http://www.thelifebeautiful.com A Celebration of Life--Be Happy! Be Successful! Be Healthy! Now and Forever! en-us You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink G.K. Chesterton Be Happy! Be Successful! Be Healthy! from The Life Beautiful! www.http://www.thelifebeautiful.com If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change. But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most, only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous and the perpetual exercise of Gods power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be. Longfellow Be Happy! BE Successful! and Be Healthy! from The Life Bautiful! http://www.thelifebeautiful.com A Sad Day in History THE IDES OF MARCH: March 15, 44 B.C. Gaius Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome, is stabbed to death in the Roman Senate house by 60 conspirators led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus.Caesar, born into the Julii, an ancient but not particularly distinguished Roman aristocratic family, began his political career in 78 B.C. as a prosecutor for the anti-patrician Popular Party. He won influence in the party for his reformist ideas and oratorical skills, and aided Roman imperial efforts by raising a private army to combat the king of Pontus in 74 B.C. He was an ally of Pompey, the recognized head of the Popular Party, and essentially took over this position after Pompey left Rome in 67 B.C. to become commander of Roman forces in the east.In 63 B.C., Caesar was elected pontifex maximus, or "high priest," allegedly by heavy bribes. Two years later, he was made governor of Farther Spain and in 64 B.C. returned to Rome, ambitious for the office of consul. The consulship, essentially the highest office in the Roman Republic, was shared by two politicians on an annual basis. Consuls commanded the army, presided over the Senate and executed its decrees, and represented the state in foreign affairs. Caesar formed a political alliance--the so-called First Triumvirate--with Pompey and Marcus Licinius Crassus, the wealthiest man in Rome, and in 59 B.C. was elected consul. Although generally opposed by the majority of the Roman Senate, Caesar's land reforms won him popularity with many Romans.In 58 B.C., Caesar was given four Roman legions in Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum, and during the next decade demonstrated brilliant military talents as he expanded the Roman Empire and his reputation. Among other achievements, Caesar conquered all of Gaul, made the first Roman inroads into Britain, and won devoted supporters in his legions. However, his successes also aroused Pompey's jealousy, leading to the collapse of their political alliance in 53 B.C.The Roman Senate supported Pompey and asked Caesar to give up his army, which he refused to do. In January 49 B.C., Caesar led his legions across the Rubicon River from Cisalpine Gaul to Italy, thus declaring war against Pompey and his forces. Caesar made early gains in the subsequent civil war, defeating Pompey's army in Italy and Spain, but was later forced into retreat in Greece. In August 48 B.C., with Pompey in pursuit, Caesar paused near Pharsalus, setting up camp at a strategic location. When Pompey's senatorial forces fell upon Caesar's smaller army, they were entirely routed, and Pompey fled to Egypt, where he was assassinated by an officer of the Egyptian king.Caesar was subsequently appointed Roman consul and dictator, but before settling in Rome he traveled around the empire for several years and consolidated his rule. In 45 B.C., he returned to Rome and was made dictator for life. As sole Roman ruler, Caesar launched ambitious programs of reform within the empire. The most lasting of these was his establishment of the Julian calendar, which, with the exception of a slight modification and adjustment in the 16th century, remains in use today. He also planned new imperial expansions in central Europe and to the east. In the midst of these vast designs, he was assassinated on March 15, 44 B.C., by a group of conspirators who believed that his death would lead to the restoration of the Roman Republic. However, the result of the "Ides of March" was to plunge Rome into a fresh round of civil wars, out of which Octavian, Caesar's grand-nephew, would emerge as Augustus, the first Roman emperor, destroying the republic forever. Comment: Ceasur was a creator of change and was opposed! http://www.thelifebeautiful.com "Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is." Maxim Gorky http://www.thelifebeautiful.com It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hard put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction. Fear secrets acids; but love and trust are sweet juices. --Henry Ward Beecher http://www.thelifebeautiful.com/tlb/valentine.html "Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is." Maxim Gorky This Day in History: Japan bombed Singapore http://www.thelifebeautiful.com "A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted." George Santayana This Day in History DRESDEN DEVASTATED: February 13, 1945 On the evening of February 13, 1945, the most controversial episode in the Allied air war against Germany begins as hundreds of British bombers loaded with incendiaries and high-explosive bombs descend on Dresden, a historic city located in eastern Germany. Dresden was neither a war production city nor a major industrial center, and before the massive air raid of February 1945 it had not suffered a major Allied attack. By February 15, the city was a smoldering ruin and an unknown number of civilians--somewhere between 35,000 and 135,000--were dead.By February 1945, the jaws of the Allied vise were closing shut on Nazi Germany. In the west, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's desperate counteroffensive against the Allies in Belgium's Ardennes forest had ended in total failure. In the east, the Red Army had captured East Prussia and reached the Oder River--less than 50 miles from Berlin. The once-proud Luftwaffe was a skeleton of an air fleet, and the Allies ruled the skies over Europe, dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Germany every day.From February 4 to February 11, the "Big Three" Allied leaders--U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin--met at Yalta in the USSR and compromised on their visions of the postwar world. Other than deciding on what German territory would be conquered by which power, little