Museum of American History; July 10, 2004

After I got done with the Civil War tour, I meandered over to the National Museum of American History to see what was new.  They closed the Sep 11 exhibit some months ago but have kept an exhibit case near it were they display Sep 11 artifacts.  Every month or two, they put something new in it.  This time was especially dramatic.

The National Museum of American History, one of my favorite museums.

A Ku Klux Klan hood. This is from Indiana, I think.

Archie Bunker's chair, beer, and cigar.

"Fat Man" atom bomb. Actually this is just the bomb casing with all the dangerous nuclear guts removed. The 10,000 pound "Fat Man" was a type of plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The primary target, Kokura, was overcast that day so the "Fat Man" was dropped on its backup target, Nagasaki. Kokura is probably the luckiest city in the world. Japan surrendered a couple days later, making it unnecessary for the Allies to invade. The planned invasion of Kyushu, called Operation Olympic, would have been half again as big as the Normandy invasion. Had the first couple atom bombings been unsuccessful in making Japan surrender, as they nearly were not, the US planned to drop as many as fifty atom bombs on Japan. Three atom bombs each would have been dropped behind each of the three main landing beaches in Kyushu to annihilate the defenses. Japan would have been one big cinder.

The Apple 1, the original home computer built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs for their "homebrew" computer club. Their friends asked the Steves to build the same for them and were willing to pay. After building about fifty of them in their garage, the two Steves realized there just might be a business opportunity for them in this home computer thing.

Banner recovered from the rubble of the World Trade Center by Fireman Joseph O'Toole of Engine Company 90, Hook and Ladder Company 41, Fire Department, City of New York.

Wreckage from United Airlines Flight 93, the fourth jet to be skyjacked on September 11. The passengers, warned by family and friends of the fate of the previous jets, fought the terrorists into the turf outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, twenty minutes flight time short of the Capitol, their probable target. In the Wahhabi view, democracy is blasphemy as it places the will of the people above the will of Allah. Congress was in session that morning. The Wahhabis wanted to kill the infidel blasphemers while they were gathered together under the Capitol dome. This wreckage is a tissue box-sized piece of the skin of the Boeing 757, right about where the stripe passes down the side. It's sheet aluminum, stripped from the frame and wadded up like you might crumple a piece of paper in your hand. That's what happens when a jumbo jet impacts the ground at 580 mph.

Crumpled skin and seat belt from United Airlines Flight 93.

Seatbelt from United Airlines Flight 93 The belt buckle is dented. The belt itself is soiled and discolored, having been buried. The ends of the belt, were it was fastened to the seat, are shredded. It looks like the force of the crash pulled the belt apart, rather than cutting it or yanking it out with fastener attached.

Civil War Washington Bus Tour; July 10, 2004

DC Cultural Tourism sponsored a Civil War Washington tour for $26 so I jumped on it. It met at the DC Visitor's Center located in the Ronald Reagan Building, which was dedicated by Bill Clinton, ironically enough. The tour focused on sights in north DC: Fort Stevens, the Old Soldiers Home, and the African-American Civil War Memorial. Fort Stevens is where the Union fought off a rebel attempt to take the capital. The Old Soldiers Home is where Lincoln went to beat the summer heat in DC. It was interesting stuff, at least for me and all right-thinking patriots.

The DC Visitors Center have a section of the Berlin Wall on display in the lobby. Who would have ever guessed that we would see it there?

We all climbed on the bus for the Big Fun Civil War Tour.

There are a lot of flags hanging next to the front door of the best homes in DC, which I like. There are some houses sporting Kerry signs, like the one in the upper window of the tan house to the left of this nice red house. But you never see a flag and a Kerry sign on the same house. You don't see any Bush signs at all. I'm guessing homes like this start at something like $700,000.

The neighborhoods look nice within DC. The people look nice. The cars are nice. It reminds me of a typical Midwestern town with slightly cuter architecture. However, I keep remembering that map of DC in the Washington Post that charted the location of all the homicides. There are about 200+ murders per year, about one for every working day, and they are fairly evenly spread over the city except for the National Mall and Georgetown, which have none. By my examination, there is a murder about every half mile in neighborhoods like this. My theory is those nice people you see walking around all day go home to bed and the night shift of drug thugs and gang bangers come out shooting each other after midnight.

