February 2 in History

The German 6th Army, which had entered Stalingrad with 300,000 men, surrendered its last 91,000 starving survivors on February 2, 1943, ending the bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, promoted to that rank just one day earlier by Hitler, who expected him to commit suicide rather than capitulate, became the first German field marshal ever taken prisoner. The defeat shattered the myth of Wehrmacht invincibility and shifted the momentum of World War II permanently to the Allies. The German offensive to capture Stalingrad had begun in August 1942, driven by Hitler’s obsession with taking the city bearing Stalin’s name and controlling the Volga River supply line. The Luftwaffe reduced much of the city to rubble, but the ruins proved ideal defensive terrain. Soviet soldiers fought from building to building, floor to floor, sometimes room to room. Snipers became decisive weapons. The average life expectancy of a Soviet reinforcement arriving at the Stalingrad front was twenty-four hours. On November 19, 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a massive pincer movement that smashed through the weak Romanian and Hungarian forces protecting the German flanks. Within four days, Soviet forces had encircled the entire 6th Army. Hitler ordered Paulus to hold his position and wait for relief. Goering promised the Luftwaffe could supply the trapped army by air, but deliveries never exceeded a fraction of the minimum 300 tons per day needed. A relief column under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein pushed to within 30 miles of the pocket in December but could get no closer. By January 1943, German soldiers were eating horses, rats, and their own boot leather. Temperatures dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius. Nearly two million soldiers and civilians died in the five-month battle, making it the deadliest single engagement in human history.

F.W. de Klerk stood before the South African Parliament on February 2, 1990, and in a thirty-minute speech dismantled the legal framework of apartheid. He lifted the bans on the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and thirty-one other anti-apartheid organizations. He announced the imminent release of Nelson Mandela. He suspended executions. Members of his own National Party sat in stunned silence. The ANC leadership, listening on smuggled radios, did not believe what they were hearing. De Klerk had been president for less than five months, and nothing in his political background suggested radicalism. He was a conservative Afrikaner lawyer from a family of National Party politicians. His brother Willem was more liberal; F.W. had been considered the establishment choice, a man who would manage apartheid more efficiently rather than dismantle it. What changed his calculus was a convergence of pressures: international sanctions were strangling the economy, the Cold War’s end had eliminated the communist threat that justified white minority rule, and the townships were becoming ungovernable. The speech caught nearly everyone off guard. The ANC had expected incremental reforms, not wholesale capitulation. Conservative Afrikaners accused de Klerk of treason. The international community, which had spent decades pressuring South Africa, scrambled to respond. Nine days later, on February 11, Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison after twenty-seven years, into a crowd of thousands and a live global television audience. The transition to democracy took another four years of negotiations, political violence, and constitutional bargaining. But the February 2 speech was the hinge moment. Once the bans were lifted and Mandela freed, there was no path back to white minority rule. De Klerk and Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. South Africa held its first fully democratic elections on April 27, 1994.

Pedro de Mendoza arrived at the western shore of the Rio de la Plata in February 1536 with fourteen ships and roughly 2,500 colonists, the largest Spanish expedition to South America to that point. He named the settlement Santa Maria del Buen Ayre, after the patron saint of fair winds venerated by sailors from Sardinia. Within three years, the colony would be abandoned, its survivors starving and besieged. Spain in the 1530s was racing to replicate the staggering wealth Cortes had extracted from the Aztecs and Pizarro from the Incas. Rumors of a "Sierra de la Plata," a mountain of silver somewhere upriver, drew Mendoza south. Charles V granted him the title of adelantado and the right to colonize the vast region around the Rio de la Plata, hoping to block Portuguese expansion from Brazil. The settlers found no silver and no cooperative indigenous empire to exploit. The local Querandi people initially traded food but turned hostile when Spanish demands became excessive. Mendoza, already gravely ill with syphilis, ordered attacks that provoked sustained warfare. The colonists, cut off from resupply and unable to grow enough food, began to starve. Contemporary accounts describe desperate conditions. Some survivors reportedly resorted to eating leather, rats, and worse. Mendoza sailed for Spain in 1537 and died at sea. The surviving colonists abandoned Buenos Aires in 1541 and moved upriver to Asuncion, which had better relations with local Guarani communities. Buenos Aires was refounded in 1580 by Juan de Garay with settlers from Asuncion, and this second founding proved permanent. The city grew slowly for two centuries as a backwater of the Spanish Empire, overshadowed by Lima and Potosi. Its explosive growth into one of the world’s largest cities came only in the late nineteenth century, fueled by European immigration and the beef export trade.

Mexico lost half its national territory in a single document. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, ended the Mexican-American War and transferred roughly 525,000 square miles to the United States, including present-day California, Nevada, Utah, and most of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. The price was $15 million, about the cost of building a few warships. The war had begun in April 1846 after a border dispute along the Rio Grande, which the U.S. claimed as the boundary of the newly annexed Texas while Mexico insisted the border lay at the Nueces River, 150 miles to the north. President James K. Polk, who had campaigned on territorial expansion, sent troops into the disputed zone. When Mexican forces attacked an American patrol, Polk told Congress that Mexico had "shed American blood on American soil" and demanded a declaration of war. Congressman Abraham Lincoln challenged this claim, demanding to know the exact "spot" where blood had been shed. American forces under Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott won a series of decisive battles, culminating in the capture of Mexico City in September 1847. Mexican negotiator Nicholas Trist, whom Polk had actually recalled to Washington in frustration, ignored his recall orders and negotiated the treaty anyway, reasoning that further delay would only worsen Mexico’s terms. The treaty guaranteed the roughly 80,000 Mexicans living in the ceded territory full U.S. citizenship and property rights, promises that were widely violated in practice. The massive land acquisition reignited the slavery debate that would consume American politics for the next thirteen years, as each new territory forced the question: slave state or free? The Compromise of 1850, Bleeding Kansas, and ultimately the Civil War all grew from the soil Mexico had been forced to surrender.

Bertrand Russell was jailed twice, once for opposing World War I and once for protesting nuclear weapons, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in between. He published his first major philosophical work at twenty-eight and his last book at ninety-six. He was ninety-seven when he died on February 2, 1970, in Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales. Still writing. Still arguing. Born in Trellech, Monmouthshire on May 18, 1872, into one of Britain's great political families, Russell was raised by his grandparents after both parents died before he was four. His grandfather had been Prime Minister twice. Russell went to Cambridge, where he fell in love with mathematical logic and spent the next decade trying to prove that all of mathematics could be derived from pure logic. The result was Principia Mathematica, co-written with Alfred North Whitehead between 1910 and 1913, a three-volume monument of logical rigor that famously requires 362 pages to prove that 1+1=2. The work is one of the most important and least-read books in the history of Western philosophy. Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorems in 1931 showed that Russell's project could never fully succeed, but the logical tools developed in Principia transformed philosophy, mathematics, and computer science. Russell opposed World War I on pacifist grounds and was dismissed from his lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge. He served six months in Brixton Prison in 1918 for a pamphlet the government considered seditious. The prison time didn't slow him down; he wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy while incarcerated. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought." His popular books on philosophy, science, and politics sold in the millions. A History of Western Philosophy, published in 1945, kept him financially solvent for decades. In his eighties and nineties, he led the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and was arrested again in 1961, at 89, for a sit-down protest in London. The magistrate offered to release him if he promised good behavior. He refused.