March 21

1790     Thomas Jefferson took office as America's first Secretary of State.  

Jefferson, a collection of contradictions, had been opposed to a strong Federal government prior to his presidency but would turn out to be a zealous applicant of Federal power while President.  Amongst his decisions were the purchase of Louisiana, a vast wilderness, which Jefferson thought would take 1,000 years to settle.  Following purchase of the territory he would order the formation of the Corps of Discovery, a military expeditionary force, to explore a route to the Pacific through it.  Contrary to widespread popular belief, the Corps's members were not the "first white men" to arrive in most of the locations that they arrived in, but they were the first official representatives of the United States.  A person has to wonder to what extent his views on U.S. expansion were formed during his period as Secretary of State.

1804     The Code Napoleon adopted in France and its possessions.  A form of the Code applies to this day in Louisiana.

The Code was a codification of then existing French common law, which had been  heavily influenced by Roman law.  It's the model form of law in much of the world.  It was commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte to attempt to resolve the irregular nature of French law, a condition that similarly resulted in the earlier Roman Code Justinian.

1806  The Corps of Discovery started their trip back east.

1836     Mexicans capture Copano, Texas.

1862  Ben Holladay bought the Russell, Majors & Waddell stage line.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

1874  My Western Home, better known as Home On The Range, was published by Dr. Brewster Higley, a Kansas homesteader, in the The Kirwin Chief.  It was shortly set to music by a friend of his.

My Western Home

by Dr. Brewster Higley

Oh, give me a home where the Buffalo roam

Where the Deer and the Antelope play;

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,

And the sky is not cloudy all day.

Chorus:

A home! A home!

Where the Deer and the Antelope play,

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,

And the sky is not clouded all day.

Oh! give me a land where the bright diamond sand

Throws its light from the glittering streams,

Where glideth along the graceful white swan,

Like the maid in her heavenly dreams.

Chorus

Oh! give me a gale of the Solomon vale,

Where the life streams with buoyancy flow;

On the banks of the Beaver, where seldom if ever,

Any poisonous herbage doth grow.

Chorus

How often at night, when the heavens were bright,

With the light of the twinkling stars

Have I stood here amazed, and asked as I gazed,

If their glory exceed that of ours.

Chorus

I love the wild flowers in this bright land of ours,

I love the wild curlew’s shrill scream;

The bluffs and white rocks, and antelope flocks

That graze on the mountains so green.

Chorus

The air is so pure and the breezes so fine,

The zephyrs so balmy and light,

That I would not exchange my home here to range

Forever in azures so bright.

Chorus

1904 Version of the text

by William and Mary Goodwin:

Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,

Where the deer and the antelope play;

There seldom is heard a discouraging word

And the sky is not cloudy all day.

Chorus:

A home, a home

Where the deer and the antelope play,

There seldom is heard a discouraging word

And the sky is not cloudy all day.

Yes, give me the gleam of the swift mountain stream

And the place where no hurricane blows;

Oh, give me the park where the prairie dogs bark

And the mountain all covered with snow.

Chorus

Oh, give me the hills and the ring of the drills

And the rich silver ore in the ground;

Yes, give me the gulch where the miner can sluice

And the bright, yellow gold can be found.

Chorus

Oh, give me the mine where the prospectors find

The gold in its own native land;

And the hot springs below where the sick people go

And camp on the banks of the Grande.

Chorus

Oh, give me the steed and the gun that I need

To shoot game for my own cabin home;

Then give me the camp where the fire is the lamp

And the wild Rocky Mountains to roam.

Chorus

Yes, give me the home where the prospectors roam

Their business is always alive

In these wild western hills midst the ring of the drills

Oh, there let me live till I die.

Chorus

1910 Version of the Text

by John A. Lomax

Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,

Where the deer and the antelope play,

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word

And the skies are not cloudy all day.

Chorus:

Home, home on the range,

Where the deer and the antelope play;

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word

And the skies are not cloudy all day.

Where the air is so pure, the zephyrs so free,

The breezes so balmy and light,

That I would not exchange my home on the range

For all of the cities so bright.

Chorus

The red man was pressed from this part of the West

He’s likely no more to return,

To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever

Their flickering camp-fires burn.

Chorus

How often at night when the heavens are bright

With the light from the glittering stars

Have I stood here amazed and asked as I gazed

If their glory exceeds that of ours.

Chorus

Oh, I love these wild prairies where I roam

The curlew I love to hear scream,

And I love the white rocks and the antelope flocks

That graze on the mountain-tops green.

Chorus

Oh, give me a land where the bright diamond sand

Flows leisurely down the stream;

Where the graceful white swan goes gliding along

Like a maid in a heavenly dream.

