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A departure already under way

By 16 October 1934 the withdrawal had been running for nearly a week: Communist forces were already moving southwest out of the Jiangxi Soviet under secret orders issued on 10 October.

A Xinhua report based on the PLA Archives says some troops and baggage began crossing the Yudu River on the night of 16 October, ahead of the formally scheduled main crossing. The archival plan set that main operation from the night of the 17th until 5 a.m. on the 19th, across about seven crossing sectors.

An archivist concluded that 17 October should be treated as the main crossing date, even though some units went over on the 16th.

Not the PLA, and not yet Mao’s march

The force was the First Front, or Central, Red Army — the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. The People’s Liberation Army did not exist under that name in 1934; the term appeared during the later civil war, standardized by a November 1948 Central Military Commission order.

Bo Gu and the Comintern adviser Otto Braun had made the decision to abandon the base, and Zhou Enlai helped execute it. Mao Zedong crossed with part of the Military Commission column on the 18th; his ascendancy came later, at the January 1935 Zunyi Conference.

What went across the river

Roughly 87,000 troops left with the First Front Red Army. The column moved chiefly at night and carried not only weapons but printing presses, an X-ray machine, money, wounded personnel and sick leaders.

About 16,000 personnel stayed near Ruijin as a rearguard, to delay the Nationalists and conceal the withdrawal.

There was no fixed destination of Yan’an: the initial objective was to move southwest and link with He Long’s forces in or near Hunan.

March restored the draft; May built the machinery

The listing treats 21 May 1935 as the day Hitler announced the return of conscription. He had done that on 16 March, when the Law for the Organization of the Armed Forces proclaimed compulsory service and a 36-division, 12-corps army.

That March law instructed the defense minister to submit detailed implementing legislation immediately. The Wehrgesetz of 21 May supplied it — the personnel, command and service framework, not the announcement.

What the cabinet approved at 4:15 p.m.

At a ministerial meeting beginning at 4:15 p.m., the Reich cabinet approved the Wehrgesetz and ordered it published. The law declared every German man liable for military service and defined the Wehrmacht as comprising the Heer, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe.

Liability ran from age 18 through the 31 March following a man’s 45th birthday, with normal call-up in the calendar year he turned 20.

The same statute made Hitler supreme commander, with command exercised under him through the defense minister, whose office became the Reich War Ministry.

Published the next morning

The law appeared in the Reichsgesetzblatt on 22 May, accompanied by implementing measures fixing a 12-month term of active service.

The breach of the Treaty of Versailles was explicit rather than implied: Article 173 had required Germany to abolish universal compulsory service.

Nine votes to nothing

On 27 May 1935 the Supreme Court announced its decision in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, reversing the federal convictions of the Brooklyn poultry defendants.

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote that Section 3 of the National Industrial Recovery Act delegated legislative power without adequate standards. Justice Benjamin Cardozo concurred, joined by Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, agreeing that the delegated code-making authority lacked meaningful limits.

The judgment was unanimous, 9–0.

Chickens that had come to rest

The Court separately held that the challenged hours, wages and local poultry-sale rules could not stand under the Commerce Clause. The birds had come to permanent rest in New York, so the Schechters’ local transactions affected interstate commerce only indirectly.

The interstate journey mattered: 96 percent of live poultry marketed in New York City arrived from other states, and the Schechters typically resold within 24 hours. The holding was that this particular journey had already ended.

What the nickname obscures

The indictment ran to 60 counts; the trial court dismissed 27 and acquitted on 14. Ten straight-killing conviction counts and one unfit-chicken count reached review — and that single count supplied the nickname.

‘Straight killing’ was chiefly a straight-selling rule requiring buyers to take the run of a coop except for culls, not a mandated slaughter technique. No religious-liberty claim was decided.

The ruling disabled the mandatory National Recovery Administration code system, and federal compliance and enforcement procedures were consequently abolished.

Three battalions across the river

German Wehrmacht units entered the demilitarized zone on 7 March 1936, with three battalions crossing to the west bank of the Rhine, where crowds welcomed them.

