Category: History

bookmark_borderPost-369: Great Grandfather No.2 before draft board in 1917

Posted on by Peter

The is a snapshot of one of my four great-grandfathers in 1917-1918. I wrote it upon my discovery online of their WWI draft registration cards.

The others are:

I transcribe the cards below and provide some comments on how the war period turned out for each man. I think I can re-create, with a degree of reliability, a lot of what they were like and how they would have likely stood on the war. Some things I do not know and will pose them as questions. While I never knew any of them, I did now their children in their old age (my grandparents).

Great-Grandfather 2
A native of Norway but in Iowa from about age 6 in the early 1880s; Farmer. Although over 40 when the US entered the war in April 1917 and thus not subject to the first call up, he was required to register in 1918. This card was submitted when he appeared before the draft board of Winnebago County, Iowa:
Picture

Registration Card

1. Name: Bert B. Sveen
2. Permanent Home Address: RFD No. 3, [i.e., rural area near] Forest City, Winnebago [County], Iowa
3. Age in Years: 42
4. Date of Birth: 1875
– Race: White
– U.S. Citizen[ship]: Citizen by father’s naturalization before registrant’s majority
– Present occupation: Farmer
– Employer’s name: Self
– Nearest relative: Mrs. Dina Sveen (wife) at RFD No. 3, Forest City, Winnebago [County], Iowa

“I affirm that I have verified above answers and that they are true,”
[Signed, Bert B. Sveen]

Registrar’s Report: Description of Registrant

– Height: Medium
– Build: Medium
– Color of Eyes: Blue
– Color of Hair: Light Brown
– Has this person lost arm, leg, hand, eye, or is he obviously physically disqualified (Specify.): No

I certify that my answers are true; that the person registered has read or has read to him his own answers; that I have witnessed his signature or mark; and that all of his answers of which I have knowledge are true, except as follows: [Blank]

[Signed by the Registrar of Winnebago County, Iowa]

Date of Registration: Sept. 12, 1918

Bert B. Sveen (left), circa 1920s

Bert Sveen [1875-1966] was not drafted and did not serve in World War I.

Why was he not drafted? What was going on in his life in the 1910s? What would have been his position on intervention in the 1914-1918 war?

Continue reading “Post-369: Great Grandfather No.2 before draft board in 1917”

bookmark_borderPost-368: Great Grandfather No.1 before draft board in 1917

Posted on by Peter

The is a snapshot of one of my four great-grandfathers in 1917-1918. I wrote it upon my discovery online of their WWI draft registration cards.

The others, in order of father’s father’s father to mother’s mother’s father, are:

I transcribe the cards below and provide some comments on how the war period turned out for each man. I think I can re-create, with a degree of reliability, a lot of what they were like and how they would have likely stood on the war. Some things I do not know and will pose them as questions. While I never knew any of them, I did now their children in their old age (my grandparents).

Great-Grandfather 1
A native of Iowa; Farmer; Danish ancestry dating to the 1880s. this card was submitted when he appeared before the Weld County, Colorado, draft board as mandated by law:
Picture

[Transcription of draft card]

Registration Card
1. Name: Peter Christian J—
2. Home Address: Osgood, Colorado
3. Date of Birth: 1893
4. Citizenship: Natural-Born [U.S. citizen]
5. Where were you born? Miller, Iowa, USA
6. If not a citizen, of what country are you a citizen or subject? [No response; not applicable]
7. Occupation: Farmer
8[a]. By whom employed? Self
8[b]. Where employed? Osgood, Weld Co., Colorado
9. Dependents: Wife
10. Married or single? Married
11. What military service have you had? No
12. Do you claim exemption from draft? No

“I affirm that I have verified above answers and that they are true,”
[Signed,] Peter Christian J—.

Registrar’s Report
1[a]. Tall, Medium, or Short? Medium
1[b]. Slender, Medium, or Stout? Medium
2[a]. Color or Eyes: Grey
2[b]. Color of Hair: Brown
2[c]. Bald? No
3. […]Disabled? No

I certify that my answers are true, that the person registered has read his own answers, that I have witnessed his signature, and that all of his answers of which I have knowledge are true, except as follows: [blank].

[Signed by the registrar for Precint 57, Weld County, Colorado]

Date of Registration: June 5, 1917

Peter C. J— (left), late 1918, with wife Ethel and infant son. (The infant is my grandfather. The infant was a lifelong Iowan, like his father. The infant would be involved in farming from boyhood in the 1920s to the mid 1950s, except for two to three years in the Army Air Corps, 1943 to 1945.)

