This Day in Insane History

On June 22nd, 1941, the largest military invasion in human history began when Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. What makes this particularly noteworthy beyond its sheer scale is the staggering arrogance and miscalculation that underpinned it.

Adolf Hitler, convinced of Soviet weakness and his own military genius, deployed over three million German soldiers along an eighteen hundred mile front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He famously predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse like a house of cards, estimating the campaign would take a mere eight to ten weeks. His generals drew up plans for a victory parade in Moscow by August.

The Germans achieved complete tactical surprise despite the Soviets receiving at least eighty four separate warnings about the impending attack from various intelligence sources. Joseph Stalin, in one of history's most catastrophic failures of judgment, dismissed every single warning as British propaganda designed to provoke a conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union. Soviet border guards were so unprepared that some German units literally had to wake sleeping Russian sentries as they crossed into Soviet territory.

The invasion mobilized six hundred thousand vehicles, seven hundred fifty thousand horses, and three thousand aircraft. In the opening hours, the Luftwaffe destroyed nearly two thousand Soviet planes, most of them sitting helplessly on the ground. Within days, entire Soviet armies were encircled and captured.

Yet Hitler's eight week prediction would prove to be one of the most disastrous underestimations in military history. The campaign would drag on for nearly four years, cost Germany the war, and result in approximately twenty seven million Soviet deaths. That June morning marked the beginning of the bloodiest theater of the bloodiest war humanity has ever known.

On June 21st, 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the United States Constitution, which was precisely the number needed to make the document officially operative. This was rather awkward timing for the remaining four states who were still debating the matter, as they suddenly found themselves in the position of having to decide whether to join a functioning government or become independent nations outside the new federal union.

What makes this particularly fascinating is that two of the largest and most economically important states, New York and Virginia, had not yet ratified. Virginia actually came around just four days later on June 25th, though they had no idea New Hampshire had already sealed the deal when they were conducting their heated debates. The delegates in Virginia were arguing passionately about whether to be the critical ninth state, completely unaware that a smaller state to the north had already claimed that honor.

New York didn't ratify until July 26th, and even then only by a razor-thin margin of three votes. The Anti-Federalists in New York had been so confident they could reject the Constitution that they were utterly blindsided when they realized the new government was happening with or without them. Their choice had suddenly transformed from "Should we help create this government?" to "Do we want to be a foreign country surrounded by the United States?"

Rhode Island, being Rhode Island, held out until May 29th, 1790, by which point George Washington had already been president for over a year. They ratified by just two votes, making them the last original colony to join the party they had fought a war to make possible. The Senate had actually threatened them with trade sanctions, treating them essentially as a foreign nation, which finally convinced them that stubbornness has its limits.

On June 20th, 1782, the United States Congress adopted what might be the most passive-aggressive symbol in the history of national heraldry: the Great Seal featuring a bald eagle clutching an olive branch in one talon and arrows in the other. What makes this particularly delicious is that Benjamin Franklin had lobbied hard for the turkey instead, arguing the eagle was a bird of bad moral character and a rank coward. Franklin lost that battle, though one suspects he spent the rest of his days smirking every time he saw the bird that regularly gets chased away from its meals by ordinary crows.

But the real oddity of June 20th comes from 1837, when eighteen-year-old Princess Victoria ascended to the British throne under circumstances so peculiar they read like bad fiction. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain arrived at Kensington Palace at five o'clock in the morning and had to bang on the door repeatedly before anyone answered. They then had to wait while someone woke the young princess, who came down in her nightgown to be informed she was now Queen of the United Kingdom and ruler of the largest empire on Earth. Her first act as monarch was to ask for an hour alone, away from her domineering mother with whom she had shared a bedroom for her entire life. Within weeks she had her mother's furniture removed from the royal apartments and relegated her to distant quarters, proving that even constitutional monarchs can engage in the timeless human tradition of moving out of your parents' house the moment you get the chance.

On June 19th, 1846, the first organized baseball game played under Alexander Cartwright's newly codified rules took place at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, and it was an absolute disaster for one team in particular. The New York Nine demolished the Knickerbockers by a score of 23 to 1 in just four innings.

Now here's where it gets deliciously ironic. Alexander Cartwright himself was a member of the Knickerbockers team, meaning the man who literally wrote the rulebook got thoroughly trounced in the first official game played by those very rules. Imagine spending months carefully crafting the regulations for a new sport, publishing them with great fanfare, and then your team proceeds to get utterly humiliated in the inaugural match.