The zone was a precisely defined treaty area — the west bank plus a 50-kilometre strip east of the river — rather than everywhere loosely called the Rhineland. Versailles Articles 42 and 43 had created it, and Locarno subsequently guaranteed the arrangement.

The initial entry met no armed resistance.

Hitler tells the Reichstag sovereignty is restored

Hitler addressed the Reichstag the same day, denounced the Locarno arrangement and declared that Germany had restored full sovereignty in the demilitarized zone.

He justified the move as a response to the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance while simultaneously offering negotiations, including a new nonaggression arrangement.

The counting problem, and the response

Troop totals differ because sources count different places and times: three battalions on the west bank on 7 March, roughly 30,000 troops across the wider treaty zone, and a U.S. military attaché’s estimate of 40,000–45,000 — about three divisions — present by 9 March.

Britain and France condemned the action. France moved troops toward its border but did not enter the zone, and neither power intervened militarily; within days the initial entry expanded into a much larger occupation.

The much-quoted remark that the Germans would have withdrawn ‘with our tails between our legs’ is described by the USHMM as reported speech, not a record made on 7 March, and historians dispute what the German withdrawal orders actually required.

23 October, not the 25th

The protocol carries its own date, and it is 23 October 1936 — the listing's 25 October is wrong. German foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath and his Italian counterpart Galeazzo Ciano signed it in Berlin after two days of talks.

It was Ciano's first foreign trip since taking the office. Hitler met him at Berchtesgaden after the protocol was concluded.

Nine points of coordinated policy

The two governments agreed to coordinate policy on a proposed Western Pact, the League of Nations, communist propaganda, Austria, Spain, international economic conferences, colonies, raw materials, the Danube region and occupied Ethiopia.

On Spain, they agreed to recognize the Nationalist government de facto as soon as possible and to coordinate any later de jure recognition.

One provision traded German recognition of Italy's annexation of Ethiopia for an economic arrangement giving German business access to the occupied colony.

Where the word 'axis' actually came from

Nothing called the Axis powers was created that night. The protocol imposed no mutual military-defense obligation, and scholars stress it was not a military alliance.

Mussolini supplied the metaphor nine days later, on 1 November in Milan, presenting an axis around which willing states could collaborate. The formal German-Italian alliance waited for the Pact of Steel in 1939, and the three-power grouping for the Tripartite Pact in 1940.

A separate German-Japanese Anti-Comintern agreement was initialled in Berlin the same day and signed on 25 November — an easy source of the mistaken claim that a three-power Axis already existed.

What the record actually supports

A girl was admitted to Sydenham Hospital in Baltimore on 4 December 1936 with fever, headache and a stiff neck, and was diagnosed with streptococcal meningitis. Conventional serum therapy produced no response.

Francis Schwentker's team then administered sulfanilamide, and the physicians reported rapid clinical improvement. The girl survived and was discharged on 25 December, becoming Sydenham's first recorded survivor of streptococcal meningitis.

The specific date of 7 December is not securely established by the scholarly sources consulted; the documented chronology is admission on the 4th, treatment after serum failed, and discharge on the 25th.

Not the first in the world

The claim of a world first does not hold. Caussé, Loiseau and Gisselbrecht had already reported a French recovery from streptococcal meningitis after Prontosil treatment in February 1936.

What the Baltimore case can defensibly be called is the first American pediatric sulfanilamide trial for meningitis, and Sydenham's first streptococcal-meningitis survivor.

The 99 percent that wasn’t

A contemporary literature review estimated mortality at at least 97 percent, not 99, and documented 66 earlier recoveries. Sydenham itself reported roughly 30 percent mortality under its pre-sulfa serum protocol.

Prontosil and sulfanilamide are related but not identical: Prontosil is metabolized into the active compound sulfanilamide, which Paul Gelmo had first synthesized in 1908.

Schwentker's better-known series of meningococcal cases — a different disease — was published in April 1937.

Five weeks at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins

Picasso finished Guernica on 4 June 1937 at his Paris studio, concluding work begun on 1 May. The month-only listing hides that date.

