** TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY **

Discussion in 'Work Safe' started by SHOOTER13, Jun 25, 2015.

  1. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    August 31st ~

    1756 – The British at Fort William Henry, New England, surrendered to Louis Montcalm of France.

    1777 – Samuel Mason, a captain in command of Fort Henry on the Ohio frontier, survives a devastating Indian attack only to become one of the young nation’s first western desperados. Mason recovered from his wounds and continued to command Fort Henry for several years. Following the end of the war, though, he seems to have fallen on hard times. Repeatedly accused of being a thief, he moved farther west into the lawless frontier of the young American nation. By 1797, he had become a pirate on the Mississippi River, preying on boatmen who moved valuable goods up and down the river. He also reportedly took to robbing travelers along the Natchez Trace (or trail) in Tennessee, often with the assistance of his four sons and several other vicious men.

    1778 – British killed 17 Stockbridge Indians in Bronx during Revolution.

    1803 – Captain Meriwether Lewis left Pittsburgh to meet up with Captain William Clark and begin their trek to the Pacific Ocean.

    1819 – The cutters Alabama and Louisiana captured the privateer Bravo in the Gulf of Mexico. The master, Jean Le Farges — a lieutenant of Jean Lafitte — was later hanged from the Louisiana’s yardarm on the Mississippi River. The cutters then sailed for Patterson’s Town on Breton Island to destroy the notorious pirates’ den there.

    1835 – Angry mob in Charleston, South Carolina, seized U-S mail containing abolitionist literature and burned it in public.

    1842 – US Naval Observatory was authorized by an act of Congress.

    1864 – At the Democratic convention in Chicago, General George B. McClellan was nominated for president. McClellan ran on a Copperhead platform climing the war had been a failure and was hopelessly lost. Only a peace with honor allowing the Southern states their independence could save the North from ruin. This was a scant 8 months before the end of the war.

    1864 – General William T. Sherman launches the attack that finally secures Atlanta, Georgia, for the Union, and seals the fate of Confederate General John Bell Hood’s army, which is forced to evacuate the area. The Battle of Jonesboro was the culmination of a four-month campaign by Sherman to capture Atlanta. He had spent the summer driving his army down the 100-mile corridor from Chattanooga, Tennessee, against a Confederate force led by General Joseph Johnston. General Hood, who replaced Johnston in July on the outskirts of Atlanta, proceeded to attack Sherman in an attempt to drive him northward. However, these attacks failed, and by August 1 the armies had settled into a siege. In late August, Sherman swung his army south of Atlanta to cut the main rail line supplying the Rebel army. Confederate General William Hardee’s corps moved to block Sherman at Jonesboro, and attacked the Union troops on August 31, but the Rebels were thrown back with staggering losses. The entrenched Yankees lost just 178 men, while the Confederates lost nearly 2,000. On September 1, Sherman attacked Hardee. Though the Confederates held, Sherman successfully cut the rail line and effectively trapped the Rebels. Hardee had to abandon his position, and Hood had no choice but to withdraw from Atlanta. The fall of Atlanta was instrumental in securing the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in the fall.

    1865 – The US Federal government estimated the American Civil War had cost about eight-billion dollars. Human costs have been estimated at more than one-million killed or wounded.

    1920 – The first radio news program is broadcast by 8MK (WWJ today) in Detroit, Michigan. It was primary election day, and it was announced that the returns — local, state and congressional — would be sent to the public that night by means of the radio.

    1935 – President Roosevelt signed the first Neutrality Act, an act prohibiting the export of U.S. arms to belligerents.

    1939 – At noon, despite threats of British and French intervention, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler signs an order to attack Poland, and German forces move to the frontier. That evening, Nazi S.S. troops wearing Polish uniforms staged a phony invasion of Germany, damaging several minor installations on the German side of the border. They also left behind a handful of dead German prisoners in Polish uniforms to serve as further evidence of the alleged Polish attack, which Nazi propagandists publicized as an unforgivable act of aggression. At dawn the next morning, 58 German army divisions invaded Poland all across the 1,750-mile frontier. Hitler expected appeasement from Britain and France–the same nations that had given Czechoslovakia away to German conquest in 1938 with their signing of the Munich Pact. However, neither country would allow Hitler’s new violation of Europe’s borders, and Germany was presented with an ultimatum: Withdraw by September 3 or face war with the Western democracies. At 11:15 a.m. on September 3, a few minutes after the expiration of the British ultimatum, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appeared on national radio to announce solemnly that Britain was at war with Germany. Australia, New Zealand, and India immediately followed suit. Later that afternoon, the French ultimatum expired, and at 5:00 p.m. France declared war on Germany. The European phase of World War II began.

