Sherman A1
Sherman A1's JournalBuffalo Soldiers at Vancouver Barracks
By Greg Shine
In April 1899, soldiers from Company B of the Twenty-fourth U.S. Infantry Regiment arrived at Vancouver Barracks. This marked the first time in the history of the post that a unit from one of the Army's four African American regiments, known as Buffalo Soldiers, comprised the post's regular garrison of troops.
For the next thirteen months these soldiers encountered the regular assignments of garrison duty; drilling, practicing marching and marksmanship, improving the post's infrastructure, performing maintenance and clerical work, and attending the post school.
In addition to garrison duty, these soldiers also participated in formal ceremonial activities - such as concerts, parades, funerals, and escorts. For example, they led Vancouver's annual Memorial Day Parade in 1899.
When Medal of Honor recipient Moses Williams, himself a former Buffalo Soldier who had served with the Ninth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, died shortly after retiring to Vancouver in 1899, a detachment of soldiers from Company B helped lay him to rest in the post cemetery with full military honors.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/vancouverbarracksbuffalosoldiers.htm?utm_source=article&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=experience_more&utm_content=small
How a Board Game Helped Win a War
Kriegsspiel
Wargames today are considered an essential part of military planning and training. They have also become a distinctive genre of tabletop and computer games where enthusiasts can test their mettle on virtual or imaginary battlefields.
It is fascinating that today’s wargames, whether that be Pentagon simulations or two friends playing Warhammer 40,000, share a common ancestor in the 19th century game Kriegsspiel (German for ‘wargame’ or ‘warplay’).
The German wargame was developed in the 1800s by Prussian officers to teach tactics and strategy to officers. It evolved from early attempts at wargaming in the German states. These first attempts were akin to chess and quite unrealistic. The board was usually laid out in a grid of squares with terrain such as rivers taking unnatural forms.
https://historyofyesterday.com/how-a-board-game-helped-win-a-war-4d57153e2979
Colonial Williamsburg acquires rare Paul Revere tankard
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has acquired a rare silver tankard made by Paul Revere, colonial America’s premier silversmith and the Revolution’s premier midnight righter. There are only about three dozen known Revere tankards. The tapering sides, midband, domed line and pinecone finial dates this one to around 1795, but researchers are still looking through Revere’s many extant record books to trace it directly back to its origins.
The silver tankard was sold at auction in May of this year for $112,500, including buyer’s premium. The Friends of Colonial Williamsburg Collections Fund provided the wherewithal to add this exceptional piece, one of the largest forms produced by Revere’s silver shop, to the Colonial Williamsburg museum holdings.
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/62035
Accounts of African American service during the War of 1812
Although the documentation is fragmented, men of African descent did serve as soldiers and sailors aboard warships and on privateers during the war in substantial numbers on either side.
By By Gene Allen Smith, Texas Christian University
Ned Simmons lived most of his life enslaved on Dungeness plantation, on the estate of General Nathaniel Greene on Georgia’s Cumberland Island. Born in 1763, probably in South Carolina, Simmons’ legal status rotated among the Greene family, but his monotonous existence on the island changed very little until the waning weeks of the War of 1812. When Admiral George Cockburn’s ships and soldiers invaded the area during early 1815, Simmons immediately volunteered for British military service. He received an old 1808 version of a British red uniform, a weapon, and began training to be a Colonial Marine. Then disaster struck! Although Simmons had enlisted, his training had not yet taken him off of Cumberland Island. During early March 1815, two American commissioners arrived to inform the British of the ratification of the peace agreement, and after days of bickering between the commissioners and Cockburn about property, the admiral acquiesced: only property—including slaves—on Cumberland Island at 11 pm on February 17, 1815, would be returned. Even this narrow interpretation of the Treaty of Ghent adversely affected Simmons. He had been one of the first to volunteer, but he had not yet departed the island. On March 10, 1815, British officers stripped Simmons of his uniform, insignia, and his weapon, and he and eighty other men returned to slavery on Cumberland Island. Unfortunately, Simmons remained enslaved on Cumberland Island until Federal troops liberated him in 1863, almost 50 years after his first flirtation with freedom.
Born a Georgia slave on October 14, 1800, to African and European parents, Jordan Noble apparently had arrived in New Orleans sometime in 1812. The teenage Noble joined the US Army in 1813 as a free drummer in the Seventh US Regiment, and during the fierce night fighting of December 23, 1814, he kept a steady beat as Andrew Jackson’s troops surprised a British vanguard, delaying the enemy’s assault south of the city. By late December two battalions of “Free Men of Color” as well as other free black militiamen and slave volunteers had swollen Jackson’s defenses at nearby Chalmette by more than 900 men. The general’s heterogeneous force—consisting of US Army soldiers, free blacks, slaves, Louisiana Creoles, Tennessee and Kentucky frontiersmen, Jean Lafitte’s Baratarian privateers, and a small contingent of Choctaw Indians—entrenched behind a defensive rampart on the east side of the Mississippi River, some seven miles south of New Orleans, to meet a series of British attacks during late December 1814 and early January 1815. On January 8, 1815, “the rattle of [Noble’s] drum was heard [even] amidst the bin of battle,” “in the hottest hell of fire” during the unsuccessful chaotic main British frontal assault at Chalmette. After the battle the British evacuated from the Gulf Coast while Noble and his free black compatriots remained in New Orleans. In fact, Jordan Noble maintained his military connections and participated in the 1836 Seminole War in Florida, in the Mexican War, and with Confederate and Union forces during the Civil War; Noble claimed service during four American wars. After his fighting days had passed, Noble held tightly onto his position within the New Orleans free black community and onto his military legacy as the drummer boy of the Battle of New Orleans. His distinction and talent, combined with his intense patriotism, had also permitted Noble to navigate the perils associated with pre– and post–Civil War American race relations.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/accounts-of-african-american-service-during-the-war-of-1812.htm
Accounts of African American service during the War of 1812
Although the documentation is fragmented, men of African descent did serve as soldiers and sailors aboard warships and on privateers during the war in substantial numbers on either side.