Peter C. J— [1893-1979] was not drafted and did not serve in World War I.

Why was Peter C. not drafted? What was going in his life in the 1910s? What was his (likely) position on the 1914-1918 war? I think I can offer insights into these things as follows:

Continue reading “Post-368: Great Grandfather No.1 before draft board in 1917”

bookmark_borderPost-367: Portraits of four great-grandfathers as young men, in 1917-18, in front of U.S. draft boards

Posted on by Peter
It is still November 2018 as I write, the centenary month of the end of World War I.

In 2014, I wrote a brief post saying that one of my great-grandfather’s had a “piece” of that war; in fact, all of them had at least some piece of the era, as young men in the 1910s. Specifically and concretely, each of my four great-grandfathers had to register for the draft (conscription) in 1917-1918.

I have located all four their draft registration cards and will post the originals and transcribe them in four posts to follow (1, 2, 3, 4), followed by comments/thoughts on each of their individual cases and circumstances in 1917, and some informed conjecture on what they may have thought of the war.

In May 1917, the USA was on the way to raising a multi-million-man army which was to reach a size of 4.35 million when all was said and done, up from a meager peacetime strength of one-hundred-some thousand (1916).

In another sign of lukewarm enthusiasm for the war, only 75,000 U.S. men had volunteered in the month after Congress voted to approve President Wilson’s declaration of war (April 6, 1917), and so in May the government began to plan for a then-unprecedented national registration system for all young-adult men, and a tiered system of eligibility for conscription (based on “exemptions”). All young men had to appear in person before draft boards of their city or county on appointed days to register, under threat of prison for no-shows:

Continue reading “Post-367: Portraits of four great-grandfathers as young men, in 1917-18, in front of U.S. draft boards”

bookmark_borderPost-366: The Book-as-Time-Capsule: My Great Uncle’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930 edition)

Posted on by Peter

I wrote in 2017 about the film All Quiet on the Western Front [1930], which I rewatched recently in honor of the centenary of the end of the 1914-1918 war.

(See also Post-365: Scenes from the End of the Great War, Plus 100 Years.)

Picture
Scene from All Quiet on the Western Front, WWI film

The 1930 film was based on a 1929 novel, Im Westen Nichts Neues ([lit. “In the West, Nothing New [to Report]”) by a German veteran of the 1914-1918 war. The book was a major hit of its time.

A June 1930 printing, English translation (“All Quiet on the Western Front”) was among my grandfather’s books, and it is the rediscovery of it that is inspiration for this post.

Aged a not quite ninety years, here is the book as it appears today:

My grandfather died in the late 1990s but his books and other papers and files remained intact until the 2010s (as my aunt continued to reside in the house) at which time I was able to discover many of them, preserved as they were twenty years or so before, some from decades earlier still.

The oldest few books in the house I believe belonged to my grandfather’s grandfather [1857-1917], which I base on years of publication, subject matter, language, and especially the font used (a few of the oldest volumes use that awful font called Fraktur). Some of the books were those my grandfather bought himself. Others somehow ended up, this way or that way, over the decades, at the house (which my grandfather, his wife, daughters, and other relatives lived in from the 1940s through the 1990s), as in those from relatives. This copy of All Quiet on the Western Front is one of those. It originally belonged to George Kosswig, my grandfather’s brother.

Now, I think this is a great discovery not because it is a rare book (which it is not; it would be easy to find for free in any library, and probably without difficulty online for free somewhere in PDF form, in a pinch, if you really want the text). It is rather, I would say, an example of a “time capsule” in book form.

This book-as-time-capsule idea came to me suddenly to me from the inner cover of this copy of All Quiet: Continue reading “Post-366: The Book-as-Time-Capsule: My Great Uncle’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930 edition)”

bookmark_borderPost-365: Scenes from the End of the Great War, Plus 100 Years

Posted on by Peter

I took special interest in the centenary of the ceasefire (armistice) that ended the 1914-1918 war.

I have written on these pages before about centenary events around the tragic 1914-1918 war, including twice about Nov. 11th:

The Best “November 11th, 1918” Visual for Commemoration

Picture
German soldier (left) lights British soldier’s cigarette, in the aftermath of a September 1918 battle. Location: A field hospital (note the wound dressing on the British soldier’s neck).

