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Know of any really good ironies in History? Here's my favorite:
In 1861 Wilmar Maclean owned a farm on Bull Run Creek in Northern Virginia. It was clear the Union soldiers would soon have to leave their camps around Washington, DC and march on the new Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia. Confederate General Beauregard was given the task of finding a favorable place where the Confederate Army could stop them. While soldiers could march across fields, their supply wagons would need good roads and good bridges--like the road and bridge near Wilmar Maclean's place. As General Beauregard studied Bull Run Creek by Wilmar Maclean's place he noticed the north bank--where the Union soldiers would arrive hot and tired--was low. The south bank was high and steep and that is where the Confederate soldiers would be waiting for them well-rested in the shade. The angle was such the Confederate soldiers would be covered by the high, steep banks while the Union soldiers would be exposed. He needed a house large enough to serve as Confederate Army Headquarters--like Wilmar Maclean's place.
When the armies started trading hot lead and a cannon ball landed in his kitchen Wilmar Maclean realized a battlefield could be a dangerous place. When he learned why his property had been chosen for that first battle he realized all of these factors had remained the same and more battles could be fought there. So he moved out just before the Second Battle of Bull Run.
Wilmar Maclean went south of Richmond reasoning that if it fell the war would be over. But just in case it wasn't he remembered the part about main roads so he looked to the secondary roads to the west. At last wilmar Maclean found what he was sure was the last place the armies would ever march to and bought the best house in Appomattox, Virginia.
Union General Grant began cutting the South's supply lines till finally he cut the last one. Confederate General Lee could only pull his men out of their trenches and head south to a place where they could be re-supplied. But Union General Sheridan's cavalry got ahead of them and forced them to the secondary roads to the west. Calculating how fast Lee's men could march and how quickly railroad cars could be loaded there could be seven trainloads of food waiting for them at Appomattox. But Union General Custer got to those trains first and delayed till the rest of the Union Army could arrive. There was nothing left for General Lee to do but seek the best house in Appomattox as a suitable place for his surrender to General Grant. That house belonged to Wilmar Maclean. He had indeed found the LAST place the armies would march to.
When Jefferson Davis was the U.S. Secretary of War in the early 1850s, he championed the strategic value of constructing the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, in the state of Delaware.
A decade or so later, Davis was the President of the Confederate States, and General Early's Confederate Army advanced to within a few miles of capturing Washington D.C. at the Battle of Fort Stevens. Union army reinforcement were rushed from Philadelphia to Washington by ship using the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal short-cut, and won the battle, saving the capital from defeat.
Edwin Booth, the famous Shakespearean actor and popular idol, once saved the life of Abraham Lincoln's son who had slipped and fell onto the tracks in the path of an incoming train at the Jersey City, N.J. station. Ironically, a few years later, Edwin Booth's notorious brother assassinated Lincoln at Ford's Theater.
Last edited by slowlane3; 08-19-2014 at 10:56 PM..
This patriotic German Fritz Haber - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia was one of the main inventors of deadly poison gas which he enthusiastically first used in warfare at the 1915 Battle of Ypres. Ironically, he also received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for his life-saving contributions to fertilizer and agriculture. Also ironically, Haber was born Jewish. Zyklon B, a close relative of the gas Haber used, was used a generation later, to kill millions of Jews in the Holocaust, many of them Haber's relatives.
[quote=CAllenDoudna;36157654] Know of any really good ironies in History?quote]
The U.S. provided many weapons to Afghan guerillas, fighting the USSR Soviets in Afghanistan 1979-1989. Later in the 21st century, Afghan terrorists used those SAME weapons to kill American forces.
In 1814, Francis Scott Key wrote "the Star Spangled Banner" inspired by seeing the British invading forces repelled by Americans at Fort McHenry, Baltimore, MD. Much later in 1861, Key's GRANDSON named Francis Key Howard, was imprisoned in Fort McHenry because he had secessionist (Confederate) sympathies.
In the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the victorious nations after W.W.I, forbade Germany from starting another Air Force. So in the mid-1930s after Hitler rose to power, the U.S.S.R. SECRETLY let the Nazi's have air field(s) in the U.S.S.R. to train Luftwaffe pilots, where they could not be detected. Ironically, in 1941 Hitler declared war AGAINST the U.S.S.R. resulting in the death of 20 MILLION Soviet citizens.
King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Czar Nicholas II were all first-cousins (grandchildren of Queen Victoria) and had spent many holiday visits together -- and yet strangely they went to war against each other (W.W.I), killing millions of people.
Maximillian Robespierre - arguably the architect of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror which resulted in 15,000 or so Parisiens losing there head in the guillotine in the 1790's.
He finally met his downfall in one of the last acts of the Reign of Terror - death by guillotine.
The namesake of the Guillotine, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, also ironically, was anti-capital punishment. Further ironies - he was arrested during the Reign of Terror and probably would have also been executed by this device if not for the fall of Robespierre.
King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Czar Nicholas II were all first-cousins (grandchildren of Queen Victoria) and had spent many holiday visits together -- and yet strangely they went to war against each other (W.W.I), killing millions of people.
If the British would have had their current rule of succession when Victoria died, her daughter would have become queen and her daughter's son would follow her as king. He was Kaiser Wilhelm. The map of Europe would be completely different, WW1 may never have happened, and many of the problems in the world today may not exist.
During the Civil War the South rallied around the song "Dixie". It was written by a New York Yankee with abolitionist sympathies who had never been in the South. The Union soldiers marched to war singing "John Brown's Body"--the tune of which was from a Southern Campmeeting song.
Hitler loved animals so much that he became a vegetarian...
But he had no problem systematically murdering millions of people...odd
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Know of any really good ironies in History? Here's my favorite: 