By By Gene Allen Smith, Texas Christian University
Ned Simmons lived most of his life enslaved on Dungeness plantation, on the estate of General Nathaniel Greene on Georgia’s Cumberland Island. Born in 1763, probably in South Carolina, Simmons’ legal status rotated among the Greene family, but his monotonous existence on the island changed very little until the waning weeks of the War of 1812. When Admiral George Cockburn’s ships and soldiers invaded the area during early 1815, Simmons immediately volunteered for British military service. He received an old 1808 version of a British red uniform, a weapon, and began training to be a Colonial Marine. Then disaster struck! Although Simmons had enlisted, his training had not yet taken him off of Cumberland Island. During early March 1815, two American commissioners arrived to inform the British of the ratification of the peace agreement, and after days of bickering between the commissioners and Cockburn about property, the admiral acquiesced: only property—including slaves—on Cumberland Island at 11 pm on February 17, 1815, would be returned. Even this narrow interpretation of the Treaty of Ghent adversely affected Simmons. He had been one of the first to volunteer, but he had not yet departed the island. On March 10, 1815, British officers stripped Simmons of his uniform, insignia, and his weapon, and he and eighty other men returned to slavery on Cumberland Island. Unfortunately, Simmons remained enslaved on Cumberland Island until Federal troops liberated him in 1863, almost 50 years after his first flirtation with freedom.
Born a Georgia slave on October 14, 1800, to African and European parents, Jordan Noble apparently had arrived in New Orleans sometime in 1812. The teenage Noble joined the US Army in 1813 as a free drummer in the Seventh US Regiment, and during the fierce night fighting of December 23, 1814, he kept a steady beat as Andrew Jackson’s troops surprised a British vanguard, delaying the enemy’s assault south of the city. By late December two battalions of “Free Men of Color” as well as other free black militiamen and slave volunteers had swollen Jackson’s defenses at nearby Chalmette by more than 900 men. The general’s heterogeneous force—consisting of US Army soldiers, free blacks, slaves, Louisiana Creoles, Tennessee and Kentucky frontiersmen, Jean Lafitte’s Baratarian privateers, and a small contingent of Choctaw Indians—entrenched behind a defensive rampart on the east side of the Mississippi River, some seven miles south of New Orleans, to meet a series of British attacks during late December 1814 and early January 1815. On January 8, 1815, “the rattle of [Noble’s] drum was heard [even] amidst the bin of battle,” “in the hottest hell of fire” during the unsuccessful chaotic main British frontal assault at Chalmette. After the battle the British evacuated from the Gulf Coast while Noble and his free black compatriots remained in New Orleans. In fact, Jordan Noble maintained his military connections and participated in the 1836 Seminole War in Florida, in the Mexican War, and with Confederate and Union forces during the Civil War; Noble claimed service during four American wars. After his fighting days had passed, Noble held tightly onto his position within the New Orleans free black community and onto his military legacy as the drummer boy of the Battle of New Orleans. His distinction and talent, combined with his intense patriotism, had also permitted Noble to navigate the perils associated with pre– and post–Civil War American race relations.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/accounts-of-african-american-service-during-the-war-of-1812.htm
Ecuador sailing ship captures a narco sub
A three-masted sailing ship belonging to the Ecuadorian Navy last week captured a so-called narco sub, a homemade low-profile vessel (LPV) designed to transport illegal narcotics, in the Pacific Ocean off Colombia, according to a statement from Ecuador's military.
It said the barque Guayas, used to train naval cadets in seamanship, interdicted the narco sub, in international waters between the exclusive economic zones of Colombia and the Ecuadorian islands in the Pacific.
Three Ecuadorian nationals and one Colombian were taken into custody, the statement said, though it did not give any details on what narcotics might have been aboard the narco sub, which was powered by three outboard engines.
The 257-foot-long (78 meter) sailing ship, powered by more than 15,000 square feet (1,393 square meter) of sails hung from three towering masks, was on a training cruise when it spotted the drug-running vessel and made the stop, the Ecuadorian military said.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ecuador-sailing-ship-captures-a-narco-sub/ar-AAPWXOH?li=BBnb7Kz
News alerts on the phone this morning
I received four in total. 3 of which referenced the incident of the gun discharging on the movie set. 1 was from the LA Times and the other two were UK sources. The fourth reference was to gun violence.
I do believe that cable “news” is just drama TV to fill airtime between ads for drugs we never knew we needed, but I am finding harder and harder to believe that all the news sources are not manipulated.
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