained, which contributed to the demands for his exile. Soon after Longchamp's departure from England, Richard was captured on his journey back to England from the crusade and held for ransom by Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. Longchamp travelled to Germany to help negotiate Richard's release. Although Longchamp regained the office of Chancellor after Richard's return to England, he lost much of his former power. He aroused a great deal of hostility among his contemporaries during his career, but he retained Richard's trust and was employed by the king until the bishop's death in 1197. Longchamp wrote a treatise on the law, which remained well known throughout the later Middle Ages. ## Background and early life Longchamp's ancestors originated in the village of Longchamps, Normandy. Although it is known that he was born in Normandy, the exact location is unknown, with it perhaps being near the Norman village of Argenton. His father, Hugh de Longchamp, also held land in England, as did many other Norman nobles after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Hugh Nonant—one of Longchamp's opponents—declared that the elder Longchamp was the son of a peasant, which seems unlikely, as Hugh de Longchamp appears to have held a knight's tenancy in Normandy. The family was originally of humble background, but rose through service to King Henry II. The elder Longchamp also held land in Herefordshire in England, including the manor of Wilton near Ross in Wales. Hugh married a woman named Eve, a relative of the Lacy family. Historian David Balfour suggests that Eve was the daughter of Gilbert de Lacy, the son of Roger de Lacy, exiled by King William II in 1095 for rebellion. Longchamp's sister, Richeut, married the castellan of Dover Castle. A second sister, Melisend, came to England with Longchamp, but otherwise is unknown. A sister is recorded as having married Stephen Devereux, but whether this is Melisend is unclear. Of Longchamp's brothers, Osbert remained a layman, and owed much of his advancement to William; Stephen served King Richard I on crusade; Henry, another layman, became a sheriff along with Osbert; and Robert became a monk. Two of Longchamp's brothers became abbots. Longchamp entered public life at the close of Henry II's reign, as an official for the King's illegitimate son Geoffrey. He soon left Geoffrey's service, and served in Henry II's chancery, or writing office, before he entered service with Henry's son Richard. Richard, who was Duke of Aquitaine at the time, named Longchamp chancellor of the Duchy of Aquitaine. Longchamp first distinguished himself at the court of King Philip II of France in Paris in 1189, when he acted as Richard's envoy in a dispute with William Marshal, King Henry's envoy. By that time, Longchamp was already one of Richard's trusted advisors. ## Chancellor and Justiciar On Richard's accession to the throne of England in 1189 Longchamp became Chancellor of England. Longchamp paid 3,000 pounds (£) for the office of Chancellor. This was followed by an increase in the price of having chancery documents sealed with the Great Seal, necessary for their authentication, perhaps to help Longchamp recoup the cost of office. At the council held at Pipewell on 15 September 1189, the King raised Longchamp to the bishopric of Ely. Richard named three other bishops at the same time: Godfrey de Lucy to Winchester, Richard FitzNeal to London, and Hubert Walter to Salisbury. Longchamp was consecrated on 31 December 1189 and enthroned at Ely on 6 January 1190. Before leaving England in 1189, Richard put the Tower of London in Longchamp's hands and appointed him jointly with Hugh de Puiset, the Bishop of Durham, to the office of Chief Justiciar, at that time not strictly a judicial office. Instead, the justiciar was the person entrusted with much of the king's authority when the king was outside the kingdom, able to act in the king's name. Along with Puiset, the king named Hugh Bardulf, William Briwerre, Geoffrey fitz Peter, and William Marshal as associates in the justiciarship, under Puiset and Longchamp. As Justiciar, Longchamp sent judges throughout the country to visit the shires on judicial visits, even though he had no previous knowledge of the judiciary. Longchamp and Puiset were unable to work together, and so in March 1190 Richard gave authority north of the River Humber to Hugh, and authority south of the river to Longchamp. Historians' opinions are divided whether Richard explicitly made Longchamp superior to Puiset at this time, or if in theory the two were supposed to co-equal in their respective spheres. By June, Longchamp had eased Puiset out of power and the justiciar's office. He also received a commission as a papal legate from Pope Clement III at this time. Supposedly Richard paid 1,500 marks (£1,000) to the papacy to secure the legateship for Longchamp. Longchamp granted the citizens of London the right to elect their own sheriffs, and to collect and remit their monetary levy of £300 directly to the Exchequer, the treasury of England. On Longchamp's visits to his diocese he was accompanied by a large train of retainers and animals, which became notorious throughout the country as a sign of his extravagance. Under his legatine authority, the bishop held legatine councils of the church at Gloucester and Westminster in 1190. He also acted to restore authority in York, which had suffered a breakdown in order after the massacre of Jews in March 1190. Also in 1190, he sent an army against Rhys ap Gruffydd, a Welsh prince who was attempting to throw off the control of the marcher lords that surrounded Wales. ## Disputes with John Longchamp's relations with the English people were made more difficult because he was a native of Normandy, and often insensitive to English customs. The medieval writer William of Newburgh claimed that Longchamp was "an obscure foreigner of unproven ability and loyalty". For example, it appears likely that Longchamp did not speak English, making his relations with his flock more difficult. The leading nobles complained that Longchamp marginalised the other officials Richard had appointed to serve with him, and that he brought in foreigners to fill offices. Although the first charge is mostly untrue, the second appears to have been valid, as Longchamp did install non-natives in judicial offices and as sheriffs. He also attempted to seize control of a number of English castles by granting their custody to relatives and dependents. Throughout 1190, Longchamp's relations with Richard's younger brother John were difficult. This led to Longchamp besieging Lincoln Castle because the castellan would not surrender the castle and allow himself to be replaced by Longchamp's nominee. The castellan, Gerard de