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This week
On Monday, I looked at the incredible life story of one lunatic who spent his entire life bouncing all over the world looking for a war to take part in:
Round Three: California
Sitting in Los Angeles was a Mexican revolutionary with a grudge named Ricardo Flores Magon. He had ideas about ousting his country’s president, who had been in the post for three decades and was facing opposition from multiple dissidents. Magon was under constant observation in LA, and faced the prospect of being dragged back across the border and dumped in front of a firing squad. He was far from humbled by this, and spent his time convincing a lot of disgruntled, unemployed men in the city to join his socialist revolution. He took anyone:'U.S. Army deserters, border bandits, escaped convicts, mercenaries,’ and then, Caryl Pryce. This was an excellent prospect for a broke immigrant running away from life, because the job came with a $100 bounty and a dollar a day as pay. Magon was also liberally promising people large land grants (160 acres) in Baja if he managed to get his revolution off the ground.
Along with other volunteers, including other South African veterans, Pryce went into Mexico as a ‘Magonista.’ At the end of January, 1911 this ragtag band of ruffians managed to take the town of Mexicali on the border. By now the American government, which had invested a lot of money in Mexico, was paying attention, and politely asked President Diaz to get his country in order. His attempts failed, and in fact, with all the veterans present, things now took a more serious turn and an officer named Stanley Williams took command and escalated proceedings. ‘Declaring he wanted action quickly, he, Pryce and Hopkins, together with 40 other gringos, hijacked a train to raid Algodones about 30 miles down the line towards Arizona. Bridges were blown, telegraph lines cut, and the terrified inhabitants sent fleeing across the border.’ There were more raids, cattle were stolen, and the US Government now stepped in.
At the beginning of March, 'the War Department announced the largest mobilisation of troops and naval vessels ever undertaken by the United States in peacetime. Twenty thousand soldiers, a fifth of the U.S. Army, together with most of the Pacific Fleet, 2,000 marines recalled from their base at Guantanamo in Cuba, were converging on the border with Mexico.' A month later, there was a showdown between Mexican soldiers and 80 of the rebels, including Caryl, near Mexicali.
‘Pinned down by two chattering Hotchkisses, with Williams dying at his side, part of his head blown off ... Pryce sent "Dynamite" Bill, the oldest man… to attack the machine-guns with his home-made bombs ... Crawling to the edge of the Encina Canal, he lit the fuses from the end of his cigar, lobbing his bombs at the enemy…’
Caryl managed to make his escape thanks to the fact that Bill had managed to knock out a Mexican machine gun. Half of his comrades had to be left behind, and in the aftermath, as they were being bayoneted by the regulars, he assumed command. At this point, he became a celebrity too. He was even referred to as the ‘Mexican Robin Hood.’ All of this hilarity was attracting journalists from the US. One of the interviews that he gave quoted him as saying his men were:
‘a bully fine lot. I thought I'd lose half of them after the first fight, but it only seems to have wet their whistle. Still, they haven't looked on their own dead, and that makes a difference. I'll lose lots of them if I don't give them more action. The young bloodhounds! They must have it.’
In May, Pryce set out to try and take Tijuana. 100 men stood in his way, and after he seized the southern entrance to the town, he asked the garrison if they’d like to surrender. They told him to do one, and so his men rampaged through the town. It was messy, with his men 'fighting like demons, time and again rushing trenches or strongholds in the face of a veritable rain of lead.’
‘Magonistas’ at Tijuana, I’ve wondered if that’s Caryl in the middle (Wikipedia)
Soon, however, the cause crumbled. Diaz had signed a treaty with other revolutionaries, and Pryce decided to have it out with Magon, who wasn’t really contributing anything to his own revolution:
‘It was getting so serious that I came up to Los Angeles to see the Junta and find out what they intended doing. They had no money, and we didn't have any ammunition and it was useless to move on to Ensenada. So when I found the jig was up, I wrote back to the boys at Tijuana and advised them to disband. Hopkins and I came north to look for something else. Perhaps some day we may go back. I could hold Lower California with a 1,000 men and a couple of screw guns.’
