19 October has quite a history.

202 BC Roman general Scipio Africanus defeated Hannibal at Zama, ending the Second Punic War. Scipio prevailed against Hannibal where many previous Roman commanders had failed. Scipio was an innovator. He greatly simplified commands, delegated authority downward, and overcame the elephants by letting them pass through the lines with the lines closing behind them against the Hannibal’s infantry.

1812 Napoleon began the retreat from Moscow. What defeated him were General Typhus and General Hubris. General Winter deliver the coup de grace. Elsewhere on this blog there is a review of Andrew Roberts’s excellent biography of Napoleon that goes into more detail about his Russian campaign. The graphic shows the advance and retreat as diminishing resources, from the brilliant Edward Tufte’s book ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.’ It is often cited as the most elegant and intuitive presentation of a mass of data at a glance.

1917 Salvation Army Officers Helen Purviance and Margaret Sheldon delivered doughnuts to front lines American troops in France. They carried weapons and sported gas masks, along with the doughnuts to give to the dough boys. There were hundreds of Salvos in rear areas doing the cooking and packing. What if any relationship there is between this nickname — doughboys — and doughnuts is much discussed on the inter-web.

1943 Streptomycin was isolated by researchers. It became the first antibiotic effective against the scourge tuberculosis (which the anti-vaxxers wish to bring back). The researchers thereafter engaged in a long and torturous legal battle over the subsequent the glory and gold. Penicillin was the first antibiotic, and this was the second.

1954 Britain ceded Suez canal to Egypt by treaty and withdrew the 80,000 troops it had there. In a last spasm of colonialism two years later Great Britain went back into the Canal in one the most catastrophic foreign policy blunders of the ages. The irony is that the blunder came from the hand of one of the most experienced diplomats England ever produced.