Chorus

1890  Gen. George Crook, age 61, died while lifting weights.  Crook was a legendary Indian Wars' general, and later in life an advocate for Indians.  By most accounts, he was one of the most successful and thoughtful of the Indian Wars' campaigners, although he does have his critics.   Crook County Wyoming is named after him.

Crook, seated in middle, during the Civil War while serving under Sheridan, second from left.  Also depicted, General Wesley Merritt, far left, General James Forsyth second from right and General Custer far right.  All of these officers went on to post Civil War careers in the Army.

1899  The Wyoming Historical Society Museum in Cheyenne opened.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

1916   The Punitive Expedition in the Press: Casper Daily Press for March 21, 1916.
 

Note how the horror of World War One has made its way back onto the front page of the newspaper.

1918  

The Kaiserschlacht Commences. March 21, 1918. Operation Michael

Afternoon edition of Cheyenne's Wyoming Tribune, March 21, 1918.

It was a momentous day, to be sure.

Excellent map showing all five expressions of the Kaiserschlacht, the massive German campaign to end the war in 1918.  Every single part of the offensive was a tactical success for the Germans. . . but not enough of a success to win the war.

And so, on this day, the German Army began its last great, and nearly successful, offensive the Great War.  An offensive, however, whose result was foreordained by the lack of German horsepower.

 What the Germans were lacking by this point of World War One.

There will be a lot of "100 Year Ago" type history venues on this event, as it is a big one.  It was, truly, the German's last big gasp of World War One.  It wrecked the offensive abilities of the German Army for the duration of the war, but it was something they had to try. After the Kaiserschlacht the Germans could only defend and their strategy changed to that.  It wouldn't work long as the home front crumbled behind the German front, to include the crumbling in moral of the German Army and Navy at home.

The offensive, made up of a series of operations that would take place over the next two months, commenced with Operation Michael, a massive offensive against the British Expeditionary Force.

Operation Michael

 

Repeat of the map above.  Operation Michael is the "First German Drive" of the mpa.

The Kaiserschlacht, it not Operation Michael, was somewhat obvious in that it had been known for months that the Germans would try a giant 1918 offensive.  As early as February the American soldier's newspaper Wadsworth Gas Attack and Rio Grand Rattler had published an issue was a drunk Mars "waiting for spring".  It was coming, and everyone knew it.

Everyone with any military savvy also knew that with Russia having now surrendered to the Germans, and the Germans having been sensible enough to accept a negotiated peace, something they failed to do in World War Two, millions of German troops should have now been available to fight in the West.  However, what hadn't been counted on with Trotsky's blundering, which delayed the onset of peace by a month, and German avarice, which caused t he German's to use Trotsky's error to absorb huge areas of Russian territory and former Imperial territory they were now left garrisoning as if they had the spare manpower to do it.

The Germans should have poured out of the East, taking every horse they could "conscript" with them.  German troops did come, but not in the numbers they could have.

So the Allies braced for an offensive they knew was coming.  They were not idle.  The British, operating partially on intelligence gathered from two German deserters, not only anticipated the attack, but placed the probable date of the attack on this very day, although they anticipated it could be slightly earlier.  As a result, the British had been engaged in nightly artillery strikes on German positions since March 18.

On this day, the offensive commenced with the assault on the BEF.

A closer view of the successful German drive on the Somme.  Over a three week period the Germans wiped out British gains on the Somme and seriously threatened the position of the BEF in Europe.

The Battle of St. Quentin, the Somme Crossings and the First Battle of Bapaume

It commenced with an artillery barraged at 0435 on British positions near St. Quentin (and it also saw the commencement of German artillery strikes on Paris). While our memory of it has become skewed due to the intense British focus on World War One, the British were a small army compared to the French, but they were also in much better fighting shape than the French overall.  While the bombardment was massive, it did not leave the British incapable of resisting.  Nonetheless, after extremely intense infantry combat, which started with a German assault at 0940, the British had yielded in some places and began to retreat. Already on March 21 the British had lost ground.  This continued to be the case through March 23.

British artillery in retreat.

The British broke at St. Quentin, but their resistance had already worked a toll on the German forces which had begun to slow down. Nonetheless the British lost their lines on the Somme on March 24.  The same day the British lost the town of Bapaume and the French began to be concerned that the British had been irretrievably beaten.  Ironically the German capture of British supplies caused despondency in the German rank as German troops realized, from what they captured, that the British were very well supplied and even had stocks of Champagne in their stores.  The French, however, began plans for an offensive operation against the Germans out of a fear that the British situation could not be restored.

By the 25th the French were in fact engaged, but in defensive operations, and the overall situation was confused. Fighting was occurring everywhere but what was occurring was not clear to anyone.  British cavalry was in action in rearguard operations slowing German advances and the RAF was busy as well, as both the oldest and newest forms of mobile warfare combined against the Germans.