The finished mural was oil on canvas, 349.3 by 776.6 centimetres — more than seven and a half metres wide — made for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the Paris International Exposition.

The Republic had commissioned a work for the pavilion; after seeing press photographs and reports of the German aerial attack on Gernika of 26 April, Picasso abandoned his earlier ideas and made the bombing the catalyst.

Dora Maar's camera in the studio

Dora Maar documented the painting's changing composition from 11 May through 4 June. The Museo Reina Sofía holds 28 photographs from the series.

The record shows figures removed, poses altered, and experiments abandoned along the way — unusually detailed evidence of how the canvas arrived at its final state.

Finished, but not yet seen

The canvas carries no literal aircraft and no bombs. The Museo Reina Sofía describes it as transcending the specific event into a broader indictment of war.

It did not meet the public on the day it was completed. The International Exposition had already opened on 24 May, but the Spanish Pavilion was still under construction and did not open until 12 July.

Protocol No. 51, decision 442

On 31 July 1937 the Soviet Politburo confirmed the NKVD plan for punishing “former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements.” Nikolai Yezhov had signed the order itself the previous day, 30 July.

Stalin had set it in motion on 2 July, instructing regional leaders to submit within five days their estimates of how many alleged kulaks and criminals should be executed or imprisoned.

The confirmed plan scheduled arrests to begin on 5 August across most of the USSR, 10 August in four Central Asian republics and 15 August in designated eastern territories, with completion ordered within four months.

Two categories, both euphemisms

Category I meant execution by shooting after review by a troika; Category II meant eight to ten years in a camp, or in some cases prison. The initial allocation covered 268,950 people: 75,950 to be shot and 193,000 to be imprisoned.

The regional troikas typically brought together the NKVD chief, party secretary and prosecutor. They were not courts — the accused and defense counsel were absent — and execution dates and places were to remain secret.

Rubles, railcars and camp capacity

The Politburo authorized 75 million rubles, of which 25 million was reserved for railway charges, plus new camp capacity and the use of Category II prisoners on construction and timber projects.

Quotas were nominally provisional limits rather than minimums, but officials repeatedly requested and received increases, with Yezhov empowered to consider them.

The four-month plan ran until November 1938. Troikas under Order 00447 ultimately condemned 767,397 people and imposed 386,798 death sentences.

Bazi Bridge, mid-afternoon

Fighting began on 13 August 1937 near the Japanese Naval Landing Party headquarters and at Bazi — Eight Character — Bridge in northern Shanghai. Contemporary accounts disagree about which side fired first; the Tokyo tribunal record notes that the Japanese and Chinese versions contradicted one another.

Around 3 p.m., troops of China's 88th Division under Major Yi Jin reached the bridge, fired on a Japanese detachment establishing positions there, and took it. Japanese artillery then shelled the Chinese troops.

From skirmish to artillery battle by nightfall

The U.S. consul general, Clarence E. Gauss, reported artillery fire in northeastern Shanghai from 4 p.m.; by 8 p.m. it had spread toward the civic-center area.

By late afternoon two Japanese warships in the Huangpu River were shelling Chinese positions.

The troops initially engaged on the Japanese side were naval infantry — about 3,000 personnel reported as responsible for guarding roughly 30,000 Japanese residents.

What the 13th was not

The Ōyama incident of 9 August — the disputed death of a Japanese naval sub-lieutenant near Hongqiao airfield — raised tension sharply, and about 30 Japanese warships concentrated at Shanghai within roughly 48 hours. But the tribunal found its details contradictory and observed that Japan did not cite it to justify the later campaign.

A Joint Commission meeting on 12 August produced mutual promises not to attack, and no settlement.

Chiang Kai-shek's larger coordinated air and ground offensive came on 14 August; 13 August is conventionally and officially treated as the battle's opening, and Japan announced on 15 August that two army divisions would be dispatched.

The 22nd, per Smith's own announcement

The listed date of 23 December is not supported. J. L. B. Smith's original 1939 announcement in Nature explicitly gives 22 December 1938 as the capture date.

A trawl net brought up a living, unfamiliar fish at a depth of about 40 fathoms several miles west of East London, South Africa. It died shortly after capture.

