February 15 in History

Emperor Justinian II dragged his two predecessors into the Hippodrome of Constantinople in 706, forced them to lie prostrate beneath his feet while he watched the chariot races, then had them publicly executed before a crowd of thousands. The spectacle was the culmination of one of the most extraordinary comeback stories in Byzantine history — and one of the most disturbing reigns in an empire not short on violent rulers. Justinian II had first ruled the Byzantine Empire from 685 to 695, combining genuine administrative talent with erratic cruelty that alienated nearly everyone. A military revolt deposed him, and the usurper Leontios ordered Justinian’s nose cut off (rhinotomy being the preferred Byzantine alternative to execution, since a mutilated man was considered unfit to rule). Justinian was exiled to Crimea. Leontios himself was overthrown three years later by Tiberios III. A man without a nose was supposed to accept his fate. Justinian refused. He spent a decade in exile, married a Khazar princess, then allied with the Bulgar khan Tervel. In 705, he returned to Constantinople with a Bulgar army, sneaked into the city through an unused aqueduct, and reclaimed the throne. He wore a golden prosthetic nose for the rest of his reign. His second reign was defined by vengeance. Leontios and Tiberios III were hunted down, paraded through the streets, and subjected to the Hippodrome humiliation before their execution. Justinian then turned on the aristocracy and military commanders who had supported his overthrow, executing hundreds. He launched punitive campaigns against the cities of Ravenna and Cherson that had sheltered his enemies, reportedly massacring civilians. Justinian II’s brutality eventually consumed him: a second revolt in 711 succeeded where the first had merely maimed, and he was killed along with his young son, ending the Heraclian dynasty and proving that even in Byzantium, revenge has diminishing returns.

The forward magazines of the USS Maine detonated at 9:40 PM on February 15, 1898, while the battleship sat at anchor in Havana Harbor. The explosion ripped the ship apart, killed 266 of the 354 men aboard, and lit the fuse for a war that would transform the United States from a continental republic into a global empire. Whether the explosion was caused by a Spanish mine or an internal coal fire remains debated more than a century later, but in 1898 the cause mattered far less than the outrage. The Maine had been sent to Havana in January 1898 as a show of force during Cuba’s war of independence against Spain. American newspapers, led by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, had spent two years publishing sensationalized accounts of Spanish atrocities in Cuba. The sinking gave them their greatest headline. "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!" became the rallying cry of a nation already primed for conflict. The US Navy’s initial investigation, conducted in March 1898, concluded that an external mine had caused the explosion. Spain’s own inquiry found the opposite: an internal accident, likely a fire in a coal bunker adjacent to the ammunition magazines. A 1976 investigation by Admiral Hyman Rickover concluded that spontaneous coal combustion was the most likely cause. A 1998 National Geographic study suggested a mine could not be ruled out. The truth may never be established with certainty. Congress declared war on Spain on April 25, 1898. The conflict lasted just over three months. American forces defeated Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. The Treaty of Paris gave the United States control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and established de facto authority over Cuba. In a hundred days of fighting, America acquired an overseas empire spanning two oceans. A mysterious explosion in a Cuban harbor propelled the United States onto the world stage — and the country never stepped back.

Winston Churchill called it "the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history." On February 15, 1942, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival surrendered Singapore to the Japanese, handing over approximately 80,000 British, Australian, Indian, and local troops to an attacking force roughly half that size. The fortress that was supposed to be impregnable fell in just one week of fighting, shattering the myth of European military superiority in Asia and accelerating the end of the British Empire. Singapore was the cornerstone of British strategy in the Pacific. A massive naval base had been built at enormous expense throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with heavy coastal guns pointed seaward to repel any naval attack. The assumption was that no army could advance through the dense jungle of the Malay Peninsula from the north. Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita proved the assumption catastrophically wrong. Yamashita’s 36,000 troops invaded northern Malaya on December 8, 1941, the same day as Pearl Harbor. Using bicycles to move quickly through jungle terrain that the British had deemed impassable, Japanese forces advanced 600 miles down the peninsula in 70 days, repeatedly outflanking and surrounding British defensive positions. When they reached the Johor Strait separating Malaya from Singapore, they crossed in small boats on February 8 and attacked the island’s weak northern defenses. Percival’s garrison outnumbered the attackers but was demoralized, poorly led, and running low on water after Japanese forces captured the island’s reservoirs. Yamashita, who was actually bluffing about his own strength and ammunition supply, demanded unconditional surrender. Percival complied on February 15, leading his officers to the Ford Motor Factory in Bukit Timah with a Union Jack and a white flag. The resulting captivity was brutal: thousands of prisoners died building the Burma Railway and in Japanese prison camps. Singapore’s fall proved that colonial empires built on racial assumptions of superiority could be dismantled in days by an enemy who refused to accept those assumptions.