The game took place on a pleasant summer day, and Cartwright had established rules that are remarkably familiar to modern baseball fans, including the diamond-shaped infield, foul lines, three strikes for an out, and three outs per inning. What he apparently hadn't established was a competitive team capable of implementing these rules effectively.

The Knickerbockers were actually a social club of prosperous New York gentlemen who enjoyed recreational activity, while the New York Nine were simply better players. Adding insult to injury, Cartwright served as the umpire for this game as well, so he had to officiate his own team's catastrophic defeat while enforcing the rules he'd invented.

The losing team reportedly had to pay for dinner and drinks afterward, which was customary for the era. One can only imagine the atmosphere at that particular meal.

On June 18th, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte was having what one might generously call a rather poor day at the office. While the Battle of Waterloo had technically begun the previous day, it was on this Thursday that the French Emperor's fate was definitively sealed in the Belgian mud.

What makes this particular historical moment delightfully bizarre is not merely that Napoleon lost, but the cascade of absurd circumstances that contributed to his defeat. The Emperor, suffering from painful hemorrhoids, could barely sit on his horse and had to delay the start of battle until late morning. This gave the Prussian forces, whom Napoleon thought he had already dispatched, just enough time to arrive as reinforcements for Wellington's beleaguered army.

Then there's the matter of Marshal Grouchy, who was supposed to be preventing those very Prussians from reaching the battlefield. Instead, Grouchy was several miles away, reportedly enjoying a plate of strawberries while debating with his officers whether the cannon fire he could clearly hear in the distance was something he should investigate. By the time he decided that yes, perhaps marching toward the sound of tens of thousands of men killing each other might be relevant to his duties, it was far too late.

The French Imperial Guard, which had never been defeated in battle, made their final assault up a muddy slope only to be met with what Wellington described as the most perfect volley his troops ever fired. The Guard broke and ran, and with them went Napoleon's empire. Within a week, the man who had conquered most of Europe was abdicated for the second time, ultimately ending up on a rock in the South Atlantic where the most dangerous thing he could conquer was boredom.

On June 17th, 1579, Francis Drake sailed his ship the Golden Hinde into what is now Drake's Bay, just north of San Francisco, and did something that must have absolutely baffled the indigenous Coast Miwok people who lived there. He claimed the entire territory for England and named it Nova Albion, which is Latin for New England, though that name would later get recycled for a completely different part of North America.

Now here's where it gets wonderfully strange. The Miwok, upon encountering these peculiar pale visitors who had arrived in an enormous wooden vessel, apparently believed Drake and his men were returned spirits of the dead. The English, being English, decided the best response to this case of mistaken identity was to hold a formal annexation ceremony complete with a brass plate nailed to a post. Drake's chaplain Francis Fletcher recorded that the native people placed feathered crowns on the explorers' heads and seemed to be offering them sovereignty over the land, which Drake interpreted as the locals voluntarily surrendering their territory to Queen Elizabeth. The chances that both groups understood what was actually happening in remotely the same way are essentially zero.

The truly peculiar part is that Drake was actually on the run. He had just spent months pillaging Spanish ships and ports along the Pacific coast of South America, his vessel was loaded with an absolutely obscene amount of stolen treasure, and he needed to careen his ship to repair it before attempting the journey home. So this grand imperial claim was really just an elaborate rest stop during what was essentially a very successful piracy expedition. The Spanish were so furious about his raids that returning the way he came was out of the question, which is why Drake eventually became only the second captain to circumnavigate the globe.

On June 16th, 1883, the good people of New York City witnessed something they'd never seen before: the opening of their very first baseball game under electric lights. Now, this wasn't at some grand stadium or professional field. This technological marvel took place at a modest venue called League Park in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Wait, that's not right. Let me back up.

Actually, the real story for June 16th involves something far stranger than baseball. On this day in 1903, the Ford Motor Company was officially incorporated, though Henry Ford had been tinkering with his automotive obsession for years prior. But what made this particular incorporation genuinely odd was the cast of characters involved. Among the original investors was a coal dealer named Alexander Malcomson, who put up the serious money while Ford contributed little more than his patents and boundless confidence. The relationship would sour spectacularly within a few years, with Ford maneuvering Malcomson out of the company through a series of Byzantine corporate gymnastics that would make a Wall Street lawyer proud.

