Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Escapades, and Other Lesser Known Historic Events

19. A Master of Deception

In Subutai’s first command assignment, he convinced an enemy garrison that he was a deserter from the Mongol army, won their confidence, and lulled them into letting down their guard. He then signaled the Mongols to attack, allowing them to easily overrun and defeat the foe.

Throughout his career, deception was a hallmark of Subutai’s generalship and a major factor in his successes. He exhibited that talent on a grand scale in 1211, when he secured a major victory over the Jin Chinese by a timely appearance to surprise the enemy with a flank attack, after convincing them that he was hundreds of miles away.

18. Subutai’s Subjugation of the Khwarezmians and the Rus

When Genghis Khan turned his attention to the Khwarezmian Empire, Subutai led the Mongol vanguard in the campaign, and chased Khwarezm’s emir to his death. Subutai then led a reconnaissance in force on a circular route around the Caspian Sea to the north en route back to Mongolia, while Genghis returned via a circular southern route that brushed against India.

Subutai’s route led him through the Caucasus, where he twice defeated the Georgians, then subjugated the Cumans. That brought him into conflict with the Cumans’ Rus allies, so he led them on a merry chase for nine days in a feigned retreat, before turning on them at an opportune moment, and destroying them at the Battle of Kalka River in 1223. Subutai then returned to the east, where he conducted successful campaigns against the Chinese for the next decade. In the late 1230s, he returned to the west, and subjugated the Rus.

17. Invading Europe

After reducing the Rus to Mongol vassals, Subutai invaded Eastern Europe in 1241. During that campaign, he oversaw the operations of Mongol armies separated by hundreds of miles, and brought them to victory over their respective opponents, in Poland and Hungary, within one day of each other. Subutai was in command at the second victory, the Battle of Mohi, which destroyed the Hungarian army and left Central Europe open to further invasion. He was drawing plans to advance along the Danube to Vienna, then subjugate the Holy Roman Empire, when news arrived of Khan Ogedei, Genghis Khan’s successor had died.

Although he wanted to press on into Europe, politics necessitated the return of Subutai and his forces to Mongolia to participate in the selection of a new Khan. Subutai never returned to Europe, and spent his final years campaigning against the Song Dynasty in southern China. Thus, Europe was spared the Mongol yoke that Russia ended up enduring for centuries.

16. Teddy Roosevelt’s Most Badass Speech

Teddy Roosevelt walked away from the US presidency in 1908, but by 1912, he had come to regret that decision. So he returned to the campaign trail, running for president as candidate of the Bull Moose Party. On October 14^th of that year, he made his way to a podium at the Milwaukee Auditorium, and opened with the unremarkable statement “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible“.

Next, he delivered one of the most remarkable lines ever uttered on the stump: “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have been shot“. As the horrified audience gasped, Roosevelt unbuttoned his vest, to reveal a bloodstained shirt beneath. The former president then topped his previous statement with an even more memorable one: “it takes more than that to kill a bull moose!”

15. TR Was Saved by a Speech

After telling his Milwaukee Auditorium audience that he had been shot, Teddy Roosevelt pulled out a 50 page speech from his coat pocket, that had been pierced through with a bullet. He continued: “Fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best“.

Just about any other candidate – except maybe Andrew Jackson – would have keeled over in shock or at least bid the audience adieu before rushing to seek medical care, but not TR. Assuring his audience “I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap“, he went ahead and delivered a ninety-minute fiery speech.

14. Teddy Roosevelt Saved His Would-Be Assassin

The assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt’s life had been made at about 8 PM, as he got into an open air car outside his hotel, waving his hat to the crowd. Just then, the darkness was lit up by a flash from a .38 Colt revolver – the former president had been shot. An aide grappled with the would-be assassin and prevented him from firing another shot, before the crowd joined in.

The culprit, a deranged Bavarian immigrant named John Flammang Schrank, would have been lynched on the spot if Roosevelt had not intervened. “Don’t hurt him. Bring him here. I want to see him“, Roosevelt told the crowd. He then asked Schrank “What did you do it for?” When Schrank stayed mum, TR told the crowd to turn him over to the police.

13. ‘He Pinked Me’

After getting shot, Teddy Roosevelt reached inside his shirt and felt around, until he encountered a dime-sized hole. He turned to an aide and remarked: “He pinked me“. TR then coughed into his hand a few times, and seeing no blood, determined that his lung had not been pierced. He directed that he be driven to the Milwaukee Auditorium, to address the waiting audience.

The hefty speech, squeezed into his jacket pocket, had combined with a glass case and a dense overcoat to slow the bullet. It was later recovered lodged against his fourth rib, on a trajectory to his heart. As to the shooter, Schrank had dreamt that the assassinated president William McKinley had urged him to avenge him by killing his vice president and successor, TR. Schrank was deemed legally insane, and was institutionalized until his death in 1943.