As we travelled further away from the center of DC, the homes got more modest but comfortable looking. And a modest home in DC can still set you back a few hundred thousand. I still saw American flags as we drove away from the rich center but no more Kerry signs. The only political signs were for a city councilman.

The next stop was Fort Stevens at 13th and Quackenbos Streets, NW, which defended the main road into Washington from the north. Fort Stevens was one of 68 forts built around Washington during the Civil War, but the only one to actually to see combat in the Battle of Fort Stevens in July 11-12, 1864. Confederate General Jubal Early sought to attack Washington, based on reports of weak defenses, which were true enough. Early tried to flank Washington, stopping only to accept a $200,000 bribe from Fredericksburg for not attacking it. By the time his troops fought their way to Fort Stevens, they were too tired to launch an immediate attack. During that night, the North reinforced Fort Stevens and repulsed the next two days attack with the loss of 874 dead. Washington was saved. The fort is about the area of a football complex. It's not a particularly pretty design, no Vauban at work here, but it got the job done.

Gun positions. Military battles are won by artillery, which causes the majority of casualties.

View from the parapet showing the outer defensive ditch.

You can see the gun positions behind a parapet of earth. Notice that there is a fire step next to the parapet where soldiers could rise up to fire their muskets, then retreat downhill out of the line of fire.

Well, this is obviously unsafe. I'm strongly against little boys sticking their heads down the muzzles of cannons, unless it seems like a cool thing to do. It also seems unwise to point cannon at residential areas, unless the neighbors are particularly annoying.

You can see the gun positions behind a parapet of earth. Notice that there is a fire step next to the parapet where soldiers could rise up to fire their muskets, then retreat downhill out of the line of fire.

Well, this is obviously unsafe. I'm strongly against little boys sticking their heads down the muzzles of cannons, unless it seems like a cool thing to do. It also seems unwise to point cannon at residential areas, unless the neighbors are particularly annoying.

This bronze plaque memorializes Lincoln's presence here during the battle. Lincoln came out to see the battle, climbing up on the parapet to watch while the rebels fired on the fort. His military escort said Confederate Minie balls "were sending little spurts and puffs of dust from the embankment on which he stood." Lt. Col. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., later to become a Supreme Court Justice, saw a civilian standing on the parapet exposed to enemy fire. "Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot!" Holmes didn't realize until after the words left his lips that he was shouting at the President. The Battle of Fort Stevens is the only time a sitting President has come under fire in war. As Confederate General Early retreated he said to one of his officers, "Major, we haven't taken Washington, but we've scared Abe Lincoln like hell!"

Here's an example of what a Civil War tent in the field might look like, but never did. Maybe a general got a tent like this but not the troops. The troops would not be hauling all these chairs and tentpoles about. After the first long march, any extra gear that wasn't absolutely necessary fell by the wayside. They only carried the minimum. I doubt the tents were this clean either.

There were a few Union defenders of Fort Stevens still lingering about to deal with any stray Confederates who might be in the area.

Here is a case of yummy yummy good for your tummy Army bread in its easy open container. Of course, Army bread is not really bread but hardtack, which is a thick biscuit made of flour, vegetable fat, and salt. They were said to be quite tasty when eaten fresh but that rarely happenned. Most troops got their hardtack months after it was baked when it was hard as a rock and infested with weevils. The soldiers called them "sheet iron crackers" and "worm castles."

You could have knocked me over with a feather when President Lincoln showed up to rally the troops. I shook his hand and thanked him for saving the Union. I sure appreciate being able to drive from Texas to DC without a passport or going through customs. He laughed and reminded me he hadn't saved the Union yet. This was Lincoln 1864, not Lincoln 1865. Lincoln 1864 was still fighting the war. I had them mixed up. You can imagine my embarassment.

Abe chatted with the kids. It's pretty impressive for him to take time out of his busy day to mingle with tourists but that's the kind of guy Lincoln is, a man of the people, you might say.

Uncle Abe gave the troops a little pep talk before the battle.

The Wildcat Regiment Band assembles to serenade the passing tourists and remaining defenders of Fort Stevens. They continue the traditon of the original Wildcats, who provided musical accompaniment for their 105th Pennsylvania Volunteer regiment until General Order 91 disbanded all regimental bands in August 1862, when the war got too serious to be fought to music.

