Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesSaturday, October 24
From the desk
Start with 1946: a captured Nazi V-2, bolted with a 35-millimeter camera by engineer Clyde T. Holliday, climbed 65 miles over White Sands and smashed itself to pieces on the way down. The camera died. The film survived, and on it was the first photograph of Earth ever taken from space. Worth a longer look: the Musashi, sunk in 1944 after absorbing nineteen torpedoes and seventeen bombs before rolling under with her captain still aboard. Smaller but sharp: 1861's telegraph lines meeting at Salt Lake City, closing the three-month gap between California and the rest of the Union.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1946Featured · This day in history
A camera rides a captured Nazi rocket 65 miles up and photographs the curve of the Earth
A year after the war ended, the U.S. Army was still firing captured German V-2 rockets into the New Mexico sky, searching for anything useful the technology could do. On October 24, 1946, V-2 No. 13 launched from White Sands carrying a 35-millimeter DeVry motion-picture camera bolted on by engineer Clyde T. Holliday. It reached roughly 65 miles before falling back and shattering on impact, destroying the camera. The film inside survived, and on it was the first photograph of Earth ever taken from outer space.
The Army's White Sands program turned a captured Nazi weapon into an orbital camera platform years before the phrase 'space race' existed. Holliday's photographs, stitched into a sequence covering 40,000 square miles, convinced American military planners and scientists that rockets could be instruments of observation, not just destruction.
Did you know
QWhere did the hardware for V-2 No. 13 actually come from?
The rocket itself was a hybrid. General Electric, which ran the Army's Hermes program, assembled No. 13 using a mix of genuine captured German V-2 parts and components the company had re-manufactured domestically to American specifications. By 1946 the original German stockpile shipped over after the war was already being supplemented and replaced piece by piece, since many of the original rockets had been damaged, cannibalized, or used up in earlier test flights. Hermes had been running since 1944, originally as an Army effort to study and reverse-engineer German rocketry before the war even ended. No. 13's mixed parentage made it a transitional machine, caught between salvaged Nazi engineering and the American industrial base that would soon build rockets from scratch.
QWhat federal legal case involving the International Finance Corporation later cited this era's precedents?
Decades after V-2 No. 13 fell to earth, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Jam et al. v. International Finance Corp., decided in 2019 under citation 586 U.S. 199. The case addressed whether international organizations like the IFC, a World Bank Group affiliate, could claim broad immunity from lawsuits in American courts. It stands alongside other period cases such as Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 and Carpenter v. United States in the Supreme Court's reporter record. These rulings have no direct link to rocketry or White Sands, but they occupy the same federal documentary record, the U.S. Reports, that preserves government actions of lasting consequence, rocket launches included.
QWhat boundary does 65 miles actually represent in the history of spaceflight?
The 100-kilometer mark, known as the Karman line, is the altitude most commonly used today to define where outer space begins. V-2 No. 13 climbed to roughly 105 kilometers (65 miles), clearing the 100-kilometer threshold by about three miles. That line would not even be proposed until the 1960s, when physicist Theodore von Karman calculated the altitude at which a vehicle would need to travel faster than orbital velocity just to get enough lift from the thin atmosphere. In 1946, nobody at White Sands was measuring against that future standard. They were simply trying to see how high a captured weapon could fly, and happened to clear a boundary that did not yet exist on paper.
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1900government
Washington says it will buy the Danish West Indies for $7 million
Two years after the Spanish-American War pulled American attention into the Caribbean, the U.S. Government announced on October 24, 1900, that it intended to purchase the Danish West Indies, the three islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix, for $7 million. Denmark had agreed to sell at a similar price once before, in 1867, for $7.5 million, but the U.S. Senate never voted on the treaty and it expired. This announcement reopened talks. They led to a signed treaty in 1902, which Denmark's own parliament rejected. The islands would not actually change hands for another seventeen years.
The 1900 announcement marked the moment control of these islands became part of American naval strategy in the Caribbean. Control of the sea lanes feeding a future canal across Panama made these three small islands worth pursuing twice more after 1867, and the pattern set here (public announcement, stalled treaty, eventual purchase) repeated itself in 1917 when the U.S. finally closed the deal for $25 million.
Did you know
QWho led the 1848 uprising that ended slavery in the Danish West Indies?