12. History Would be Quite Different If the French Had Not Guillotined Louis XVI

The French Revolutionary Wars, and later the Napoleonic Wars, roiled Europe and much of the world from the 1790s until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. They went into high gear after the revolutionary French government chopped off the head of their former king, Louis XVI. That scared the daylights out of the rest of Europe’s monarchs, and guaranteed their undying enmity towards revolutionary France. However, the unfortunate Louis had come quite close to avoiding that fate.

The years after the French Revolution had been tough on Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette. The absolute monarchy had been drastically weakened, and in October of 1789, the unwashed masses had burst into the Palace of Versailles, and forcibly transferred the royal family to Paris. Ever since, kings and queens lived as virtual prisoners of their subjects. Feeling increasingly humiliated as they were forced to adjust to the role of constitutional monarchs, the royal couple decided to slip out of Paris. They almost got away.

11. The Royal Flight

King Louis XVI planned to flee with his family to the citadel of Montmedy, roughly 200 miles from Paris, where 10,000 men under a royalist general awaited. After regaining his freedom of action, Louis planned to launch a royalist counter revolution, and restore France to pre-revolution days. On the night of June 20^th, 1791, he and Marie Antoinette gathered their family, and prepared to slip out of the Tuileries Palace.

Behind, Louis left a document addressed to the National Assembly, letting them know his intent to roll the clock back to the royal concessions granted in 1789, before the Revolution began. In private correspondence, Marie Antoinette took a more reactionary line, declaring an intention to return to the old order, without any concessions at all.

10. The Last Minute Change of Plans

To whisk away the French royal family and their close intimates, a Swedish Count Fersen had arranged for two fast light carriages, that could have made it to Montmedy relatively quickly. However, that would have entailed splitting the family, something the king and queen refused to contemplate. Instead, Louis and Marie Antoinette decided on a different ride at the last minute: a bigger and more conspicuous carriage drawn by six horses, that could accommodate everybody. It turned out to be a bad choice.

Around midnight on the night of June 20-21, 1791, Louis XVI, entered the carriage disguised as the valet of a Russian noblewoman – the governess of the royal children, who pretended to be their mother. Marie Antoinette pretended to be a governess, while her sister acted like a nurse. They made it out of Paris unchallenged, but soon rued their last-minute carriage change. The heavy carriage was slow, and it had to stop for repairs when its traces broke. The royal couple’s disguises were also flimsy, and they were recognized by many along the route.

9. End of the Royal Flight

The French royal flight ended at the small town of Varennes, just thirty miles shy of safety. The local postmaster recognized Louis XVI from currency bearing his likeness, and the royal family was arrested and returned to Paris. It was a disaster. Before his flight, the revolutionaries had accepted Louis as a constitutional monarch, and took his assurances that he agreed with them at face value. His flight, coupled with the document he had left behind telling them what he really thought, changed their minds.

Until then, abolishing the monarchy and declaring a republic had been a fringe position advocated only by radicals. Now, it quickly gained in popularity. Finally, in December of 1792, Louis XVI was tried for treason, and convicted. He was guillotined a month later. His wife met a similar fate, and was guillotined in October, 1793.

8. The Little Known Functionary Who Saved the World

Not that many people know who Stanislav Petrov is. However, everybody alive today, anywhere in the world, irrespective of race, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, political persuasion, or any other distinction, owes him a huge debt of gratitude.

Acting on a gut instinct and placing a huge responsibility upon his own shoulders, Petrov saved the world from a full-blown nuclear holocaust. In short, if not for Petrov, most of us would not be alive today. The relative few still living would be struggling to survive in some barbarous and radioactive post-apocalypse environment.

7. The Alarming Alarm

Early in the morning of September 26^th, 1983, Soviet early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the US. Computer readouts confirmed the warning, and advised that several American missiles had been launched. Soviet protocol for such a scenario called for an immediate response by launching their own nukes in retaliation.

Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer in charge, and his job was to immediately alert the Soviet leadership to launch their own missiles. As he put it in an interview decades later: “I had all the data [to suggest there was an ongoing missile attack]. If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it“. You and I can read this today because, as seen below, Petrov had the moral courage to pursue a different course of action.

6. The Worst Time For a Nuclear Launch Alarm

In September of 1983, Cold War tensions were particularly high. Soviet leaders feared American president Ronald Reagan. They also suspected that a massive NATO training exercise is known as Able Archer, which was taking place at the time, might be a ruse, to conceal preparations for a surprise attack against the Warsaw Pact. In short, it was a bad time for nuclear attack warnings to go off in the USSR.

By nuclear warfare logic, the protocols of immediately launching your missiles upon receipt of a warning that the enemy had launched their nukes made sense on “use it or lose it” grounds. Given the short window – under half an hour – between missile launch detection and impact, the side that failed to immediately launch its own missiles risked having them destroyed in their silos. Stanislav Petrov’s job was to sound the alarm up the chain, which almost certainly would have led to a decision to launch Soviet missiles.