Captain Hendrik Goosen and his crew did not recognize its scientific importance, but alerted the local museum because of its unusual appearance.

A sketch posted into the Christmas mail

The catch went to Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, curator of the East London Museum, who found a roughly 1.5-metre fish with vivid blue scales and fleshy fins. She made a sketch and sent it with descriptive notes to the ichthyologist J. L. B. Smith.

The letter took ten days to reach him. The museum had no adequate preserving equipment, so the decomposing internal body was discarded and a local taxidermist mounted what remained.

Smith did not inspect and conclusively identify the mounted specimen in person until February 1939.

Which family, and whose discovery

Smith named the species for the curator and the reported capture locality: Latimeria chalumnae. Modern Latimeria belongs to the family Latimeriidae — not the extinct family Coelacanthidae under which the article was filed.

Coelacanths had been inferred absent from the fossil record for roughly 70–80 million years, a disappearance museum sources place near the end of the Cretaceous rather than in the Jurassic.

The find was new to Western science, not to everyone: Comorian fishers already knew the fish as gombessa.

A vote on something already done

The plebiscite was held on 10 April 1938, in an Austria that German troops had occupied on 12 March and that annexation laws of 13 March had already declared part of the German Reich.

One mark on the ballot answered two questions at once: approval of the completed annexation and approval of Hitler's Reichstag list. The annexation law provided no mechanism by which a 'no' result could have reversed anything.

The manufactured electorate

Roughly 300,000 to 400,000 people were barred from voting — Jewish Austrians, Roma and Sinti, and known political opponents. The voting followed a month of propaganda, intimidation and terror.

For many participants the ballot was effectively public rather than secret: entering the booth looked suspicious, so voters often marked 'yes' outside it.

What 99.73 percent means

The regime announced 4,453,912 valid 'yes' votes against 11,929 'no' — 99.73 percent of valid votes, not of all Austrians. Official turnout was 4,471,618 of 4,484,617 listed electors, with 5,777 ballots invalid or disregarded. A separate vote in the pre-Anschluss German Reich the same day returned an official 99.01 percent.

Austrian historians differ over how much of the margin came from genuine enthusiasm, from intimidation, exclusion, public voting or falsification. The Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance holds that wholesale direct falsification was not necessary to manufacture the appearance of unanimity.

The claim that the result personally astonished Hitler is not established by the sources consulted; a scholarly account says only that it exceeded Nazi leaders' expectations.

The 9th, after two failures

The June 5–7 dating in the listing belongs to work at the wrong site. Micah Muscolino's chronology places two failed attempts at Zhaokou on 4–6 June 1938, after which Chinese Nationalist troops excavated the Yellow River's southern dike at Huayuankou, north of Zhengzhou. Water spilled through the opening on 9 June.

The dike was opened primarily by excavation, not by simply blowing up a dam.

The Japanese vanguard was less than 50 kilometres away.

What the flood was meant to do

The operation was carried out under Chiang Kai-shek's command to cut the Long-Hai railway, stop the Japanese drive toward Zhengzhou, and cover the retreat and regrouping of Chinese forces.

Only people near the breach received meaningful warning; commanders feared wider notice would reveal the plan and accelerate the Japanese advance. The water moved slowly at first, then advanced southeast across the densely cultivated Henan plain at roughly 16 kilometres a day.

By 15 June it had reached the Long-Hai railway, and a Japanese spokesman acknowledged that it had completely checked the advance on Zhengzhou and would force a change of route toward Wuhan.

Counting the dead is itself disputed

Postwar damage tables covering 44 counties in Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu record 19,934,000 mu flooded — 35 percent of the recorded cultivated area — with 893,303 deaths and 3,911,354 people displaced across the prolonged 1938–1947 disaster.

Diana Lary gives 500,000 as the lowest death estimate. The figures are not interchangeable: immediate drownings cannot be cleanly separated from later deaths from hunger, disease, recurring floods and wartime disruption.

The flood bought time but did not end the campaign — Japanese forces redirected along the Yangtze and took Wuhan in October 1938.