Journey Through Time Episode 2 The Attack that Shook America: Black Tom Explodes. New York harbour erupts with an explosion as Black Tom island is ripped apart. A series of explosions set off a chain reaction as barges and railway carriages loaded with ordnance ready for export exploded. The shock waves ripple out around Manhattan and New Jersey, shattering windows 25 miles away and even registering on the Richter scale. However, only 7 people died and although the Statue of Liberty was damaged, it was not highly visible damage. Woodrow Wilson, who wanted to maintain America’s neutrality in the war, was facing re-election and it was passed off as a regrettable accident. In the end it was the Zimmerman telegram that prompted America to join the war. In 1920, after the war, the Mixed Claims Commission was ensuring that Germany paid reparations, but Von Pappen (i.e. ex-embassy saboteur in the US) argued against the War Guilt Clause 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, keen to deflect attention away from his own sabotage. After a 13 year trial the Mixed Claims Commission settled on a compensation payment of $50 million dollars, but Hitler refused to pay it- in fact it wasn’t settled until 1953 with the final payment made in 1979. The Black Tom Explosion hardened American attitudes towards ‘traitors within’ which played out in the brutal internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, and the creation of America’s counterintelligence operations.
The Rest is History Episode 646. the Fall of the Incas: Death to the Emperor (Part 3) We left Pizarro and Atahualpa in November 1532 sleeping in a room together, Atahualpa having been taken captive. Atahualpa offered to fill a room with gold up to a certain mark on the wall within two months, in exchange for his freedom. He had no sense that these Spanish were just the first of many. During his period of imprisonment, there was a lot of contact between Atahualpa and the Spaniards, and he was still more concerned with the Civil War with his brother, than the Spaniards. His brother Huáscar was being brought north in a cage by Atahualpa’s troops, and ordered to be murdered. By January 1533 the gold to ransom Atahualpa was beginning to arrive slowly. Atahualpa ordered that temples be destroyed to yield up more gold, largely as a way of punishing the people who had supported his brother. When Atahualpa’s general Chalcuchímac took Spaniards to a temple which did not have sufficient gold, he was burned alive. At this stage, Pizarro’s screwed-over partner Almagro with 150 more troops and royal officials. Pizarro began melting down the gold – such beautiful workmanship reduced to ingots- and Almagro demanded half but Pizarro gave him only a token amount. Pizarro’s brother Hernando was sent back to Spain, something that upset Atahualpa because the two men had become friends. The Spanish were anxious that Atahualpa’s troops would attack from the north, and the recently-arrived Almagro and his men wanted to kill him. As the rumours of the imminent invasion of Atahualp’s troop spread (and they were just rumours- there was no invasion planned), Pizarro agreed to hold a kangaroo court and Atahualpa was sentenced to death by burning, unless he converted to Christianity. Aware that death by burning would mean that there would be no mummified body to go to the next life, he finally agreed. The Spanish grilled him anyway and buried him. Both Pizarro’s brother Hernando and the King were very critical of Pizarro’s decision to kill a King, and now Pizarro needed to find a new Incan intermediary.
Foundling. Episode 6. As the series winds up, Jess’s father Lewis finally contacts the producer Lucy Greenwell, and says that he had no idea that Jennifer had been pregnant, and is evasive over whether and how much he continued to have contact with Jennifer. Meanwhile, after Jess decided to go ahead with the podcast, Jennifer’s family who had made contact with her even though their mother had not, withdrew contact with her. Jess herself had distanced herself from them when she was excluded from her ‘new’ grandfather’s deathbed and funeral, and then they blocked contact with her on social media. Meanwhile Lucy the program producer finds another American girl who was also a foundling, and as with Jess, it turned out that her mother had also gone on to have other children that she abandoned. This woman, Janet, had met with her mother and established contact with one brother, but her curiosity satisfied, she had let the relationship lapse. Jess is nowhere near doing that: she is still too angry, and wants her mother Jennifer to be punished. And the arrival of two Cold Case detectives and the knowledge that women are being prosecuted today for abandoning their babies decades and decades ago, shows that there is punishment- but just not the sort of punishment that would satisfy Jess.
Actually, I have had less and less sympathy for Jess as this series has gone on. It’s all about her, and she is heedless to the damage she is doing in order to have her own questions answered and her insecurities assuaged. With DNA there is no secrecy any more, and it’s as if secrecy is a crime. I don’t know that it is: sometimes secrets have to be kept for life to go on.
How Did We Get Here? Episode 5: Israel and the Palestinians: From WW2 to the First Arab War The White Paper which was issued in 1939 after the crushing of the Arab Revolt was rejected by the Palestinian Mufti, then in Germany, because as far as he was concerned, it still allowed for a large Jewish population in the Palestinian homeland. The Jews were angered by the White Paper’s restriction of Jewish immigration, leading to an uprising against the British and the bombing of the King David Hotel by Jewish paramilitary groups. By 1947 Britain threw in the towel, and handed it over to the United Nations, who had their own plans for partition. The UN plan gave 55% of the land Israel in a chequerboard of seven separate entities, but no one actually took responsibility for the implementation of the plan. But why did the UN vote in favour of it? Britain abstained, and the UN at that time had a different and mainly European membership before the decolonization of the post-war period. The Palestinians rejected the UN plan, arguing that they should have received all of the land. 300,000 of the 700,000 Palestinians left straight away, for various reasons. War broke out, but the Arab armies except for Jordan (which was still under British protection) were weak. The Jewish population ended up with 4/5 of the Mandate territory, with just two Palestinian reserves left: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Features Gudrun Kraemer, Professor of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin, Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University and the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen, author of ‘The Making of the Modern Middle East’.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 