While we tourists inspected the fort, a Union soldier keeps watch for the enemy. Fortunately, no rebels attacked during our visit.

This is the former Old Soldier's Home from Civil War days. Lincoln would sleep out here during the summers to beat the Washington heat. The Home is perched 300 feet above DC and is much cooler, catching the breezes on the hilltop. Washington was built on swampland which made the summers humid and full of mosquitoes. People threw their shit, literally, in the canal where Constitution Avenue lies now. The summer heat made the stench unbearable.

The government bought the house and surrounding farm land from George W. Riggs, the founder of Riggs National Bank back in 1851. Now the grounds have expanded into the Armed Forces Retirement Home, hosting a thousand former servicemen. There is no waiting line. They have room for 1300. You have to either be wounded in service or serve twenty years and be able to walk through the front door. You can stroke out the next day and you will be cared for but you have to make it through the threshhold on your own steam.

The retirees pay a pittance to stay. The cost is paid by a twenty-five cent charge made to every enlisted person's monthly paycheck. Also, anytime an enlisted person suffers pay forfeitures, it goes to the Home. Angela, our guide, says the food is pretty good. It sounds like one of those secret good deals that nobody knows about.

This second floor room may have been Lincoln's bedroom but nobody can be sure, said our tour guide, Angela Brown, of the National Trust. Angela wrote her master's thesis on Lincoln's commute to the Old Soldier's Home. It was three miles on dirt roads in a carriage which took about half an hour. There is a story, unconfirmed, that somebody put a bullet through Lincoln's stovepipe hat near the entrance to the grounds one evening as drove alone. Secretary of War Stanton insisted a troop of cavalry accompany him from then on. There was some monkey business with his carriage brakes, too, which tossed Mary Lincoln from the carriage once. Nobody knew if it was an accident or sabotage.

Or maybe this was Lincoln's bedroom. It's a lot bigger. One Union officer assigned to the detail guarding Lincoln wrote that he brought an urgent dispatch to Lincoln one night, opening his bedroom door, turning up the lamp and handing Abe his spectacles. Lincoln signed for the dispatch in bed and the officer left him, thinking that this man does not give a lick for his own security.

Through this door, Lincoln passed many times as President.

The African-American Civil War Monument in the northwest district of Washington, at Vermont Avenue and U Street, at the U Street/Cardozo Metro Station.

The bronze, called "Spirit of Freedom," stands eleven feet tall and cost $2.6 million.

This guy was a big wheel from the African-American Civil War Museum around the corner and was full of facts such as most of the early intelligence gained by the Union about Confederate ship and troop movements was gathered by black men working in Southern ports and forts. This intelligence network was based on a preexisting network of black Freemasons. Blacks were prohibited by law from serving in the army, but not the navy. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that enabled the black population to join the army, which they did in droves. While black people composed three percent of the total population, they composed ten percent of the Union army. Black enlistment was an international phenomenon, with enlistees coming from Canada, the Carribean, even England to fight the Confederacy. The regiments from DC were composed of 95% freedmen and only 5% former slaves, mostly runaways. That reflected the population of Washington, which had a large population of free black people. Because DC was under direct federal control, the government could declare emancipation unilaterally. Lincoln chose to buy slaves from their owners to emancipate DC. Slaves would go before a panel who estimated their market value. The federal government paid that amount to the slaveowner and the slave went free. Almost all black people in DC were free before the Emancipation Proclamation.

The granite walls bear a roster of every black soldier and sailor who served in the Civil War.

A detail of one of the engraved plates bearing the roster of the 208,943 black soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union in the Civil War. Although they composed a tenth of the Grand Army of the Republic, they weren't invited to the two day victory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue at the end of the war for fear of offending the southern sensibilities of Washington. However, they did march in the victory parade through Richmond, offending plenty of southern sensibilities.

One third of all black Union troops died in service.

While this an interesting old building in Chinatown it is not as historically significant as the alley to the right of it, which leads back a block and then turns to the right to end at the back of Ford's Theater. When John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's, he ran out the back, jumped on his horse, and went riding like hell out this alley, turning right past the front of this building and galloped off to hide out in the woods in Maryland. The poor dope who was holding his horse was thrown in prison for a few years, even though he was not part of Booth's conspiracy and was clueless about the events in the theater until too late.

