A Wet Date in History

It's probably a little-known detail, hardly worth noting, but water played a part in a lot of events that occurred on this date in history.

First, on this day in 1620, a little ship named the Mayflower set sail from Southampton, England. Aboard were 102 passengers we know today by the term Pilgrims. (Why is it that we normally hear about those folks only around Thanksgiving?)

About 243 years later, in 1863, another boat arrived in Charleston from Mobile, Alabama, where it had been built. It was destined to make history about seven months later when it sank the USS Housatonic--and then promptly sank herself. The CSS Hunley, the first submarine to sink an enemy ship, was recovered from the ocean floor and the process of its restoration begun in 2000, 137 years after its sinking.

CSS Hunley

Eighty years after the Hunley arrived in Charleston, U.S. troops launched an amphibious assault on one of its own islands, Kiska, Alaska. Part of the island chain known as the Aleutians, Kiska had been captured by the Japanese in June 1942. When U.S. forces moved to retake Kiska, they discovered that the Japanese had already abandoned the island. Despite that fact, more than 100 American casualties resulted from friendly fire in their effort to retake the island.

US troops landing on Kiska

On the other side of the world on this day in 1944, the Allied forces conducted another amphibious invasion named Operation Anvil (aka Operation Dragoon), the invasion of southern France. Coming so close on the heels of the invasion of Normandy, Anvil is relatively unknown by most people today.

The end of that war came on this date in 1945 and is usually remembered as V-J Day (Victory over Japan). The most remembered image of the occasion is the photo of an American sailor passionately kissing a female nurse or dental assistant, a total stranger, in New York's Times Square. And the water connection on this date? There were plenty of tears of joy mingled with tears of mourning for the more than 405,000 American military personnel killed during the war.

Finally, on this date in 1964, Olympic long jumper Ralph Boston set a new world record in that event with a jump of 26 feet, 11.45 inches, in Kingston, Jamaica, besting former record holder Jesse Owens's feat of 26 feet, 8 inches.

Ralph Boston

Boston's path crossed mine fleetingly (and I do mean fleetingly!) in 1971 when the members of our high school two-mile relay team decided to practice on our own at the University of Tennessee's Tom Black Track one day. A lot of runners were on the track that day, warming up, running, cooling down. As I ran my last lap and rounded the final turn into the straightaway, a man running sprints flashed past me on the right. It was none other than Ralph Boston, who was an assistant dean at UT at the time. I needed a drink of water after that!