time was given to military considerations in the war against the Third Reich. Churchill and Roosevelt, however, did promise Stalin to continue their bombing campaign against eastern Germany in preparation for the advancing Soviet forces.An important aspect of the Allied air war against Germany involved what is known as "area" or "saturation" bombing. In area bombing, all enemy industry--not just war munitions--is targeted, and civilian portions of cities are obliterated along with troop areas. Before the advent of the atomic bomb, cities were most effectively destroyed through the use of incendiary bombs that caused unnaturally fierce fires in the enemy cities. Such attacks, Allied command reasoned, would ravage the German economy, break the morale of the German people, and force an early surrender.Germany was the first to employ area bombing tactics during its assault on Poland in September 1939. In 1940, during the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe failed to bring Britain to it knees by targeting London and other heavily populated areas with area bombing attacks. Stung but unbowed, the RAF avenged the bombings of London and Coventry in 1942 when it launched the first of many saturation bombing attacks against Germany. In 1944, Adolf Hitler named the world's first long-range offensive missile V-1, after Vergeltung, the German word for "vengeance" and an _expression of his desire to repay Britain for its devastating bombardment of Germany.The Allies never overtly admitted that they were engaged in saturation bombing; specific military targets were announced in relation to every attack. It was but a veneer, however, and few mourned the destruction of German cities that built the weapons and bred the soldiers that by 1945 had killed more than 10 million Allied soldiers and even more civilians. The firebombing of Dresden would prove the exception to this rule.Before World War II, Dresden was called "the Florence of the Elbe" and was regarded as one the world's most beautiful cities for its architecture and museums. Although no German city remained isolated from Hitler's war machine, Dresden's contribution to the war effort was minimal compared with other German cities. In February 1945, refugees fleeing the Russian advance in the east took refuge there. As Hitler had thrown much of his surviving forces into a defense of Berlin in the north, city defenses were minimal, and the Russians would have had little trouble capturing Dresden. It seemed an unlikely target for a major Allied air attack.On the night of February 13, hundreds of RAF bombers descended on Dresden in two waves, dropping their lethal cargo indiscriminately over the city. The city's air defenses were so weak that only six Lancaster bombers were shot down. By the morning, some 800 British bombers had dropped 1,478 tons of high-explosive bombs and 1,182 tons of incendiaries on Dresden, creating a great firestorm that destroyed most of the city and killed numerous civilians. Later that day, as survivors made their way out of the smoldering city, over 300 U.S. bombers began bombing Dresden's railways, bridges, and transportation facilities, killing thousands more. On February 15, another 200 U.S. bombers continued their assault on the city's infrastructure. All told, the bombers of the U.S. Eighth Air Force dropped 954 tons of high-explosive bombs and 294 tons of incendiaries on Dresden. Later, the Eighth Air Force would drop 2,800 more tons of bombs on Dresden in three other attacks before the war's end.The Allies claimed that by bombing Dresden, they were disrupting important lines of communication that would have hindered the Soviet offensive. This may be true, but there is no disputing that the British incendiary attack on the night of February 13-14 was conducted also, if not primarily, for the purpose of terrorizing the German population and forcing an early surrender. It should be noted that Germany, unlike Japan later in the year, did not surrender until nearly the last possible moment--when its capital had fallen and its Fuhrer was dead.Because there were an unknown number of refugees in Dresden at the time of the Allied attack, it is impossible to know exactly how many civilians perished. After the war, investigators from various countries, and with varying political motives, calculated the number of civilians killed to be as little as 8,000 to more than 200,000. Estimates today range from 35,000 to 135,000. Looking at photographs of Dresden after the attack, in which the few buildings still standing are completely gutted, it seems improbable that only 35,000 of the million or so people in Dresden that night were killed. Cellars and other shelters would have been meager protection against a firestorm that blew poisonous air heated to hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit across the city at hurricane-like speeds.At the end of the war, Dresden was so badly damaged that the city was basically leveled. A handful of historic buildings--the Zwinger Palace, the Dresden State Opera House, and several fine churches--were carefully reconstructed out of the rubble, but the rest of the city was rebuilt with plain modern buildings. American author Kurt Vonnegut, who was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the Allied attack and tackled the controversial event in his book Slaughterhouse-Five, said of postwar Dresden, "It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground" For comments http://www.thelifebeautiful.com/tlb/comments.html "The most perfect society is that whose purpose is the universal and supreme happiness." Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz http://www.thelifebeautiful.com/tlb/valentine.html "To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour." William Blake http://www.thelifebeautiful.com Appreciate the blessings bestowed upon you by God which you hardly notice whether they exist! http://www.thelifebeautiful.com/ezine/giftofsanta.html gus@thelifebeautiful.com (Gus) Yoga is one of the greatest gifts from our foreparents http://www.thelifebeautiful.com/ezine/giftofpast.html gus@thelifebeautiful.com (Gus) An Immortal classic of love and sacrifice by a master story teller http://www.thelifebeautiful.com/ezine/giftofmagi.html gus@thelifebeautiful.com (O. Henry) God has given a self-replenishing gift of time to all in equal measure http://www.thelifebeautiful.com/ezine/giftofgod.html gus@thelifebeautiful.com (Gus)