The Mysteries of History (May 8 Edition)
Mount Pelée; V-E Day
1902 — Mount Pelée Catastrophically Erupts, Burying “The Paris of the Caribbean”
image generated using Bing Image Creator
Martinique is an island which lies in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies, southeast of Haiti.
In the spring of 1902, the residents of St. Pierre, a city on that island that was then known as “The Paris of the Caribbean,” had been assured by local leaders that they had little to fear from the rumbling and belching of 4,500-foot high Mount Pelée looming over their city.
The city’s officials were wrong to make that “un-warning” (which was given partially due to an upcoming election they wanted the voters to stick around for), and the citizens were tragically wrong to give credence to those individuals’ cavalier prognostications.
Mount Pelée violently blew its top on this date in 1902. The force of the eruption was so destructive that by the next day, the city of Saint Pierre was almost completely destroyed, and all but two of its 27,000 inhabitants had been killed — one of the survivors only living to tell the tale because of being ensconced in an underground jail, not dissimilar to how Kurt Vonnegut would survive the firebombing of Dresden almost forty-three years later.
Toxic superheated air and white-hot ash engulfed the city within minutes.
The catastrophe should not have been shocking to anyone, though, as the mountain had been sending warning messages for weeks: It started over a month prior, on April 2, when steam was seen pouring from its sides; three weeks later, warning rumblings were felt and ash was catapulted into the air. As the fateful day approached, Mount Pelée became more and more agitated, emitting ever-stronger signals of imminent disaster. Still, people just watched and waited, some even arriving from out of town to gawk.
Finally, in the early morning hours of May 8, 1902, a three thousand degree Fahrenheit gas cloud was expelled from the mountain’s innards and boiling ash burst forth and flowed towards Saint Pierre at a speed of 300 miles per hour (480 kph).
The residents of Saint Pierre barely knew what hit them; they had thought that the only danger would have been from a flow of lava, and that they would have had time to escape to the sea if need be, but that was, unfortunately, only wishful thinking.
And even those in the sea (there were 15 ships in the harbor at the time) suffered from the monstrous onslaught from the mountain, as it capsized all of the vessels, and those sailors who were not killed suffered serious injuries from burns.
The volcanic eruption in Martinique was the deadliest of the entire 20th Century.
The moral of the story is: When the earth speaks to you, listen to it, not politicians.
public domain image from wikimedia commons
Questions: What would you have done had you lived in Saint Pierre during this time? What if your family refused to leave? For what infraction was the jailhouse survivor incarcerated? How did his life go after that? Was he badly injured?
1945 — WW2 Allies Celebrate V-E Day
public domain images from wikimedia commons
80 years ago today, people in many countries of western Europe, the Soviet Union (partly in Europe and partly in Asia), the British Isles, the U.S., Canada, and Australia, celebrated the ultimate resounding defeat of the diabolical Nazi mayhem machine on this date in 1945.
German soldiers all throughout the areas where they had been fighting finally laid down their arms and surrendered en masse. Approximately two million German soldiers were captured by the Russians.
Questions: How long did it take for the Soviet Union to morph from an ally to an enemy following the defeat of the Nazis? Were you alive at the time WW2 ended? If not, what age were WW2 veterans when you were born (for me, born in 1958, many of them were still young men, some as young as early 30s)?
Read about “The Secret Lives of Kids” here.