Camville, had sworn allegiance to John and stated he would no longer recognise the chancellor's authority. In response, John took the two castles of Tickhill and Northampton. News of the dispute reached Richard, who sent Walter de Coutances, the Archbishop of Rouen, to England in late spring 1191, with orders to negotiate a peace between John and Longchamp. Eventually, Walter brokered a compromise between the two as a result of which Gerard was confirmed as castellan and John relinquished the castles. Longchamp also agreed to work to ensure John's succession to the throne in the event of Richard's death. Longchamp's legatine commission from the papacy expired in spring 1191, on the death of Clement III, thus removing one of Longchamp's power bases. The legation was, however, renewed a few months later by Clement's successor, Celestine III. A further complication for Longchamp arose in September 1191, when Henry II's illegitimate son Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, was arrested by Longchamp's subordinates, led by the castellan of Dover Castle, Longchamp's brother-in-law. Their orders had been to arrest the Archbishop of York as he landed at Dover on the archbishop's return to England, but Geoffrey had been warned of their plans, and fled to sanctuary in St. Martin's Priory. Longchamp's men laid siege to the priory, and after four days forcibly removed Geoffrey. The violence of the attack reminded the public of Thomas Becket's martyrdom, and public opinion turned against Longchamp. Longchamp claimed that Geoffrey had not sworn fealty to Richard, but this was likely just an excuse to eliminate a rival. An intense propaganda campaign led by partisans of John ensued. One of the leaders of the campaign against Longchamp was Hugh Nonant, the Bishop of Coventry, and he along with other magnates, including Geoffrey, who had been released, convened a trial on 5 October 1191 at Loddon Bridge near London. Longchamp did not attend, but he was deposed and excommunicated, and after trying to hold the Tower of London, he was forced to surrender due to lack of support from the citizens of London. The council then declared his offices forfeit, and ordered the surrender of the castles in his custody. The main charge against Longchamp appears to have been his autocratic behaviour. Longchamp went to Dover in late 1191 to seek transport to the continent. During his escape, he was unable to answer the local people when they spoke to him in English. He attempted to leave England in various disguises, including a monk's habit and women's clothes. Hugh Nonant wrote that Longchamp attempted on one occasion to hide dressed as a prostitute, which led to him being assaulted by a fisherman who mistook him for a whore. Longchamp eventually succeeded in leaving England, on 29 October. ## Exile and return Longchamp went to the court of Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was holding King Richard captive at Trifels. The bishop arranged for Richard to be held at the imperial court and negotiated a payment plan for the ransom, 100,000 marks, under the terms of which the emperor agreed to release Richard once 70,000 marks had been paid and hostages for the payment of the rest had been received. When the Emperor in January 1194 called a meeting of the imperial magnates to debate King Philip II of France's offer to pay the Emperor to keep Richard captive, Longchamp attended along with Walter of Coutances and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard's mother. After further diplomatic wrangling, Richard was freed on 4 February 1194. Richard rewarded Longchamp with the custody of Eye and an appointment as Sheriff of Essex and Sheriff of Hertfordshire when the pair returned to England, but Longchamp soon became embroiled in a renewal of his disagreement with Archbishop Geoffrey of York. Richard left England in May 1194, and Longchamp accompanied him to the continent, never to return to England; Longchamp returned to the Emperor's court in 1195. Richard continued to use Longchamp in diplomacy—although it was Geoffrey who arranged a truce with King Philip in 1194—as well as retaining the bishop as chancellor, but the main power in England was now Hubert Walter. Longchamp spent the rest of his life outside his diocese, usually accompanying the king. ## Death and legacy Longchamp died in January 1197, at Poitiers, while on a diplomatic mission to Rome for Richard, and was buried at the abbey of Le Pin. Much of the information on his career comes from people hostile to him, for example, Gerald of Wales called Longchamp that "monster with many heads". The historian Austin Lane Poole says that Gerald described Longchamp as more like an ape than a man. Longchamp was reportedly a cultured and well-educated man. He was supported by others among his contemporaries, including Pope Clement III, who, when he appointed Longchamp legate, wrote that he did so at the urging of the English bishops. When he was one of four men named bishop in 1189, medieval chronicler Richard of Devizes wrote that the four new bishops were "men of no little virtue and fame". Historian John Gillingham wrote that Longchamp's "record of his life in politics and administration was a good one, spoiled only by his failure in 1191". Two writers have seen, in the assembly that met to try Longchamp in 1191, a precursor to the gathering at Runnymede in 1215 that drew up Magna Carta, as it was one of the earliest examples of the nobles of the realm coming together to force the government to rule with their advice. Longchamp also promoted the careers of his brothers; Henry and Osbert became sheriffs in the 1190s, Osbert the Sheriff of Yorkshire. His brother Robert, a cleric, also benefitted, becoming prior of the Ely cathedral chapter and later abbot of St Mary's Abbey, York. The medieval poet Nigel Wireker (also known as Nigel de Longchamps) dedicated to the bishop a satirical poem, Speculum Stultorum ("Mirror of Fools"), on the habits of students. Richard Barre, a medieval writer and judge, dedicated his work Compendium de veteris et novo testamento to Longchamp. Longchamp was one of Barre's patrons, and secured the post of Archdeacon of Ely for him as well as judicial posts. One of Longchamp's probable innovations as chancellor was the replacement of the first person singular previously used in documents drafted in the king's name with the majestic plural or "royal we". He wrote a work on law entitled Practica legum et decretorum, a manual on the usage of both civil and canon law in the Angevin possessions on the continent, composed sometime between 1181 and 1189. It was well known in the Middle Ages, and served as a practical guide for those involved in litigation.

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