A man known as John Gottlieb, called Moses Gottlieb or General Buddhoe by the enslaved population he led, organized the rebellion on St. Croix alongside Admiral Martin King. About 8,000 enslaved people gathered peaceably outside Fort Frederik to demand their freedom. Governor Peter von Scholten, facing the crowd and fearing bloodshed, announced immediate and total emancipation on July 3, 1848, rather than let the standoff turn violent. The move freed the colony's entire enslaved population in a single stroke, decades before the United States did the same. Buddhoe was later arrested and exiled by Danish authorities despite the peaceful nature of the protest he led, a detail that still shapes how St. Croix remembers emancipation day each year.
QWhat was the Fireburn, and who led it?
Thirty years after emancipation, laborers on St. Croix rose up again, this time over wages and working conditions rather than slavery itself. The Fireburn riot of October 1, 1878 became the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history, led by Mary Leticia Thomas, remembered as Queen Mary of St. Croix, alongside three other women. The uprising burned plantation property across the island in protest of the harsh labor contracts that had replaced slavery in all but name. Queen Mary was one of the few women known to have led a major Caribbean labor revolt in the nineteenth century. Queen Mary's name is still invoked on St. Croix during Fireburn commemorations each October.
QHow religiously diverse were the islands the U.S. was trying to buy in 1900?
By 1900 roughly 30,000 people lived across St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix, and only about a quarter of them were Catholic. The majority belonged to Anglican, Moravian, or other Protestant congregations, a legacy of Danish colonial administration mixing with British and German missionary activity over the centuries. Moravian missionaries in particular had been active in the islands since the 1730s, building one of the oldest Protestant missions in the Caribbean. That religious mix meant Washington's negotiators were buying a population with deeper ties to Northern European Protestant churches than to the Catholic institutions common elsewhere in the Spanish and French Caribbean. The demographic breakdown rarely appears in accounts that focus only on the purchase price.
1944military
Musashi rolls over and sinks after waves of American carrier strikes
For two years, Musashi had been the pride of the Japanese fleet, a 72,000-ton battleship built to outgun anything afloat. On October 24, 1944, while steaming through the Sibuyan Sea as part of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force, she was caught by aircraft from the USS Intrepid and other American carriers. Over several hours the planes returned in wave after wave, hitting her hull with an estimated nineteen torpedoes and seventeen bombs. By evening she listed past thirty degrees and rolled under at 7:36 p.m., taking Captain Toshihira Inoguchi down with her.
Musashi's sinking confirmed what the U.S. Navy had bet its entire Pacific strategy on: that carrier aircraft, not battleships, now decided naval battles. Halsey's Third Fleet planes needed no battleship duel to kill the heaviest warship ever built, a lesson that shaped American naval doctrine for the rest of the century.
Did you know
QHow many ships did it take to escort the crippled Musashi after Kurita abandoned her?
Kurita left Musashi behind at 3:30 p.m. to keep his Center Force moving, then reversed course and found her still afloat at 4:21 p.m. He detailed a heavy cruiser and two destroyers to stand by the wounded battleship rather than risk his whole formation. That escort could do nothing about the flooding below decks. The gesture bought Musashi a few more hours before she went under at 7:36 p.m. Kurita then pressed on toward Leyte Gulf with the rest of his force, leaving the escort ships to handle the rescue effort alongside Kiyoshimo and Hamakaze.
QWhat happened when one of Musashi's own guns misfired during the attack?
During the battle a shell fired from Musashi's own main armament detonated inside the barrel of the middle gun in Turret No. 1, wrecking the turret's elevating machinery. The malfunction happened separately from the American bomb damage that also struck that turret, meaning Musashi lost part of her offensive power to her own ordnance failure before the day was through. For a ship built around nine 18.1-inch guns as her defining strength, losing a gun to an internal detonation rather than enemy fire was a strange footnote to her final battle.
QWhy did Musashi's crew counterflood the ship twice in opposite directions?
Damage control teams fought two separate lists. Early in the attack they reduced a 5.5-degree starboard list down to just 1 degree by counterflooding compartments on the opposite side. But continued torpedo hits reversed the problem entirely, pushing the ship into a 6-degree list to port instead. Crews had to reverse their counterflooding strategy mid-battle, flooding different compartments to correct a tilt running the opposite way from the one they had just fixed. The bow eventually sank 4 meters and forward freeboard dropped 1.8 meters, numbers logged by a crew tracking a losing fight compartment by compartment.
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Quote of the day
“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.”
