On This Day: August 18

On This Day, for August 18, by Britannica.

I’m Kurt Heintz. Today we’re looking at:

• The man behind one of the most destructive and effective military forces in history
• And the death of a revolutionary you may have missed in modern textbooks

Our first story:

Genghis Khan—a warrior and ruler of genius who, starting from obscure and insignificant beginnings, brought all the nomadic tribes of Mongolia into a rigidly disciplined military state—died on this day in 1227.

Various dates are given for the birth of Temüjin, as Genghis Khan was named by his father, Yesügei, a member of the royal Borjigin clan of the Mongols. The chronology of his early life is uncertain. He may have been born in 1155, in 1162 (the date favoured today in Mongolia), or in 1167. According to legend, his first ancestor was a gray wolf, born with a destiny from heaven on high.

Yet his early years were anything but promising. When he was nine, his father was poisoned by a band of Tatars, another nomadic people, in continuance of an old feud. The remainder of Temüjin’s clan, led by the rival Taychiut family, abandoned Temüjin’s widowed mother and her children, considering them too weak to exercise leadership and seizing the opportunity to usurp power. Despite this, Temüjin took advantage of the prestige granted to him as a member of the royal clan, and he made powerful and important allies. He became close with the most powerful Mongol prince at the time, Toghril, who later provided Temüjin with an army with which to reunite his people. Over the coming years, Temüjin would prove his superior leadership and tactical prowess, and build his reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty.

Unlike his ancestors before him, Temujin smartly employed allies rather than family members in matters of war. By 1205 he had vanquished all rival tribes, such as the Tartars, as well as those he used to call his friends. He intended to leave alive none of the old rival aristocrats, who might prove a focus of resistance. He also sought to provide himself with a fighting force. Finally, he wanted to crush the sense of clan loyalties that favoured fragmentation and to unite all the nomads in personal obedience to his own family.

In 1206 a great assembly was held by the River Onon, and Temüjin was proclaimed Genghis Khan or Universal Ruler. Mongolia itself took on a new shape as a result. The petty tribal quarrels and raids were a thing of the past. A unified Mongol nation came into existence as the creation of Genghis Khan. Mongol ambitions looked beyond the steppe where they originally lived. Genghis Khan was ready to start on his great adventure of world conquest. The new nation was organized, above all, for war.

Organization, discipline, mobility, and ruthlessness of purpose were the fundamental factors in Genghis Khan’s military success. Massacres of defeated populations, with the resultant terror, were weapons he regularly used. His practice of summoning cities to surrender and of organizing the methodical slaughter of those who did not submit has been described as psychological warfare—but, although it was undoubtedly a policy to sap resistance by fostering terror, massacre was used for its own sake. Mongol practice was to send agents to demoralize and divide the army and population of an enemy city, mixing threats with promises. The Mongols’ reputation for frightfulness often paralyzed their captives, who allowed themselves to be killed when resistance or flight was still possible. Indeed, the Mongols were terrifying warriors—and their tactics are not as easily forgotten as those of their western counterparts.

The achievements of Genghis Khan were grandiose and disastrous all at once. He united all the nomadic tribes of his land, and with numerically inferior armies he defeated great empires, yet he did not exhaust his people. He fought tirelessly and without pause. He died on this day in 1227 after being thrown from a horse in the midst of battle against the Xi Xia kingdom. One can truly say he died as he lived: fighting.

At the time of his death, Genghis Khan had conquered the landmass extending from Beijing to the Caspian Sea, and his generals had raided Persia and Russia. His successors would extend their power over the whole of China, Persia, and most of Russia. They did what he did not achieve and perhaps never really intended—that is, to weld their conquests into a tightly organized empire. His last ruling descendant wasn’t deposed until 1920. The destruction brought about by Genghis Khan survives in popular memory, but, far more significant, these conquests were but the first stage of the Mongol empire, the greatest continental empire of medieval and modern times. And despite the many unwelcome changes of fortune the Mongol nation has endured through all that history—feudal disintegration, incipient retribalization, colonial occupation—it has survived to the present day.

Here are Fast Facts for August 18. I’m Meg Matthias.

On this day in 1952, Patrick Swayze, the American actor and dancer who was perhaps best known for his performances in Dirty Dancing and Ghost, was born in Houston, Texas.

Roberto Clemente, one of the first Latin American baseball stars in the United States, a great man and a humanitarian, was born in Puerto Rico on this day in 1934.

American actor and director, and founder of the Sundance Institute and Film Festival, Robert Redford, was born on this day in 1936 in Los Angeles, California. He was known for the diversity of his on-screen characterizations—including his 1969 role as the Sundance Kid, which made him a major movie star—and he became known as well for his commitment to environmental and political causes,

Speaking of Sundance… According to lore, more than 200 outlaws from regional gangs gathered at Brown's Hole in the American West, and there on this day in 1896 Butch Cassidy proposed to organize a Train Robbers' Syndicate. It became known as the Wild Bunch and included the Sundance Kid.

On this day in 1587, Virginia Dare was born on Roanoke Island—the site of the first attempted English settlement in North America. She was the first child born to English parents in the New World. (For a bit more information on the isle of Roanoke, check out our August 17th episode.)

American basketball player Larry Bird—who led the Boston Celtics to three NBA championships (1981, 1984, and 1986) and is considered one of the greatest pure shooters of all time—announced his retirement on this day in 1992.

