[1] Although it was privately rumored for much of his life that Hugo was the illegitimate son of Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, who is generally believed to have died with his teenage mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, in a murder-suicide pact in January 1889 (the "Mayerling incident"), no corroborating evidence of this ancestry has been established.

[3] Ironically, in 1945, The New York Times published a story that a German lithographer by the name of "Hugo Koehler", following his death at the age of 93, was revealed to be Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria, son of Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany and a member of the Imperial Austrian Habsburg family.

In August, he was attached to the gunboat USS Villalobos (PG-42) which was assigned to the Yangtze River Patrol in China "on the broad principle of extending American protection to wherever this country's nationals resided for Gold, Glory or Gospel," observed Koehler.

For one month there were dinner parties every night and on weekends at Longleat, before the commission headed to Scapa Flow in early February 1919, where nearly 80 ships of the German High Seas Fleet had been interned while awaiting disposition through peace treaty negotiations.

The ships that were in commission, as for example the new light cruiser Koenigsberg were also in hopeless condition, although they had large crews on board... As this rabble came out on deck, where we were patiently waiting, the men crowded around us so it was necessary to ask the captain to have them withdraw sufficiently to allow us breathing space...

Conditions were everywhere alike: everything unspeakably filthy, no work being done, everything going to rack and ruin..."[53] In his report to Admiral Sims, Koehler wrote, "The one sure thing about the German navy is that it is finished-finished far more effectively than if every officer and man and ship had been sunk.

"[54] At Wilhelmshaven, he put in "a good many hours" reading newspapers, handbills and political pamphlets distributed by the "Workmen's Council", the Socialists and the civil government, with titles such as, "Tirpitz the Grave Digger of the German Navy".

The Germans were greatly amused that the British were reluctant to come ashore and gave the American naval spy and his scribe permission to travel to Berlin by night train, provided they remained confined to their compartment.

With Olympia's departure for Scotland on November 8, McCully and a small contingent of officers and bluejackets were the American naval presence for the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, the struggle between the Bolsheviks and those who opposed them (often known as the "Reds" and "Whites", respectively).

Seizing the opportunity to fill the void of the departed German army, newly independent Poland occupied parts of Lithuania, eastern Galicia and Ruthenia, before advancing into western Ukraine, where Nestor Makhno, an anarchist with a band of militarist peasants was attacking both Red and White troops.

At the suggestion of Admiral Mark L. Bristol, Commander, Naval Forces, Turkish Peninsula, McCully was proposed to lead a special mission for the U.S. State Department with the purpose of keeping the government informed of developments in that region and to protect American lives and interests.

But apparently the Greeks believe that there is no need for such mundane things as raisins and olives while loans are plentiful and they can get flour and automobiles for paper money...."[89][90] Vice Admiral Bristol detached one of the various destroyers in his command, to operate along the northern Black Sea coast to assist the Mission, enabling McCully to continuously maintain mail and radio communication.

I broke down, crying like a child, and begged the kind officer to take me to America, to my Mother, as I had no one in Odessa but my beloved husband's grave... During the sad scene one of the armed Bolshevists took stations at the door, and the other, evidently knowing the English language, came closer to hear the conversation.

As Koehler described it, "Ships lying alongside the docks crowded on human cargo almost to the last inch of space and then, fearing the fire, moved away from the piers into the stream, although they made almost no impression on the multitude seeking to board.

[106] Wrangel, known as the "Black Baron" by the Reds, immediately locked down the Crimea as the last enclave of the White movement, ruthlessly restoring discipline by executing all looters, agitators, speculators and commissars, in one instance parading 370 men in front of him and then having them all shot.

They were taken under fire, and the first shot came close as the destroyer sped up to 25 knots and hugged the west side of the straight, making it through to reach the Sivash front and General Slashchov's troop landing at the small village of Kirilovkar.

"Villagers were bitter enough in denunciations of Bolsheviks, but I noted no great enthusiasm for Wrangel's forces- the attitude was one of indifference- of a people who had known the worst and cared little one way or another..."[112] On daybreak of the third day, Koehler joined a small cavalry detachment headed toward the fighting in Melitopol.

The millworker in Alimovka expressed the idea of thousands when he said that formerly the Russians had a czar, a fool, to rule them, [and] taxes were very bad, but bread was five kopeks a pound and plentiful, and a man could get all the shirts, and shoes, and sugar and tea and tobacco he wanted.

On the previous day I had seen the capture on Chertisa Island... former stronghold from which the old Zaporogian Cossacks directed raids against rich towns from Constantinople to Poland...At daybreak, as soon as the opposite shore could be made out, artillery began a brisk fire followed by all the noise the single machine gun company could produce.

Besides McCully's party, the ships pulled out U.S. consuls and their archives, representatives of the American Red Cross and YMCA, relief workers from other agencies, and approximately 1,400 Russian refugees from Sebastopol and Yalta in the Crimea, Novorossiysk, Russia, and Odessa.

The recent assassination of the Polish president, Narutowicz, a Lithuanian by birth who had been conciliatory in resolving the boundary dispute with Lithuania that followed the Poles taking of Vilna was a serious blow to the country's future, Koehler believed.

In 1936, the Koehlers purchased "Eastover", a thirty-acre estate off Wapping Road in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, with a 1,000 ft. waterfront on the Sakonnet River, where Hugo planted raspberries, built a sea wall, tended a flock of sheep and made a rose garden for Matilda.

Koehler recalled Russia in the years after World War I, when the White Russians and Bolsheviks battled for control of armies driven into the sea as they tried to reach the Crimea, and of the great famine and atrocities that were "unhappily too true."

The Japanese have agreed with the Fascist powers and the German advisor to Chiang Kaishek, General Von Falkenhayn, who had been forced to withdraw from China because of pressures from Japan, told Hitler that Germany "has been backing the wrong horse" in Asia.

"[191] Speaking before the Fleet Reserve Association in February 1939, Koehler claimed that following the Munich Pact, Britain was actually in a better position since Neville Chamberlain had succeeded in garnering the support of the British people, including the Labourites.

We are in as bad a state today as the French were before their collapse, the basic cause of which was the easy indifference of the masses of the people, their shortsighted unwillingness to get down to hard work and to make the sacrifices that an intellectually honest analysis indicated as indispensable.

He warned that America must make its stand clear on the lend-lease program, referring to it as a "magnificent gesture", and saying that in the First World War, the "altruism" of the United States was "not appreciated" and was overridden by the national and economic policies and the political expedients of Europe and the East.

In November 1942, 25-year old Lt.(j.g) John F. Kennedy, then attached to the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center at Melville, Rhode Island, was mourning the death of his close, childhood friend, Marine Second Lieutenant George Houk Mead Jr., who had been killed in action at Guadalcanal that August and posthumously awarded the Navy Cross.

In October 1925, while Koehler was commanding the Balboa Naval Transmitting Station at the Pacific end of the Panama Canal Zone, rumor about his engagement to a particularly colorful, San Francisco socialite and divorcée made national news.

"[210] Later, in a bitter child visitation rights battle in 1927 that went all the way to the California Court of Appeals, Abercrombie lost custody of their children, Lyman Jr. ("Robert") and Cecelia, after making baseless accusations that Swenson had molested their four-year-old daughter.