The irony is delicious: Malcomson believed he was the senior partner, the money man who would keep the impractical inventor Ford in check. Instead, Ford proved to be as ruthless a businessman as he was a visionary mechanic. Within three years, Malcomson found himself completely frozen out of what would become one of the most valuable companies in American history, all because he'd underestimated the quiet farm boy from Michigan. The coal dealer returned to selling coal, considerably richer from the buyout but forever haunted by what might have been had he managed to hold onto those shares.

On June 15th, 1752, Benjamin Franklin did not actually fly a kite in a thunderstorm, despite what every elementary school textbook has led you to believe. That particular act of atmospheric insanity likely occurred a month earlier. But what did happen on this date was almost equally absurd: Franklin wrote a letter describing his already-completed experiments to the Royal Society, and the scientific establishment in London was still scratching their powdered wigs trying to figure out if this colonial upstart was a genius or a madman.

What makes this deliciously ironic is that while Franklin was penning his correspondence about electricity and lightning rods in Philadelphia, French scientists had already beaten him to the punch by performing his exact experiment in May, using his published instructions. A fellow named Thomas-François Dalibard erected a forty-foot iron rod in Marly-la-Ville and successfully extracted electrical sparks from storm clouds on May 10th, proving Franklin's theory before Franklin himself had fully documented his own results.

The real kicker? King Louis XV was so impressed that he sent his personal congratulations to Franklin, which meant the American got credit for an experiment the French performed first, based on theories Franklin had published, but which he may have already secretly tested himself weeks before anyone else, though he was too busy to mention it promptly. The whole affair resembled a scientific game of telephone played across the Atlantic with lightning bolts.

Franklin's casual approach to potentially lethal experimentation and his even more casual approach to telling people about it encapsulates the rather loosey-goosey nature of 18th-century science, where getting yourself killed in the name of natural philosophy was considered less important than making sure you wrote an entertaining letter about it afterward.

On June 14th, 1777, the Continental Congress made a decision that would eventually give American schoolchildren something to pledge allegiance to and seamstresses across the nation steady work for centuries: they adopted the Stars and Stripes as the official flag of the United States. But here's where history gets delightfully murky and wonderfully strange.

The resolution itself was maddeningly vague, stating only that the flag should have thirteen alternating red and white stripes and thirteen white stars on a blue field, representing a new constellation. What they failed to specify was rather important: How big should it be? What arrangement should the stars take? Should the stripes be horizontal or vertical? Who exactly designed this thing anyway?

This vagueness led to a glorious period of flag-making anarchy where American flags looked wildly different depending on who stitched them up. Some featured stars in circles, others in rows, some in random scattered patterns that suggested the seamstress had perhaps enjoyed too much rum while working. The blue field varied from navy to something closer to robin's egg. Proportions were entirely up to individual interpretation.

The Betsy Ross story, charming though it is, didn't surface until her grandson made the claim nearly a century later, in 1870, with no contemporary evidence to support it. The real designer remains lost to history, which is rather fitting for a nation that would go on to argue passionately about everything else.

It took until 1912, a full one hundred thirty-five years later, for President Taft to finally standardize the flag's proportions and star arrangement, presumably because someone in the government finally noticed that no two American flags looked quite alike.

On June 13th, 1983, something extraordinary happened in the cold vacuum of space that nobody had planned for and that would have caused absolute pandemonium had it occurred just a few minutes later. The Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which had already made history as the first human-made object to travel through the asteroid belt and visit Jupiter, crossed the orbit of Neptune and became the most distant human-made object from Earth.

Now, you might be thinking that doesn't sound particularly weird, but here's where it gets deliciously strange. Neptune at that moment was actually closer to the Sun than Pluto due to the odd elliptical nature of Pluto's orbit, a situation that would persist until 1999. So Pioneer 10 hadn't actually left the solar system in any meaningful sense, but it had crossed an invisible line that represented the furthest planetary orbit, even though that planet wasn't actually there at the time.

The spacecraft itself had already stopped taking pictures years earlier. Its camera had been turned off after the Jupiter flyby in 1973 to conserve power, so this momentous occasion passed without so much as a single photograph to commemorate it. Pioneer 10 just kept hurtling through the void in silence, carrying its famous gold-anodized plaque depicting a nude man and woman and a map showing Earth's location, like the universe's most optimistic message in a bottle.

The real kicker is that NASA scientists were tracking this milestone with slide rules and early computers while the spacecraft itself, built with 1970s technology, had no idea it was making history. It simply continued its lonely journey toward the star Aldebaran, which it won't reach for another two million years, give or take a few millennia.