October 14th – Heroic Defiance

Hastings

At the Battle of Hastings, on this day in 1066, King Harold II, of the Anglo-Saxons, was killed during the course of his desperate resistance against the forces of the Norman invader, William the Conquerer. With their king dead, and suffering the full onslaught of William’s highly-trained archers and cavalry, the Anglo-Saxons broke and fled. A Frenchman would sit upon the English throne by Christmas of the same year.

“The Bull Moose”

In a much more positive moment for the English-speaking world (sort of), it was on the same day in 1912 that Theodore Roosevelt, running for president again under the new flag of the Progressive Party, was shot in the chest by a would-be killer while preparing to give a speech in Milwaukee. The moment was a positive one, anyway, because the bullet’s path was obstructed by Roosevelt’s eyeglass case and thickly folded speech, both of which happened, by the whimsy of providence, to be in his breast pocket. Roosevelt, already the greatest man who ever lived, grabbed the moment by the throat in his customary way and forced it to its knees, solidifying his place in the annals of badass history by delivering a ninety-minute campaign speech with an assassin’s bullet in his chest. Much of it was extemporaneous, in fact, the original having just been pierced through by a bullet; you can read it here. Be prepared to laugh, too, for Roosevelt’s continued assurances to anxious onlookers becoming increasingly excellent. “Don’t you waste any sympathy on me. I have had an A-1 time in life and I am having it now.”

Uprising at Sobibor

Prisoners at the Sobibor death camp in Poland staged an uprising on this day in 1943, killing eleven SS officers and making possible the escape of 300 Jews. Many were quickly recaptured, however, and only some 50 or so of those who escaped survived the war.

The Conscientious Destroyer

Relatedly, the noted German (I will not say Nazi) general Erwin Rommel died on this day one year later, in 1944, murdered by his own superiors for his involvement in the plot to remove Adolf Hitler from power. Given the choice between exposure, a lengthy show trial, and the collective punishment of him, his family, and everyone they knew, on the hand, and Rommel’s willing death on the other, the illustrious general chose the latter. His exact fate is unknown, for there are two competing traditions: while it is relatively certain that he was driven to the outskirts of the town of Herrlingen, one story maintains that he was given a cyanide capsule and left alone in the car to do what needed to be done, while the other holds that he was shot by the two military policemen who had driven him out there in the first place.

In any event, Rommel’s family and friends were spared the complete doom that would otherwise have fallen upon them, and Rommel himself was buried with full military honours, the official story being that he had died heroically in the line of duty. The truth about his execution, and the reasons for it, would not come out until the Nuremberg Trials. These revelations bolstered a reputation that was already extraordinarily good, for a member of the German general staff, owing to his battlefield competence, far-reaching chivalry and complete refusal to follow Hitler’s orders concerning the brutal treatment of Jews, prisoners and Allied commandos. As it was with Robert E. Lee, the man and the cause were not always the same.