 British 6 Inch Gun firing on March 26 near Ancre.

Nonetheless a council of war was held on the 26th with the result that General Foch of the French Army was made the supreme Allied commander.

The Battle of Rosieres and the Battle of Arrars

On the 26th and 27th the British fought the Battle of Rosieres in which the British committed tanks. Nonetheless the Allies continued to lose ground and lost the town of Albert during the night.  Throughout the retreat phase that went  through the 27th Tommies occasionally panicked and took up defense positions at the report of German cavalry being just over the horizon.  Still, while they retreated continually they did not disintegrate and both the British and the French remained in action throughout.  On the 28th a German assault only a handful of miles, showing that the Germans were slowing.  A primary factor was that the German cavalry that was needed to exploit the breakthroughs in the Allied lines that continually occurred simply didn't exit.

There wasn't any. The Germans were now, in terms of fighting at the front, an infantry force only.  They'd lose the war as a result.  The could exploit gaps in the British lines no quicker than a man could advance, and with each days advance the German troops became more and more fatigued until, at last, they simply refused to move, even under threat of death.

The First Battle of Villers-Bretonneux and the Battle of Moreuil Wood

On March 30 the Germans none the less tried again, launching an assault south of the new Somme salient towards Amiens.  The Germans gained some ground but it was slight, and German troops lost discipline when they hit Allied supply depots.  This phase of the German offensive saw the remarkable Canadian cavalry charge in the Battle of Moreuil Wood in which the Canadian Cavalry Brigade conducted a mounted assault near the village of Moreuil, taking the wood against the prediction of failure of a nearby French unit, receiving assistance from the RFC in the assault.  The Germans retook the wood the following day, March 31, but the Canadians then took it back. The Germans ultimately retook the wood, showing the intense nature of the fighting, but the overall offensive was called off shortly after that.  Operation Michael had gained a lot of ground, but it had ground to a halt.  By April 5 the Germans were exhausted and an effort to resume the offensive against the British failed.

 The charge at Moreuil Wood.

The initial German advance had been significant, but equally significant is that the  Germans had failed to take any of their objectives and by April 5 they were halted.  The German advance was impressive, but far short of achieving a knockout blow.  German and British losses were nearly equal at 250,000 men but the British were able to make up material shortages so rapidly that loss of material turned out to be relatively inconsequential.  German manpower losses, however, were catastrophic as it had lost a significant number of elite troops in the effort, which it would not be able to replace.

Many of the German troops lost were Stoßtruppen

 German Stoßtrup, Spring 1918.  Trained in individual and small unit combat, this soldier is carrying a MP18 and a P08.  Submachineguns were a brand new weapon at the time.

Stoßtruppen were a late war German innovation created to attempt to restore mobility to the battlefield.  Highly trained light infantrymen, these "Storm Troops" were in some ways the first of their kind. Predecessors of units like the later American Rangers and other similar elite infantry units, they were trained to storm enemy positions and overwhelm them in violent rapidly moving assaults.  They were equipped accordingly, carrying pistols, K98a's, and as seen above, submachineguns.

They were also a bit of a desperate effort on the part of the Germans to make up for the lack of cavalry, something which is evident but rarely discussed.  Unable to take a concentrated enemy position by a mounted charge, the Germans had to resort to infantry, something that had proven to be a failure since 1914.  They sought to overcome this through highly trained specialized infantry.  It worked in part, but only in part.  Stoßtruppen could penetrate. . . but they really couldn't advance.  And by April 5, the Germans weren't advancing.

But they couldn't stop.  To do so was to conceded an inevitable defeat. So, ground to a halt against the British though they were, they determined to renew the offensive elsewhere.   

 

1931  University of Wyoming geology professor S. H. Knight took these photographs of the Grand Canyon.

1954  Cheyenne's KFBC-TV Channel 5 started broadcasting.  Attribution:  On This Day.

2012  American Heritage Center, UW, Wyoming History Day  District 6 (Hot Springs, Fremont, and Teton Counties) competition in Dubois and District 7 (Uinta, Sweetwater, Lincoln, and Sublette Counties) in Pinedale.

Elsewhere:

1943  The second military conspiracy plan to assassinate Hitler in a week fails.  A week earlier, German military conspirators attempted to blow up an airplane in which Hitler was traveling, but the fuses failed to work.  On this instance, a volunteer officer was to carry bombs and get next to Hitler as he reviewed memorials,  Hitler's visit to the memorials turned out to be too short for the fuses to ignite, so the plat was not carried off.

2016:  University of Wyoming basketball coach Larry Shyatt resigned.