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June 1920 Some jokes age well; some don’t. Take the one about the French exchange officer who learned that his American shipmate had just become a father. “My wife and I want children,’’ Henri said, “but, alas, she is unbearable. Realizing he had used the wrong word, he blurted “I should have said ‘inconceivable.’” “No, no—” said the new father, “the word you want is ‘impregnable.’”
This semi-salacious triple entendre was especially popular in the 1920s because so many Americans spoke French (as popular internationally as English is in the 1990s). This issue of Proceedings is cluttered with untranslated French words, sentences, and even full paragraphs. German, too, is quoted, but not so often. From childhood, Americans had giggled at convoluted Germanic phrases like, Throw the horse over the fence some hay.’’ But returnees from Over There had discovered that war had uncovered a hidden German talent for naming things, especially their enemies: e.g., the kilted Black Watch from Scotland were rechristened for all time as “the Ladies from Hell,” and the U.S. Marines became “Devil Dogs,” after their hand- to-hand encounter with German soldiers at Belleau Wood.
June 1940—At Manila Bay in the summer of 1898, America and Germany, two new kids in the family of nations, got into a shoving match that ended with one scared and the other glad. Which was which? Six days after Commodore Dewey destroyed the Spanish squadron and imposed a blockade on Manila, the German gunboat Cormoran arrived. Within a month, four more warships showed up—one carrying Vice Admiral Otto Von Diederichs. With six cruisers and two smaller ships, the 61-year-old Dewey remained confident but was concerned that Germany had sent so large a force to protect so few vital interests.
What Dewey didn’t know was that Von Diederichs was there expecting Dewey to make the kill and depart, leaving Germany to feast on the remains. Neither officer knew that the blockade would last more than three months during which tempers on both sides would grow short after repeated crossings of bows, warning shots, and boardings. Finally, Dewey sent Flag Lieutenant Tom Bundy to see Von Diederichs. Three days later, Von Diederichs sent Flag Lieutenant Hintze to talk to Dewey, who exploded, “If you are at war with the United States, 1 want to know it. You can have war here or at any time. We are ready.”
But neither side was really ready—and would not be for another 19 years.
June I960 -God only knows what a German-American War of 1889 would have been like. At Apia, Samoa, we would almost certainly have found out, but for the grace—and fury—of God. In “The Apia Hurricane of 1889 ” Medical Corps Captain J.A.C. Gray offers a grim postmortem. A victorious Samoan army of 6,000 has bloodied a German landing force of 160 men and the U.S. Consul asks for and gets a three-ship squadron to protect American lives and property against the vengeful Germans’ indiscriminate shelling and burning. 1 hus did the Trenton, Vandalia, and Nipsic confront SMS Adler,
Olga, and Eber in Apia harbor, with HMS Calliope looking on. The barometer began to fall on 15 March and, 29 hours later, Apia’s beaches were littered with corpses and the scrap iron—all that was left of six belligerent warships. God had clearly said, “Knock if off!”
A 21-year-old naval cadet who had been lashed in the Vandalia’s rigging by a coal passer survived this Armageddon to remember the slow-motion struggles in the water below him as his weaker shipmates turned their serene laces upward to heaven and sank from sight. Perhaps God stripped Cadet John A. Lejeune, flagellated him with ratlines, and scalded him inside and out with sea water in order to toughen him enough to become a Commandant of the Marine Corps, a superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, and the only Marine ever to command an Army division in combat against Germany. '
Clay Barrow
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