You can finish reading this article below:
On Thursday, I rabbit holed on film stars from across the globe and what they got up to during the Second World War:
Stars Past Military Age
Spencer Tracy was 41, Humphrey Bogart, 42, had served as a teenage sailor in the First World War ("At eighteen, war was great stuff. Paris! Sexy French girls! Hot damn!) James Cagney was 42, and Gary Cooper 41. Clark Gable was 40. Riding on a high after Gone with the Wind, as opposed to blockade running like Rhett Butler, he would act as as president of the actors' division of the Hollywood Victory Committee: 'created on December 10, 1941, to ask artists of the stage, screen, radio and television not under the flag to contribute to the war effort.’ After the death of Carole Lombard in 1942, Gable would push hard to see active service and got a few combat missions in B-17’s in over Germany in 1943 before he was yanked from the line of fire after a near miss from some flak that nearly took his head off. MGM were determined to get their valuable asset out of the way of the Nazis, not least Hitler, who had announced a $5,000 dollar reward for the man that brought him his favourite actor unscathed.
Ronald Reagan was slightly younger than this crop at 37, and had been in the Army Reserve. He was willing to serve, but acute myopia ruled combat out. Instead, when Warner Bros. Lawyers stopped asking for deferrals, he put his career on hold to serve first at Fort Mason in California, and then doing PR for the First Motion Picture Unit, which produced propaganda and training material.
So what of John Wayne, who was 34 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour? America’s hero, ultimately the star of countless war films, had no intention of getting shot at for real…
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He’d already been around for donkey’s years by 1941, but his real breakthrough, Stagecoach, had only come in 1939. When he visited a recruitment centre in 1942, he cited his impending divorce as a reason to stay Stateside, as well as an old shoulder injury from playing college football, which Durant studiously points out, this came as a surprise to everyone watching him fight his way through endless westerns. He was eventually classed as 3-A, which exempted him for reasons of ‘family dependence.’ John Wayne might have literally dodged a bullet, or many bullets, but he was uncomfortable defending this fact in the years to come. ‘For these young men who were going to the front, I represented America,’ was one explanation he used. ‘They would take their fiancées to the movies on Saturdays and hold hands in front of a John Wayne western... So I put my big hat back on because I thought it was better.’ He raised money for the war effort, and he visited the wounded, but when these young men asked him why he didn’t serve, he often didn’t know how to respond. Occasionally he mumbled something about contractual obligations. Hollywood’s Richard Douglas Jensen, who dug right into this wrote:
"The most honest assessment of Duke's non-service is that he, tormented by the fear of poverty and by the overriding ambition to advance his film career, stayed in Hollywood to make movies. It was not cowardice that kept Duke from wearing the uniform. It was another fear: the fear of returning from the war and having to start over as a B-western cowboy or, worse, of having no career at all. For the rest of his life, Duke felt ashamed in the presence of those who had gone to war. When many actors he knew returned and resumed their careers, Duke felt he had done wrong by not serving."
John Wayne in "The Longest Day," 20th Century Fox,1962 (IMDB/20th Century Fox)
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Olympic History:
Some history from the 1936 games for you, the one where black athlete Jesse Owens crashed Hitlers aryan party. I like this story because it makes Hitler look stupid. Hitler was a big fan of Luz Long, his lovely German, blond, champion long jumper. Unfortunately for Adolph, Long and Owens hit if off big time and struck up a friendship. And Luz also failed to beat Owens. Failing utterly as the poster boy for the Nazi regime. Lols.
Long was killed on Sicily during the Second World War. It’s all a bit shady, because he had surrendered beforehand and was a prisoner of war.
Herewith some photos of the mausoleum on the island, in sight of Mount Etna, where all fallen Germans, including Luz Long, now lie…
I also just wanted to share a find from an antique shop by the side of a motorway somewhere in France last month. We stopped because we were bored, and I ended up with a brilliant souvenir coaster set from the last time Paris hosted the Olympic Games…
Next Week:
On Monday you can expect a selection of great speeches given by indigenous people in America, almost always in the face of settler encroachment and pretty shoddy treatment by incomers. You’ll also get the next instalment of The Sex Lives of Royals. We’ve been putting it off, because neither of us particularly like him, but Charlotte and I will be tackling Edward VIII, because it’s not all lols and a sex chair, it’s grim.
Are you suggesting Luz Long's death was suspicious Alex?