Scenes like this (right on desktop version) were repeated across the Western Front on November 11th, 1918, according to reports of those who were there. It seems surreal that the opposing armies immediately put down their guns and began intermingling and celebrating the end of the fratricide at last, in the hours after the ceasefire.

I propose that the above photo is the best possible commemoration of the Armistice, better than any thousand-word write-up anyone could come up with; some pictures, as they say, are worth more. (Though the photograph is not from Armistice Day itself [Nov. 11th] itself, it may as well be; it closely parallels the experience of hundreds of thousands that day.)

The picture symbolizes, at one level, the triumph of humanity and fraternal feeling through/over even the worst of politicians’ blunders. I think it is symbolic, too, of the kind of the European unity and friendship that “could have been” (i.e., there was never any need at all for the 1914-1918 war.)  At once both positive and tragic.

I tried to do my own small commemorations marking the exact 100th ‘hourly’ anniversaries of both the signing of the armistice and its much-more-famous implementation later that day (11 AM Paris time), Continue reading “Post-365: Scenes from the End of the Great War, Plus 100 Years”

bookmark_borderPost-364: On the Isle of Saint Helena

Posted on by Peter
Napoleon, following his second capture in 1815, was sent off to one of Earth’s most remote places, Saint Helena.
He would never again leave the island. After years alone there, with hardly even anyone to talk to, he died.

The image of Napoleon alone on Saint Helena, for years, thousands of miles from the continent of which he was nearly undisputed master for most of the 1800-1815 period, is poetically tragic even if one doesn’t like Napoleon.

Are there any lessons from Napoleon for the rest of us? In the imagery of Saint Helena, there are. I would here cite the traditional folk song  “The Isle of Saint Helena” which describes the man island-bound to Saint Helena and contemplating his life every day as he watches the waves.

“He sees his victories,
and how fleeting they all were!”
 
The point is that things are fleeting. All things. Here is the full song The Isle of Saint Helena (starting at 0:47) and lyrics:

Continue reading “Post-364: On the Isle of Saint Helena”

bookmark_borderPost-363: The Future of Fiji (and the World) as Seen From 1859

Posted on by Peter

(Expanded from a draft from mid-August 2015. I was reading about Fiji at the time before I was to spend twelve hours in that mysterious, tropical island-country as part of one of my returns-to-the-USA in late August 2015. I was coming from Brisbane, Australia, visiting my cousin, Mel. W. The long layover in Fiji was also the cheapest option. From my perspective fortuitous as it would give me a foray into Fiji on the cheap.

 
 

In the weeks before I was to briefly spend time in Fiji in August 2015, I looked around for material. One thing I found to be so amazing as to be worth recording here. It is something published in March 1859, which concludes with a series of futurist predictions about Fiji and the world. Reading these predictions from 1859, I am amazed.

The predictions have (nearly) all come true:

(Final two paragraphs of an anonymous, ten-page book review appearing in The Knickerbocker [March 1859 issue] . The reviewed book is the 1858 Fiji and the Fijians by Thomas Williams and James Calvert (ed. George Stringer Rowe). The Knickerbocker was a New York literary magazine with an 1833-1865 publication run. It was similar in style, and likely a partial antecedent to and/or inspirtation for, The Atlantic [first issue published in 1857]). The entire March 1859 edition of the Knickerbocker is online here.)
 
 
Picture
Fiji Sunset — approximately the view I had. (Updated in Sept. 2019 with website move; I cannot now recall whether I took this picture, but it looks exactly like mine and what my memory tells me.)

First, my own brief experience in Fiji, then an attempt to evaluate the Knickerbocker writer’s predictions with the distance of 159 years of time elapsed since publication. Summary: Very accurate.

 

A Brief Foray into Fiji, Late August 2015

Fiji is not like any place I have been, before or since.

I formally entered the country and have the passport stamp to prove it, which means I am counted as one of the Continue reading “Post-363: The Future of Fiji (and the World) as Seen From 1859”

bookmark_borderPost-357: Young Metternich

Posted on by Peter

Austria’s 2017 general election has come and gone, following Germany’s a month ago. The key issue in both elections was the 2015-2016 Migrant Crisis, disgruntlement over which appears to have energized large numbers and shifted the political discourse to the right; turnout was high. In Austria’s case, parties of the right will have over two-thirds of the seats in the new legislature, and that is with proportional representation.

