Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesThursday, August 13
From the desk
Start with 1918: Opha May Johnson walked into Marine Corps Headquarters first in line and became the first woman to enlist in the Marines, five days after the Navy Secretary opened the door. She spent the war managing paperwork for the roughly 300 women who followed her signature. Worth a longer look: Barbed Wire Sunday in 1961, when East German troops rolled wire across Berlin before dawn and split families mid-block by breakfast. And 1898 offers something stranger, a battle staged for show in Manila that killed real men anyway.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1898Featured · This day in history
Spain surrenders Manila after a battle both sides agreed to fake
By August 1898, Manila was surrounded. Filipino revolutionary forces under Emilio Aguinaldo had dug trenches around the city and cut off its water, while Commodore George Dewey's fleet controlled the bay. Fearing vengeance and looting if the city fell to Filipino revolutionaries rather than the Americans, Governor-General Fermin Jáudenes arranged a staged battle with Dewey and Major General Wesley Merritt: a brief bombardment followed by a white flag and a surrender to the Americans alone. On August 13, the choreographed fight went mostly to plan, though Filipino troops who joined the advance thinking it real left six Americans and forty-nine Spaniards dead before the city changed hands.
The staged handover let Washington claim Manila without contesting it against the Filipino army that had actually besieged the city for months, a shortcut that Washington had not fully thought through as it took on its first overseas colony. Within six months, that same arrangement, and the exclusion of Aguinaldo's forces from their own capital, helped ignite the Philippine-American War, which occupied tens of thousands of American troops for years.
Did you know
QWho was sent ashore to negotiate once the white flag went up?
Lieutenant Colonel C. A. Whittier and Lieutenant Brumby rowed in to meet the Spanish Captain-General the moment the white cloth appeared over Intramuros. Their job was to hammer out the formal terms of surrender on the spot, since the choreographed battle had only gotten the two sides to the point of a flag, not a signed capitulation. The two officers represented the American command directly on Spanish-held ground while the surrender terms were still being settled. Their errand turned the theatrical exchange of signals into an actual legal transfer of the city, the paperwork that made the surrender official.
QWhat did Commodore Dewey think of the staged-surrender plan when Spain first proposed it?
He said no. Dewey initially rejected the idea of a choreographed battle outright, and only came around once Major General Wesley Merritt's army troops had arrived and were ready to make a credible show of force on land. Until Merritt's men were in position, Dewey's fleet alone bombarding an empty fortification would have looked less like a face-saving ritual and more like a hollow bluff. The delay meant the plan sat unfinished for weeks after Dewey's May 1 naval victory before both sides finally locked in the details on August 10.
QWhat specific telegram did Washington send once Manila had actually changed hands?
On August 17, four days after the surrender, a telegram to both Dewey and Merritt laid down the policy in blunt terms: no joint occupation with the insurgents, period. It ordered the two commanders to preserve peace and protect persons and property within American-occupied territory and instructed them to use whatever means their judgment required to keep Aguinaldo's forces from sharing the city. That single cable formalized the exclusion that had already been enforced at gunpoint on the ground, turning a battlefield improvisation into official American policy.
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1918military
First in line, a 39-year-old Washington clerk enlists in the Marine Corps
The Marine Corps had never taken a woman into its ranks until Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels approved reserve enlistment for women on August 8, 1918, to free men for combat overseas. Five days later, on August 13, 1918, Opha May Johnson, a 39-year-old civil service clerk born in Kokomo, Indiana, was first in line at Marine Corps Headquarters to sign the papers. She was put to clerical work, managing enlistment records for the women who came in behind her. By year's end, roughly 300 women had followed her into the Reserve.
Marine Corps Headquarters, Washington, D.C.Story page →
The American Throughline
Johnson was the first woman allowed into a Marine Corps that had excluded women since its founding in 1775, and the roughly 300 women who followed her that year became the institution's first female reservists. Her promotion to sergeant weeks later made her the highest-ranking woman in the Marine Corps during her time in service.
Did you know
QHow old was Opha May Johnson compared to the typical Marine recruit of 1918?
Johnson enlisted at 39, a good deal older than the teenage and early-twenties men who filled most Marine Corps ranks during World War I. At 39, she was already an experienced civil servant, not a fresh recruit. Rather than combat training, she went straight into clerical work at Headquarters Marine Corps, managing enlistment paperwork for the women who signed up behind her. Her age and clerical background suited her for the desk work the Corps needed filled, work meant to free younger men for the trenches in France.
1969culture
New York buries three astronauts in paper; Nixon pins on the nation's highest civilian honor
Three weeks after Neil Armstrong's boot print went into the lunar dust, New York City gave Apollo 11 a welcome it had given only a handful of times before, for kings and conquering generals. On August 13, 1969, Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin rode through Manhattan under a blizzard of shredded paper thrown from office windows along the parade route. That night in Los Angeles, President Richard Nixon presented all three with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a state dinner, the government's formal answer to a feat most Americans had only watched on television.
Kennedy had promised a moon landing before the decade's end back in 1961, and the parade and the medal ceremony were the country making good on that promise in public. Nixon's ceremony made the achievement official government business, placing the astronauts on the same civilian honor roll as diplomats and scientists.
Did you know
QHow long were the astronauts kept isolated from the public before this parade?
The Apollo 11 crew spent the weeks after splashdown under strict medical quarantine, a precaution against the remote possibility they had brought back unknown lunar microorganisms. NASA doctors had no way to be certain the moon was biologically inert, so Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin were sealed away from family and press alike before ever appearing at a public event. The August 13 parade was effectively their reintroduction to open-air American life, the first time crowds could see them in person rather than through a quarantine window or a television screen.
QWhat rank does the Presidential Medal of Freedom actually hold among American honors?
The Presidential Medal of Freedom sits at the very top tier of United States civilian recognition, sharing that highest rank with the Congressional Gold Medal, which is awarded by legislative action rather than presidential authority. It is not a military decoration and carries no combat requirement; recipients are chosen for meritorious contributions to national security, world peace, or significant cultural and public achievement. Nixon's decision to award all three astronauts the medal placed them alongside scientists, diplomats, and civic figures rather than military honorees.
QWhat came right after the parade and medal ceremony for the crew?
The two honors on August 13 were the opening leg of a much longer circuit. Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin were sent on a world goodwill tour immediately afterward, carrying the moon landing to foreign capitals still absorbing the same broadcast footage Americans had watched weeks earlier. The world tour that followed took the moon landing to capitals far beyond American borders.
