On this day:
1297
Battle of Stirling Bridge: Scots jointly led by William Wallace and Andrew Moray defeat the English.
1649
Siege of Drogheda ends: Oliver Cromwell’s English Parliamentarian troops take the town and execute its garrison
1708
Charles XII of Sweden stops his march to conquer Moscow outside Smolensk, marking the turning point in the Great Northern War. The army is defeated nine months later in the Battle of Poltava, and the Swedish empire ceases to be a major power
1829
Surrender of the expedition led by Isidro Barradas at Tampico, sent by the Spanish crown in order to retake Mexico. This was the final consummation of Mexican independence.
1857
The Mountain Meadows Massacre: Mormon settlers and Paiutes massacre 120 pioneers at Mountain Meadows, Utah.
1921
Nahalal, the first moshav in Palestine, is settled as part of a Zionist plan to colonize Palestine and creating a Jewish state, later to be Israel.
1922
The British Mandate of Palestine begins.
1944
World War II: RAF bombing raid on Darmstadt and the following firestorm kill 11,500.
1978
U.S. President Jimmy Carter, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel meet at Camp David and agree on the Camp David Accords, a framework for peace between Israel and Egypt and a comprehensive peace in the Middle East.
1997
14 Estonian soldiers die in the Kurkse tragedy, drowning in the Baltic Sea
2001
The September 11 attacks take place in the United States. Airplane hijackings result in the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City, damage to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the crashing of a passenger airliner near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
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9/11: The notion that life is sacred, that highminded conflict can be limited to combatants, and that civilians are to be avoided is shown to be untrue. Indeed, the more innocents, the better.
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Kirk: The notion that our national problems need only a respectful engagement with your opponent, discussion, debate, and good-humored withdrawal to a neutral corner is shown to be untrue. Surprise and incoherent viciousness are leverage.
***Dinner at Lilith. Better decor. That dining car feel is gone. Still with the hurried atmosphere. Food: quirky choices indifferently done, especially at the price. Their second place is coming at the old Station.
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A Bahrain-based United States military installation has sustained severe damage during recent months of fighting with Iran, the acting secretary of the US Navy has said, prompting Washington to evaluate what to do with its headquarters in the Middle East.
“They blew the hell out of Bahrain,” Hung Cao said in an interview with The Epoch Times on Wednesday.
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At one minute before noon on Saturday, September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake struck the Kanto area, including Tokyo and Yokohama. Its epicenter was in Sagami Bay, 50 miles southeast of Tokyo near the island of Oshima. The initial shaking lasted for about five minutes and was followed by a tsunami that washed people and houses out to sea. In some of the smaller inlets, the tsunami reached heights of up to 40 feet. Many were drowned, but the tsunami extinguished many fires that otherwise would have been uncontrollable.
Tokyo’s largest building, the twelve-story Asakusa Tower, split in two and collapsed. The earthquake knocked out the seismograph at the central weather bureau in Tokyo. The seismograph at Tokyo Imperial University, still functioning, recorded a series of 1,700 earthquakes and aftershocks that struck the Tokyo area over the following three days.
Fires followed the initial quake and did more damage than the quake itself. Since the city was built largely of wood, the fires burned out of control. Gas mains ruptured by the quake, and leaking oil from above-ground storage tanks added to the conflagration. A condition called a 'fire tornado' was soon created, with a wind of such velocity that it would lift a person off the ground. These crisscrossed the city and either burned people alive or suffocated them with dense fumes of carbon monoxide. More than 30,000 people were reportedly killed at a single location, a park on the east bank of the Sumida River, when a firestorm descended on refugees gathered there. Firefighting equipment was destroyed or could not be moved because of the rubble that blocked the roads. Water was not available to fight the fire because the water mains were ruptured by the quake. Bridges and narrow streets became deathtraps as fleeing people could neither go forward nor turn back. Hundreds of people who had attempted to cross one of the large bridges that spanned the Sumida River found themselves trapped and incinerated when walls of fire swept the bridge from both banks.
A party of 200 children on an excursion train trip were buried alive by a falling embankment. Hundreds of people tried to escape in small boats, only to be drowned by waves caused by aftershocks or to be burned to death in burning oil slicks. The liner Empress of Australia saved several thousand people by loading them aboard and heading out to sea to ride out the disaster.
The quake devastated 45,000 square miles. In Yokohama, Japan’s chief port, communications were completely destroyed, as was the Imperial University Library, which contained one of the world’s great collections of rare books, original documents, and priceless art objects.
The flexible Japanese wood-and-paper house withstood the shaking, but their heavy tile roofs often collapsed and trapped the occupants. For the most part, steel-framed and reinforced concrete buildings remained standing with only moderate damage, but altogether 60 percent of the buildings in Tokyo and 80 percent in Yokohama were flattened by the quake or destroyed by the fires that followed.
Aftershocks continued to shake the region following the quake. A soaking rain followed on the third day, which helped extinguish the fires that were still raging. Food shortages were rampant, and riots broke out, but there was no looting and little profiteering. Members of the Korean community were attacked as rumors accused them of setting fires and poisoning the wells. Several hundred were killed by vigilantes before the authorities could reestablish order.
A week after the quake, 25,000 people were still living in the open. One of the biggest problems was disposing of dead bodies, many still undiscovered in the rubble. When found, they would be piled up and cremated. The Sumida River was full of bloated and discolored corpses.
144,000 were killed. 144,000
Rebuilding costs were ruinous.
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