The age of the new Austrian Chancellor has been the main coverage of the election I have seen. It is amazing, actually, that he is so young. The German press has called this character a ‘Young Metternich’ ever since he became Foreign Minister, at age 27, a few years ago. He is now 31.

Picture 

 

Sebastian Kurz (b. 1986), is Austria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs [Dec. 2013 to Present], and Head of the Austrian People’s Party (OVP) from mid 2017. His party will control 34% of seats in the legislature as the largest party, and Kurz will soon be Chancellor, the youngest head of government in the world.

Picture 

Sebastian Kurz
 

The original Metternich (1773-1859) is characterized as a political genius who dominated Austrian politics from the 1810s to the 1840s, starting, as Kurz has, as Foreign Minister.

Metternich’s great achievement is the preservation of Austrian power. At that time, Austria was a true power, a major power, but could have disappeared after the Napoleonic disruption. Metternich gave the Austrian Empire another century of life, for better of worse. The Austria of that era was a multi-national, pan-central-European empire with a German ruling minority and a long-established royal family (the Hapsburgs). It era represented a Catholic, multi-ethnic, ‘multicultural’ alternative model to north-German Protestant ‘Prussianism’ based in Berlin.

 
 

(Having long since lost the struggle against Berlin, Austrian/Hapsburg power ended forever in 1918, after the loss of legitimacy caused by its poor performance in the war and an embarrassing-and-obvious dependence on Germany from summer 1914 onward (actually earlier). With Vienna discredited and totally unable to suppress ethnic secession movements, the pan-central-European ‘Austria’ fell apart and this new German-Austria, as we know it today, was born.)

 
 
 
 

The ‘Young Metternich’ appellation for Kurz doesn’t make much sense, to me. The Austria of today is, unlike its imperial predecessor namesake, a very small state (7.5 million citizens in a Europe of 750 million). Also critically for this comparison, modern Austria is, by tradition, not a player in international politics. It is not now and never has been a NATO member, and, for a Western country, was quite a late entrant into the EU (1995, about forty years late).

 
 

Kurz and Metternich might be compared in broader terms. Metternich is credited not just with preserving/restoring Austrian power after the Napoleonic crisis, but with being a/the central figure in doing the same for the whole of Europe’s quasi-aristocratic order which was seriously threatened, discredited, and injured during Napoleonic period. A lot of ‘centrists’ around today’s Europe dream of a figure to play this role of defending the European post-1945 order of social-democractic liberal democracy in a time it is (widely believed to be) “under threat.

 
 

Skeptics would say that Kurz is not such a figure, even discounting the small size and disengagement of Austria, as he led his party to a 7.5% popular vote gain using, many have said, a watered-down version of the rhetoric of the insurgent Austrian Freedom Party (FPO). The latter is a party of the populist-nationalist right, whose campaign was based on slogans like “Stop the Islamization of Austria.”

 
Picture 

“A new style. It’s time.”
 
Picture 

 
Who will be Kurz’s coalition partner? 

He can form a ‘coalition of the Center’ with the Social Democrats (SPO), or he can rule in a right-wing coalition with the FPO. If the latter coalition governs, Austria will seem to have entered the ‘Viktor Orban’ Wing of European politics.

bookmark_borderPost-353: Herr Genscher Speaks (1989): Viewed from the Present

Posted on by Peter
I am studying the German language again after a long hiatus. The last time I formally studied in a classroom setting was 2008. It surprises me how much I can still do in that language.

In my class are two good-humored Greeks I think their mid 20s. One spent a few years in the U.S. as a boy.

This week and next, the teacher’s topic for us is the final year or so of the German Democratic Republic (fall 1989 to fall 1990). Their system, in retrospect, was showing serious signs of strain by August and September 1989; the anti-communist silent protests centered on the Lutheran churches had been ongoing for years Leipzig and Dresden but began to mushroom in October 1989.

The marchers’ two principal chants were “Wir sind Das Volk” [‘We are the People,’ an odd slogan in some ways; some today, long after the days of communist rhetoric, may not realize that their slogan deliberately mocked communist rhetoric about “the People”] and “Gorbi! Gorbi!” Gorbi” [Gorbachev, seen as a savior]); the Berlin Wall was opened by the authorities on November 9th, 1989; the GDR formally continued to exist for another eleven months and held an election which featured a young Angela Merkel as a candidate for the first time; she attached herself quickly to the ruling CDU machine, =inherited this very machine later on, and has been Chancellor 2005 to present at the head of this machine — likely now through 2021, after the latest German election).