The city of Reykjavík was designated the administrative capital of Iceland on this day in 1786.

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair—the legendary rock festival near Bethel, New York, that attracted some 400,000 fans—ended on this day in 1969.

The controversial novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which is presented from the perspective of its protagonist, Humbert Humbert, a pedophile who lusts after his own stepdaughter, was published in the U.S. on this day in 1958. In 1962 Stanley Kubrick released a film adaptation, which garnered Nabokov an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay.

Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian revolutionary prominent in the independence movement against the British rule of India, who additionally led an Indian national force from abroad against the Western powers during World War II, died on this day in 1945.

Bose was the son of a wealthy and prominent Bengali lawyer. He studied at Presidency College in Kolkata, from which he was expelled in 1916 for nationalist activities, and then at the Scottish Churches College, where he graduated in 1919. Afterward he was sent by his parents to the University of Cambridge in England to prepare for the Indian Civil Service. In 1920 he passed the civil service examination, but in April 1921, after hearing of the nationalist turmoil in India, he resigned his candidacy and hurried back to India.

Bose joined the Noncooperation movement started by Mohandas K. Gandhi, who had made the Indian National Congress into a powerful nonviolent organization. Bose became a youth educator, journalist, and commandant of the Bengal Congress. His organization efforts against the British government led to his imprisonment in December 1921. He was appointed chief executive officer of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation in 1924 but was soon after deported to Burma under suspicion of connections with secret revolutionary movements. Released in 1927, he returned to India, where he was elected president of the Bengal Congress, and then elected one of the two general secretaries of the Indian National Congress along with Jawaharlal Nehru. Together they represented the more militant, left-wing faction of the party against the more compromising, right-wing Gandhian faction.

Vocal support of Gandhi increased within the Indian National Congress, and, in light of this, Gandhi resumed a more commanding role in the party. Bose became increasingly critical of Gandhi’s more conservative economics as well as his less confrontational approach toward independence. When the civil disobedience movement was started in 1930, Bose was already in detention for his associations with an underground revolutionary group, the Bengal Volunteers. Yet, while sitting in prison, he was elected mayor of Kolkata. Released and then rearrested several times for his suspected role in violent acts, Bose was finally allowed to proceed to Europe after he contracted tuberculosis and was released for ill health. In enforced exile and still ill, he wrote volume 1 of The Indian Struggle, (covering the years 1920 to 1934) detailing the Indian struggle for independence from Britain, and he pleaded India’s cause with European leaders. He returned from Europe in 1936, was again taken into custody, and was released after a year.

In 1938 he was elected president of the Indian National Congress, and he formed a national planning committee, which formulated a policy of broad industrialization. However, this did not harmonize with Gandhian economic thought, which clung to the notion of cottage industries and benefiting from the use of the country’s own resources. He founded the Forward Bloc, hoping to rally radical elements, but was again incarcerated in July 1940. He refused to remain in prison during this critical period of Indian history, and he threatened to fast to death, which frightened the British government into releasing him. On January 26, 1941, though closely watched, he escaped from his Kolkata residence in disguise and, traveling via Kabul and Moscow, eventually reached Germany in April of the same year.
In Nazi Germany, Bose came under the tutelage of a newly created Special Bureau for India, guided by Adam von Trott zu Solz. He and other Indians who had gathered in Berlin made regular broadcasts from the German-sponsored Azad Hind Radio beginning in January 1942, speaking in English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, and Pashto.

A little more than a year after the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia, Bose left Germany, traveling by German and Japanese submarines and by plane, and he arrived in May 1943 in Tokyo. On July 4 he assumed leadership of the Indian Independence Movement in East Asia and proceeded, with Japanese aid and influence, to form a trained army of about 40,000 troops in Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia. On October 21, 1943, Bose proclaimed the establishment of a provisional independent Indian government. Alongside Japanese troups, his Indian National Army advanced to Rangoon, Burma (now called Yangon), and then into India in 1944. In a stubborn battle, the mixed Indian and Japanese forces, lacking air support, were defeated and forced to retreat; for some time, the Indian National Army succeeded in maintaining its identity as a liberation army, based in Burma and then Indochina.

With the defeat of Japan, however, Bose’s fortunes ended. A few days after Japan’s announced surrender in August 1945, Bose, fleeing Southeast Asia, reportedly died in a Japanese hospital in Taiwan as a result of burn injuries from a plane crash. There are many, however, who believe the circumstances of his death to be too suspicious to wholeheartedly believe.

The story of Subhas Chandra Bose pales in the shadow of the nonviolent Gandhi, who many believe epitomizes the story of nonviolent revolution. Bose’s alliance with Nazi Germany and imperial Japan also casts a shadow on his reputation today; saying “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” so to speak, doesn’t necessarily dismiss the connection. However, we can learn much from Bose’s history. It shows us plainly that the road to independence is not glittering, gold, or even paved—it’s a bitter fight that often does not end in legendary glory. But fights for independence and justice will continue despite the means or what little road we have built will fall to dust.

Thanks for listening today. Whether you’re a war historian, a Butch Cassidy buff, or a revolutionary looking to brush up on your history, there’s always more to read and discover at Britannica.com. Today’s program was written by Emily Goldstein. For Britannica, I’m Kurt Heintz. And I’m Meg Matthias.

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