Udvar Hazy Center

The Udvar-Hazy Center opened last December near Dulles International Airport as a new part of the National Air & Space Museum. You can never have enough airplane museums. That's what I say. My old flying buddy Bruce quite agrees. We were both Weapon System Officers/Navigators in the Air Force, flying F-4E Phantoms in the Philippines. Now we are old farts boring everyone with airplane stories, just like the old Vietnam farts did to us and the WWII farts before them. We are carrying on the old fart tradition.

The museum is free in theory, but you have to pay twelve bucks to park. It's not like you can walk to it from anywhere because it's way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. That's probably why it wasn't mobbed with crowds while we were there.

We took Bruce's daughter, Nicole, and her pal, Alyssa. They're in the fifth grade. I was surprised that they would be interested but then girls have always like to hang out with Bruce and I. We're cool guys. It's been like a curse sometimes.

Alyssa and Nicole, ready to see the old airplanes with the old farts.

The girls race ahead to the Udvar-Hazy Center.

The faux control tower on top of the museum, which lies underneath the departure pattern for Dulles. The airliners flying overhead are a nice touch.

Pitts Special S-1C "Little Stinker"

It's an aerobatic plane hung upside down in the front hall.

Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

The Lockheed Skunk Works built the Blackbird to cruise at Mach 3.2 above 60,000 feet so as to be untouchable when flying reconnaissance missions over hostile nations like the Soviet Union and Cuba. It was originally called the RS-71 but when President Lyndon Johnson publicly announced it he transposed the letters and called it the SR-71. So the Air Force changed its designation and the thousands of technical manuals and other support materials so that the whole world would not know that our president was a bonehead.

Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

Bruce and I couldn't figure out why this Blackbird was flying for the Logistics Command. This particular aircraft was based in Kadena and doubtless had a lot of flying time over China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union.

Langley Aerodrome A

This is the brainchild of Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, which everyone was sure would be the first manned aircraft to fly.

Backed by the federal government, Langley scaled up the design of a model aircraft that he had flown successfully in earlier tests. Unfortunately, that amplified design flaws of the Aerodrome, which was overengineered and underpowered. When launched from a houseboat in the Potomac a few weeks before the Wright Brothers first flight, it flew like a handful of mud. A bitter Langley blamed it on a bad catapult.

Eleven years later, Glenn Curtiss rebuilt it and was able to get it off the ground for short flights. That inspired the Smithsonian to put it on display in 1918 and bill it as the first aircraft "capable of sustained free flight."

That pissed off Orville Wright something fierce, who felt the Smithsonian was trying to claim the first manned flight for itself falsely. When he rebuilt the original Wright Flyer in the 1920s, he would be damned if he would give it to the Smithsonian. Instead, he lent it in 1928 to the Science Museum in London.

He did not relent until the Smithsonian retracted its false boast in 1942. The Wright Flyer returned to America in 1948 to be displayed in the Smithsonian as the true first manned aircraft.

Nieuport 28C-1

The French replaced these Nieuports with the superior Spads in WWI but fobbed them off on the Americans who had no home-grown fighters at the time. The Nieuport had an unfortunate habit of breaking its wings off in a dive, which the French would rather have the Americans deal with than themselves.

The Nieuport's engine was lubricated with castor oil, two gallons of it per hour, which was pumped to the engine which sprayed it out in a mist. The pilots wore goggles to keep the oil out of their eyes and a scarf to wipe the goggles off. Unfortunately, that did not keep the oil out of their mouths.

Castor oil is a laxative, the ingestion of which could suddenly and unexpectedly turn a fighter mission into a bomber mission. The Nieuport pilots took to drinking a preflight concoction of milk and brandy to firm up their bowels for air combat.

This particular Nieuport is a mongrel, patched together from five Nieuports of postwar vintage. It's painted in the colors of the 94th Aero Squadron, the "Hat In The Ring" squadron.

Curtiss P-40E Warhawk

This particular aircraft, despite its fearsome visage, never fought. It was delivered to the Canadian air force and later was owned by a troop of Boy Scouts. It's hanging in the Smithsonian because the P-40s which actually fought in WWII usually didn't survive.