What was the “key point” in the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic? The state security services choosing not to suppress October demonstrations was clearly vital. October may already be too late a date, though.

Today the German teacher spent some time on the so-called Genscher Rede [speech] of September 30, 1989 at the West German Embassy in Prague. That is 28 years ago today. At that time, hundreds and then thousands of East Germans had camped out on the West German embassy grounds in Prague hoping for permission to emigrate to the West. The fact that the Czech-Communist security services allowed them to simply jump the embassy fences is another sign in retrospect that the end was near.

We watched the speech. Genscher’s “speech” was just a few seconds long and delivered in a mood reminiscent of a team winning the World Cup.

Picture

Genscher gave the speech on the embassy balcony overlooking thousands — some youths (above left) seem to have climbed onto the window sills or balcony to hear it.

This is how a Wiki writer describes Genscher’s speech:

“He announced that he had reached an agreement with the Communist Czechoslovak government that the refugees could leave: “We have come to you to tell you that today, your departure …” (German: “Wir sind zu Ihnen gekommen, um Ihnen mitzuteilen, dass heute Ihre Ausreise …”). After these words, the speech was drowned in cheers.”

Hans-Dietrich Genscher (1927-2016) was actually himself an ‘East German,’ having been born, raised, and lived there until 1952, when he emigrated to West Germany at age 25; in other words, he was an example of the East German state’s problem of losing good people to the much-more-attractive U.S.-backed West German machine. They lost millions this way in the early years. Then, on Sept. 30, 1989, Genscher brought in thousands more. This was a blow the East German state could not handle.

Genscher rose to West German Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor (1982-1992) under Helmut Kohl and was previously West German Interior Minister (1969-1974) under SPD Chancellor Willy Brandt). He rose in politics within the Free Democratic Party (FDP), a freemarket-liberal party. In the old days when West Germany’s CDU was still widely considered primarily a “Catholic Party” by Germans, the FDP was a safe place for Protestants on the right. (Almost all pre-communist ‘East Germans’ were, at least nominally.) Genscher was a high government minister under both left- and right-wing governments.

The Genscher speech viewed from almost thirty years later:

There was an federal (Bundestag) election in Germany last weekend. I think two things can be said about the Genscher Speech legacy given the results of the election.

(1) The ruling apparatus and its system may not have been as unpopular as this kind of imagery suggests. The “necoCommunist” party called Linke (which is descended directly from the East German ruling party) got 18% of the eastern vote, and generally does even better than that at the regional level (generally 20-25%). See, e.g., Post-246: Here Comes Bodo Ramelow.

(2) Refugee Imagery and its Political Discontents. I know that today’s Germans have two political/historical memories of Germans-as-refugees: This case is one, this imagery of thousands crowding the embassy grounds in Prague and elsewhere in 1989; the other is earlier but even more important, I think, as it is a kind of ‘foundation myth’ of the Federal Republic [West German state] itself: Following WWII, tens of millions across Europe were homeless and many were expelled or could not return for some reason, i.e. refugees. This included something like 12 million  Germans from points east of the GDR’s eastern border. These expellees formed a large part of the Federal Republic’s population.

These two memories may have been what impelled Chancellor Merkel to suddenly and without consultation announce an open-border policy for refugees in late August 2015, which soon saw 1.5 million Islamic refugees enter Germany. German birth rates are low and the refugees were mainly young and male: One estimate has it that this 2015-2016 refugee wave alone constitutes 10% of the military-age population of Germany; in one fell swoop. This decision seems to have caused a significant exodus of support from Merkel’s party, to the FDP and to a brand-new party to the right of the CDU. For the first time, the Bundestag has a party that threatens the CDU from the right. Their platform is dominated by: “Stop Merkel’s Refugee Policy.”

