Sir Vernon Sturdee (1890–1966) was an Australian Army officer. During
the First World War he participated in the landing at Gallipoli and the
fighting on the Western Front. Promotion was stagnant between the wars,
and he remained at his wartime rank of lieutenant colonel until 1935. He
had little faith in the strategy of basing a fleet at Singapore, and
warned that the Army would have to face a well-equipped Japan. As Chief
of the General Staff during the Second World War, he conducted a doomed
defence of the islands to the north of Australia against the Japanese.
He later commanded the First Army in New Guinea in 1944–45, directing
the fighting at Aitape and on New Britain and Bougainville. He was
charged with destroying the enemy without committing his troops to
battles that were beyond their strength. When the war ended, he took the
surrender of Japanese forces at Rabaul. He succeeded Sir Thomas Blamey
as Commander in Chief of the Australian Military Forces in December
1945, and was Chief of the General Staff again from 1946 to 1950. During
this time, he had to demobilise the wartime Army while fielding and
supporting part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Sturdee>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1520:
Citizens of Toledo, Castile, who were opposed to the rule of
the foreign-born Charles V, rose up in revolt when the royal government
attempted to unseat radical city councilors.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Comuneros>
1847:
New Zealand Wars: A minor Māori chief was accidentally shot by
a junior British Army officer in the Petre settlement of New Zealand's
North Island, triggering the Wanganui Campaign.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanganui_Campaign>
1912:
American Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across
the English Channel.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Quimby>
1945:
World War II: Nearly one million Soviet soldiers began the
Battle of the Seelow Heights against the "Gates of Berlin".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Seelow_Heights>
2007:
In one of the deadliest shooting incidents in United States
history, a gunman killed 32 people and wounded over 20 more before
committing suicide at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University in Blacksburg, Virginia.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_shooting>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
heir apparent:
(usually monarchy) Someone who will definitely inherit, assuming he
survives the one from whom he is inheriting.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heir_apparent>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
The gods conform scrupulously to the sentiments of their
worshippers: they have reasons for so doing. Pay attention to this. …
The Emperor Julian's morals were almost those of St. Gregory Nazianzen.
There is nothing in this but what is natural and usual. The
transformations undergone by morals and ideas are never sudden. The
greatest changes in social life are wrought imperceptibly, and are only
seen from afar. Christianity did not secure a foothold until such time
as the condition of morals accommodated itself to it, and as
Christianity itself had become adjusted to the condition of morals. It
was unable to substitute itself for paganism until such time as paganism
came to resemble it, and itself came to resemble paganism.
--Anatole France
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France>