Richard Feynman diagnosed the Challenger disaster with a glass of ice water and a piece of rubber. During a televised hearing of the Rogers Commission in 1986, he dipped a section of O-ring material into a cup of ice water and showed that it lost its resilience at low temperatures. The rubber stiffened. The audience could see it. That was the explanation for why the Space Shuttle Challenger had broken apart 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members. Born in Far Rockaway, Queens on May 11, 1918, Feynman showed an early aptitude for mathematics that his father, a uniform salesman, actively encouraged. He earned his doctorate at Princeton under John Archibald Wheeler and joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos at 24. He was the youngest group leader on the project. While at Los Alamos, his first wife, Arline, was dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Albuquerque. He drove to see her on weekends. She died in June 1945, weeks before the Trinity test. His contribution to physics was the development of quantum electrodynamics (QED), a theory describing how light and matter interact at the subatomic level. His approach used what became known as Feynman diagrams, intuitive visual representations of particle interactions that simplified calculations physicists had previously found nearly impossible. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, who had independently developed equivalent formulations. He was a legendarily effective teacher. His undergraduate lectures at Caltech, published as The Feynman Lectures on Physics, remain in use decades after they were delivered. He played bongo drums, picked locks for entertainment, painted under a pseudonym, and spent time in strip clubs in Pasadena working on physics problems. The Challenger investigation was his final public act. He conducted his own inquiry parallel to the official commission, talking directly to engineers who had warned NASA about the O-ring problem. His appendix to the commission's report concluded: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." He died of kidney cancer on February 15, 1988, at 69.

Twenty dog sled teams ran a 674-mile relay across frozen Alaska in a blizzard to deliver 300,000 units of diphtheria antitoxin to the isolated town of Nome, arriving on February 2, 1925 — five and a half days after the serum left Nenana. The temperature dropped to minus 40 degrees. Visibility was zero in whiteout conditions. The final leg was run by a Norwegian musher named Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog, a black Siberian husky named Balto, who found the trail by scent when his driver could not see his own hands. Nome in January 1925 was icebound and unreachable by ship or airplane. When Dr. Curtis Welch diagnosed diphtheria in several children and realized the town’s antitoxin supply had expired, he faced a nightmare: a highly contagious disease in a remote community of 1,400 people with 455 children, the nearest serum supply 1,000 miles away in Anchorage, and no way to get it there except by dogsled along the Iditarod Trail. The territorial governor organized a relay of the best mushers in Alaska. A train carried the serum from Anchorage to Nenana, the end of the rail line. From there, twenty mushers and their teams carried the 20-pound cylinder of serum in stages through some of the harshest conditions on earth. Wind chill temperatures reached minus 85 degrees. Several mushers suffered frostbite. One team crossed Norton Sound on sea ice in a gale, with the dogs running blind. Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog Togo covered the most dangerous stretch, 91 miles across the exposed ice of Norton Sound. Kaasen and Balto completed the final 53 miles, arriving in Nome at 5:30 AM on February 2. The serum was frozen but still viable. Dr. Welch administered it immediately, and the outbreak was contained. Five children had already died, but the epidemic was prevented. Balto became the most famous dog in America, immortalized in a statue in New York’s Central Park, though mushers who knew the trail always argued that Seppala’s Togo was the real hero of the run.