5. Stanislav Saves the Day – And the World

When he received an alarm that the US had launched nukes, Stanislav Petrov declined to alert his superiors. “The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it … A minute later the siren went off again. The second missile was launched. Then the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Computers changed their alerts from ‘launch’ to ‘missile strike’“.

Petrov trusted his instincts – and the advise of radar operators who told him they registered no missiles – and dismissed the alert as a false alarm. Instead, he called the duty officer at Red Army headquarters and reported a systems malfunction. If he was wrong, mushroom clouds would have erupted all around the USSR within minutes. They did not. A few days later, Petrov received an official reprimand – not for what he did that night, but for mistakes in the logbook.

4. Martin Luther King Winged the ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s best-known quote, “I have a dream“, is one of the most famous lines ever delivered in an American speech. A highly memorable part of an inspiring oration delivered before the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington, August 28^th, 1963, the phrase resonated and caught on.

Indeed, that phrase probably did as much or more than anything else in Dr. King’s remarkable life to cement his place in the popular imagination as an icon in the struggle for civil rights. Relatively few people know that it was an improvisation.

3. An Inspired Improvisation

When Dr. King walked up to the podium that memorable August day in 1963, he intended to deliver a written and prepared speech – copies of which had already been distributed to the press – that contained no mention of dreaming. However, mid-speech, while reading the seventh paragraph, King took a pause for breath. During that brief break, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, a good friend of King, shouted “Tell ‘em about the dream!”

King responded by pushing the prepared text aside, shifting gears, and giving himself over to the spirit. What followed was one of the greatest examples of rhetorical dexterity, as King abandoned the prepared speech halfway through, and began riffing and improvising the second half, with the “I have a dream” refrain.

2. The Japanese City That Dodged Destruction

Sometimes in history, the margin between catastrophe and salvation is rather thin and depends on little more than the vagaries and whims of fate. Few examples are more illustrative of that than the fate of the Japanese city of Kokura on August 9^th, 1945. At 3:49 AM that morning, the Bockscar, a B-29 piloted by US Air Force Major Charles W. Sweeney, took off from Tinian Island in the Pacific, headed for Kokura.

In the bomb bay was Fat Man, a plutonium atomic bomb, more powerful than the uranium core weapon that had devastated Hiroshima three days earlier. As late-night turned to dawn and then morning, Kokura stirred and came to life, its inhabitants blissfully unaware that death was winging its way towards them. Weather observation planes reported clear skies over Kokura, and the Bockscar proceeded to a rendezvous point where it was supposed to link up with Big Stink, a B-29 tasked with filming the strike. Then fate intervened, and spared Kokura.

1. One City’s Salvation Was Another City’s Doom

When Bockscar reached Kokura, Big Stink, with which it was scheduled to rendezvous, was nowhere to be seen. So Bockscar circled around, waiting for the film plane to show up. After 40 minutes of flying around, Major Sweeney gave up on Big Stink, and proceeded to Kokura. By then, however, clouds, plus smoke from a conventional bombing raid on a nearby city, had combined to obscure Kokura.

Over the next 50 minutes, Bockscar crisscrossed the skies above the target city, hoping for enough of a break in the cloud and smoke to drop its bomb. Below, the Kokurans went about their daily lives, innocently oblivious to the death circling above. After three failed bombing runs, Sweeney finally gave up, and flew at a new heading for his alternate target in case he was unable to bomb Kokura: Nagasaki. One city’s salvation proved to be another city’s doom.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Arab America – Al Mutanabbi: The Greatest Arab Poet

BBC, September 26^th, 2013 – Stanislav Petrov: The Man Who May Have Saved the World

China Knowledge – The Red Eyebrows and Lulin Uprisings

Daily Beast – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Last Tango

Encyclopedia Britannica – Al Mutanabbi

Encyclopedia Britannica – Butch Cassidy

Encyclopedia Britannica – Red Eyebrows, Chinese Rebel Group

Forbes, August 27^th, 2013 – How Martin Luther King Improvised ‘I Have a Dream’

Gabriel, Richard A. – Subotai the Valiant: Genghis Khan’s Greatest General (2004)

History – When Teddy Roosevelt Was Shot in 1912, a Speech May Have Saved His Life

Independent, The, August 9^th, 1995 – City Remembers Day it Escaped the Bomb

Military History Matters: The Novgorod: Circular Ironclad

New York Times, August 7^th, 1995 – Kokura, Japan, Bypassed by A-Bomb

Schama, Simon – Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1990)

Wikipedia – Flight to Varennes

Wikipedia – Russian Monitor Novgorod

Wikipedia – Subutai the Valiant