Diversions

History Friday – The Secret Voyage of the Kofuku Maru

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When I came around to writing a novel set in the World War II timeframe a couple of years ago, one of the main characters spent the war years, first in Malaya and then Australia. This meant a deep dive into the war along the southern Pacific front, and life in Australia during that period. We Americans had Pearl Harbor, defeat of our military in the Philippines, the Bataan Death March, Wake and Midway, Guadalcanal and Tarawa; Australia had the loss of their troops in Singapore and Malaya, the occupation of Sumatra, Japanese air raids on Darwin, and the war next door in New Guinea.

The fall of Singapore struck a particularly heavy blow to the Allies in 1942: so close to Australia, with many personal and economic connections. Refugees from British and Dutch interests in southwest Asia fled in the direction of Australia and India in anything that could float and escape the deadly notice of the Japanese. One of those fortunate vessels was the Kofuku Maru, a 70-ft Japanese-built wooden craft, with a mainsail and an engine. It was constructed in the late 1930s to support the fishing fleet based out of Singapore, bringing water and food out to the fishing fleet, and collecting the catch for sale in the marketplace. Confiscated by British authorities after war broke out, by early spring of 1942 the Kofuku Maru was under the command of a volunteer Australian merchant mariner in his sixties named Bill Reynolds. Reynolds was tasked with evacuating civilians from the Malay peninsula, first to Sumatra, and then to Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

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History Friday – The Other Alamo

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(A repost from 2012, from my author blog – for the anniversary of Texas independence.)

The Texas Revolution and War for Independence from Mexico initially rather resembled the American Revolution, some sixty years before— a resemblance not lost on the American settlers in Texas. At the very beginning, both the Colonies and the Anglo-Texans were far-distant communities with a self-sufficient tradition, who had been accustomed to manage their own affairs with a bare minimum of interference from the central governing authority. Colonists and Anglo-Texans started off by standing on their rights as citizens, but a heavy-handed response by the central government provoked a response that spiraled into open revolt. ‘Since they’re trying to squash us like bugs for being rebellious, we might as give them a real rebellion and put up a fight,’ summed up the attitude.

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A Serious Case of the “Mehs”

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It seems that the Oscar Awards happened last weekend. Was there any reason to watch four solid hours of entertainment industry self-congratulation, aside from seeing if any aspiring starlet would parade in a completely transparent dress without any undergarments to speak of. On the day following, just about all the stories about the Oscars on my guilty pleasure of a mainstream newspaper, the English Daily Mail, concerned the fashions – or the bad taste displayed thereof – on the red carpet. There was only a single story or two about the movies and the awards garnered. Although the National Establishment Media organs try to sound chipper and upbeat about the broadcast and streaming audience for the Oscars … general interest in the event seemed pretty restrained.

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History Friday – Rescue 9-’49 – Or a Heroic Exploit by the 19th Century Army Officer that Fort Rucker Wasn’t Named After

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Lately I have been refreshing my memory and knowledge of Gold-Rush era California. Relevant volumes are already fringed with small Post-it notes, making it easier for me to come back to a particularly vivid description of a place, a curious character, the presence of someone later-well-known, or an interesting yet little known turn of events. For example, William Tecumseh Sherman was in California in 1848, as the aide to the American military governor, perhaps – or maybe not – afire with impatient envy of his fellow West Point classmates who were serving in the active theater of the war with Mexico. I had wanted to work him in as a walk-on character in The Golden Road, but my main character’s adventures never intersected with WT Sherman, except for delivering a newspaper to his house in San Francisco.

Anyway, an interesting sidelight to the history of the Gold Rush happened towards the end of that first year, 1849. It seemed as if half the world rushed into California, by land, sea or a combination thereof, eager to start collecting gold nuggets as big as peas and beans (or even bigger) off the ground. Some intrepid gold-seekers came through Mexico, or across Texas and New Mexico Territory, but a substantial number came by the established route; starting from the various jumping-off places along the Mississippi-Missouri. Such adventurers surged along the Platte River to Ft. Laramie, over South Pass, to Fort Hall, the Humboldt River, then up and over the last hurdle of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. At a point in present-day Nevada, the route deviated into several branches.

Those travelers – worn-down by the last few hundred miles through desert, low on supplies, having lost draft animals to hard-use, near-starvation and low-grade harassment by Indians – looked for an easier passage through the high mountains than the difficult Truckee route. They also hoped to avoid the ghastly experience of the Donner-Reed company of three years previous; caught in deep snow, with cannibalism the only alternative to death by starvation. Many chose a slightly easier passage toward the south called the Carson pass. But a portion of the late-season ‘49ers were diverted north, on a cutoff advertised as a short-cut to the northern gold fields – a short-cut talked up by rancher and entrepreneur Peter Lassen. Which it was, sort of … but it led through the Black Rock Desert and equally hard, waterless country, which demolished morale, supplies, and physical endurance of ‘49ers who were close to the end of all those. (A smaller, very misguided and disjointed company went even further south and blundered into – and out of the Death Valley – rescuing themselves by pluck, luck and the courage of several able members of it.)

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History Friday: The Handcart Saga

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(The return of History Friday at Chicagoboyz – a break from current events!)

Last week my daughter picked up a lavishly-illustrated book at a thrift store that she thought I might be interested in, and it turned out that I was, since the next book (a YA adventure, and sequel to West Towards the Sunset) will touch on interesting doings in the far West – in California, the Nevada Territory and the Mormon colonies in the Utah Territory. We had lived in Utah for three years when I was assigned to Hill AFB. Utah is rather like Texas in that both states have a rather distinct culture and off-beat origin story, at least in comparison to most other western states. The epic journey of the pioneer handcart companies from the jumping-off places in the Mid-West to Salt Lake City is one of the cultural underpinnings to the LDS Iliad, the foundation-cornerstone of Deseret, and an epic of faith, and self-organizing heroism not very well-known outside the LDS church. And thereby hangs the tale related in this volume.

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