February 21 in History

Three men who ran the most powerful office in the world got 2.5 to 8 years for obstruction of justice. John Mitchell, the Attorney General, had ordered the break-in. H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, Nixon's closest advisors, covered it up. All three reported to minimum-security prisons. Mitchell served 19 months. Haldeman served 18. Ehrlichman served 18. The burglars who actually broke into the Watergate got longer sentences than the men who told them to do it.

Thomas resigned in 1245 after confessing to torture and forgery. He was Finland's first bishop. The job came with converting pagans who didn't want converting. He'd held the position for twenty years. Nobody knows exactly what he forged or who he tortured, but the confession was public enough that Rome accepted his resignation immediately. He didn't face trial. He didn't lose his status as a priest. The Catholic Church just let him step down quietly. Finland's entire Christian infrastructure had been built by a man who admitted to crimes serious enough to end his career, but not serious enough to prosecute. He disappeared from records after that.

Ahmed Gragn had conquered two-thirds of Ethiopia. For fourteen years, his Muslim forces burned churches, enslaved populations, pushed the Christian empire to the edge of extinction. The Ethiopian emperor was down to a mountain fortress and 400 Portuguese musketeers who'd sailed up from the coast. They met Gragn's army at Wayna Daga with 8,000 troops against his 15,000. The Portuguese guns cut through cavalry charges. Gragn took a musket ball to the chest and died on the field. His army disintegrated within hours. Ethiopia survived because 400 men with early firearms showed up at exactly the right moment.

A sixteen-year-old hiding in a monastery became Tsar of Russia because nobody else wanted the job. Mikhail Romanov's father was in Polish captivity. His mother was a nun. The previous decade had seen three false Tsars, a Polish invasion, and mass starvation. The national assembly chose him precisely because he was weak — young, inexperienced, with no powerful backers. They thought they could control him. His dynasty ruled for 304 years, until a firing squad ended it in a basement in 1918.

The last foreign army to invade mainland Britain landed at Fishguard, Wales — 1,400 French troops sent to spark an Irish rebellion. They were ex-convicts and conscripts, led by an Irish-American general who'd never seen combat. They spent their first night looting local farms for food and got drunk on stolen wine. The British sent 500 reservists — part-time soldiers, mostly farmers. The French surrendered after two days without a real battle. One reason given: they mistook Welsh women in traditional red cloaks for British Redcoats and thought they were outnumbered. Napoleon was still two years from taking power. This was the revolution's foreign policy.

The Cherokee Phoenix printed in two columns — English on the left, Cherokee on the right. Sequoyah had invented the syllabary just twelve years earlier. Before that, Cherokee had no written form. Now they had a newspaper. They used it to publish Cherokee laws, tribal decisions, and arguments against their forced removal. The U.S. government shut it down three years later. They knew what literate resistance looked like.

The first telephone book had 50 names. No numbers. You just picked up and told the operator who you wanted. The New Haven District Telephone Company published it on a single sheet of paper in February 1878. Within two years, they had to add numbers because operators couldn't keep up. That's when your phone stopped being a person you asked and became a number you dialed.

Bob Fitzsimmons knocked out Peter Maher in 95 seconds. One punch to the solar plexus. Shortest heavyweight title fight in history. But the fight itself wasn't the story — the location was. Texas banned prizefighting. So promoters built a temporary arena on a sandbar in the Rio Grande. Four hundred spectators took a train to the Mexican border, then crossed on a pontoon bridge. The ring sat in technically Mexican territory. Texas Rangers watched from the American side. They couldn't do anything. Fitzsimmons won the title on a sandbar because the law stopped at the river. Three countries involved, 95 seconds of actual boxing.

Kurt Eisner was shot walking to parliament. February 21, 1919. He'd been Bavaria's first republican premier for three months. The assassin was a 22-year-old aristocrat who thought Eisner had dishonored Germany by admitting war guilt. Eisner died on the street. Within hours, a communist burst into the Bavarian parliament and shot two politicians. The government fled Munich that night. Workers' councils seized control. They declared a Soviet Republic. It lasted three weeks before Freikorps paramilitaries crushed it, killing over 600 people. The violence radicalized a young veteran living in Munich at the time. His name was Adolf Hitler.

The Brazilians took Monte Castello on their fifth attempt. They'd been trying since November. Three thousand men from the Brazilian Expeditionary Force — the only Latin American ground troops in Europe — finally broke through German positions in the Northern Apennines. They'd trained in the tropics. Now they were fighting in snow. The Germans held the high ground for months, dug into rock and ice. Brazil sent 25,000 soldiers to Italy total. More than 450 died there. When they came home, nobody talked about it. The dictatorship didn't want heroes who'd fought for democracy abroad.

The USS Bismarck Sea sank in 90 minutes. February 21, 1945, off Iwo Jima. Four kamikaze pilots hit her in succession. 318 men died — the last American aircraft carrier lost in combat. The Saratoga, hit the same night, survived with 123 dead. She'd been torpedoed twice before, bombed four times, and still made it home. Japan had 2,800 kamikaze pilots left. They'd sink or damage 368 ships before August. The Bismarck Sea's survivors watched her go down while still in the water themselves. Some carriers burn for days. This one didn't make it to dawn.