The new party, the AfD, which was co-led by a man (Alexander Gauland) who left the CDU after forty years over the refugee crisis, did very well in the eastern states, even coming in as the largest party in some districts and a strong second in most of the rest. (The ruling CDU got 27.5% of the vote in the east to the AfD’s 22%.)

bookmark_borderPost-252: Western Civilization’s Long-Forgotten Catastrophe (circa 1200 BC)

Posted on by Peter
We tend to think of “history” and “progress” as synonyms. But….A few weeks ago, I borrowed a book from my friend Jared, on his recommendation. The title is The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine. Chapter Two deals with the period 1100-800 BC. Therein I find this:

[T]he archaeology paints a depressing picture of the Greek world in the centuries after the fall of the Mycenaean palaces [circa 1200 BC]. Overall, the number of inhabited places in mainland Greece fell by two-thirds in the twelfth, and by another two-thirds in the eleventh century. This was the low point, and recovery then began: settlement numbers doubled in the tenth century, and doubled again in the ninth-eighth centuries.

Of course, settlement numbers on their own mean nothing: the crucial variable is settlement size. […] [I]n fact, the scale of settlements in the early Iron Age [i.e., circa 1100-800 BC] is generally smaller than that in the periods on either side. […] Not only did the number of settlements fall, but the places themselves were less complex than what had gone before.
Picture

This points to a civilizational catastrophe for early Western Civilization, the scale of which is enormous, of “Old Testament” proportions (and it is contemporaneous with Old Testament times).

Let me try to present the data in a simpler way:

Number of Inhabited Places in Mainland Greece
(Mid-1200s BC=100 [arbitrary; for easy comparison])
1200 BC: 100
1100 BC: 33
1000 BC: 10
900 BC : 20
700 BC : 40.

During the long decline, the remaining settlements were smaller-scale, so we have to magnify the drop even more in real terms. If the settlements were half as dense at the 1000 BC nadir as before the long decline began, that implies a 95% population drop from 1200 BC to 1000 BC in mainland Greece, a cradle of Western Civilization. Other cultures in the region fared similarly. Political, economic, and cultural collapse. The authors say that literacy came grinding to a halt in these centuries; writing was all but lost; we find no monuments at all from these centuries.

There are always people around warning about impending collapse but few are ever listened to and even fewer are ever right. One such man I know of today who has a substantial following is John Michael Greer. He is one of the most prominent Peak Oil theorists. He writes something called the Archdruid Report. I have read some of his writings. He writes well but I don’t know what to think of his grand thesis, that industrial civilization is slowly coming to an end, with perhaps a population fall-off similar to the one described above in ancient Greece coming to us in this century. This is too radical an idea to easily believe. (I am likewise sure that the same was said by Greek intellectuals in the late Bronze Age, in the 1200s BC, when someone tried to point to signs of coming decline, whatever those may have been.)

The amazing thing is that nobody knows why things fell apart so dramatically starting around 1200 BC. The authors reject an old theory that it was caused by pressure from seaborne raiders. They say that while raiding did increase at this time, it was the effect, not the cause, of the civilizational decline. They start talking about internal social and political problems within the states affected, and soon their explanation bogs down in the muck and leaves the reader unsatisfied. They don’t offer any kind of firm explanation for the “collapse”. It remains a mystery.

“The worst disaster in ancient history”

— Historian Robert Drews on the Mediterranean world decline beginning ca. 1200 BC

bookmark_borderPost-20: Ten U.S. Bombers

Posted on by Peter
The April 10th issue of the Korea Herald  has a curious listing on its “Today in History” section:

World
1945: German Me 262 jet fighters shoots  [sic] down 10 U.S. bombers near Berlin

Picture

Germany’s Me-262 “Sparrow”
I lived in Berlin for six months. I’ve sometimes wondered what it was like to be there in April of ’45. But my real question is: Why would a detail of the action of WWII, like this, qualify for anyone’s “Today in History”?

Some googling leads me to several possible answers: (1) The Me-262 was the world’s first jet aircraft, (2) losing ten bombers on a single day may have been a very high one-day loss, (3) maybe whoever chose this factoid simply wanted to note that the Germans still had it together enough at such a late date to manage to shoot down ten in one go-’round

On #2: According to this, the U.S. 8th Air Force, which flew bombers against Germany, lost 4,145 bombers in the war.

The 8th flew Mission #1 on 17 August 1942 when 12 B-17s attacked Rouen Marshalling yards and the last mission on 8 May 1945 Mission #986, when 12 B-17s dropped leaflets in Germany.

If the USA lost 4,145 bombers in the time period above-delineated, that comes to 4.2 bombers lost per day. Losing ten on one day (April 10th, ’45) is not particularly dramatic. Again according to this, the highest single-day bomber loss was in 1943, when 60 were lost in one day.