    1940 – US National Guard assembled. They will be mobilized for 1 year, extended to 2, to train and assist in war games to test new tactics.

    1940 – 56 U-boats were sunk during this month (268,000 ton).

    1942 – The Battle of Guadalcanal. Japanese General Kawaguchi lands 1200 troops on the island.

    1942 – 3rd Marines leave San Diego bound for American Samoa.

    1943 – American carrier based aircraft strike Marcus island. The Independence, Essex and Yorktown are involved. These ships are part of the newly formed Fast Carrier Task Force.

    1943 – Commissioning of USS Harmon (DE-678), first Navy ship named for an African American Sailor.

    1944 – A US B-24-J bomber crashed into Maoer Mountain in China after having completed its bombing mission over the port of Takao in Taiwan. All 10 men onboard were killed. The wreckage was not discovered until Oct, 1996.

    1945 – General MacArthur establishes the supreme allied command at the main port of Tokyo, as the first foreigner to take charge of Japan in 1000 years.

    1945 – The remaining Japanese troops in the Philippines formally surrender.

    1945 – The Japanese garrison on Marcus Island surrenders to the American Admiral Whiting.

    1945 – Field Marshal Brauchitsch and Field Marshal von Manstein are arrested by Allied authorities. Meanwhile, the civilian population is in flux. Germans who fled the bombing of their cities are going home to stake their claim on whatever remains of their property. One in five persons in the western zone of Germay is a refugee. There are also Germans driven out of Poland and Silesia as well as other parts of eastern Europe.

    1949 – Six of the 16 surviving Union veterans of the Civil War attended the last-ever encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, held in Indianapolis, Indiana.

    1950 – Far East Air Force B-29s completed air strikes on the docks and railway yards at Songjin and the industrial factory at Chinnampo. From Aug. 28-31, aircraft dropped 326 tons of bombs on Songjin and 284 tons on Chinnampo.

    1951 – The former enemies of the world war reconvened in San Francisco to finalize negotiations on the peace treaty to formally end WW II. Japan agreed to pay the Int’l. Red Cross about $15 per POW while the allies agreed not to bring charges against it.

    1951 – The last United Nations Command offensive of the war occurred when the 1st Marine Division began its assault against the Punchbowl and from Aug. 31 to Sept. 3. The 2nd Infantry Division seized Bloody Ridge at a cost of 2,700 casualties.

    1954 – Under terms of the Geneva Agreement, a flow of almost one million refugees from North to South Vietnam begins.

    1961 – A concrete wall replaced the barbed wire fence that separated East and West Germany, it would be called the "Berlin Wall".

    1962 – Last flight of Navy airship made at NAS Lakehurst, NJ.

    1965 – President Johnson signs into law a bill making it illegal to destroy or mutilate a U.S. draft card, with penalties of up to five years and a $10,000 fine.

    1990 – East & West Germany signed a treaty to join legal & political.

    1995 – NATO planes and UN artillery blasted Serb targets in Bosnia for a 2nd day in response to the market attack in Serajevo.

    1996 – More than 100 members of the Iraqi National Congress in Irbil were captured by Iraqi secret police and apparently executed.

    2002 – Kuwait will buy 16 attack helicopters from Boeing in a deal worth $886 million. Defense Minister Sheik Jaber Mubarak Al Hamad and U.S. Ambassador Richard Jones signed the deal.

    2004 – A video purporting to show the methodical, grisly killings of 12 Nepalese construction workers kidnapped in Iraq was posted on a Web site linked to a militant group operating in Iraq.

    2010 – Gen. Ray Odierno was replaced by Gen. Lloyd Austin as Commander of US forces in Iraq.
  2. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 1st ~

    1676 – Nathaniel Bacon led an uprising against English Governor William Berkeley at Jamestown, Virginia, resulting in the settlement being burned to the ground. Bacon’s Rebellion came in response to the governor’s repeated refusal to defend the colonists against the Indians.

    1752 – The Liberty Bell arrived in Philadelphia.

    1772 –
    Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa formed in California. Father Junipero Serra held the 1st Mass at San Luis Obispo. He left Father Jose Cavalier the task of building the state’s 5th mission.

    1774 – The Powder Alarm was a major popular reaction to the removal of gunpowder from a magazine by British soldiers under orders from General Thomas Gage, royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. In response to this action, amid rumors that blood had been shed, alarm spread through the countryside as far as Connecticut and beyond, and American Patriots sprang into action, fearing that war was at hand. Thousands of militiamen began streaming toward Boston and Cambridge, and mob action forced Loyalists and some government officials to flee to the protection of the British Army. Although it proved to be a false alarm, the Powder Alarm caused political and military leaders to proceed more carefully in the days ahead, and essentially provided a “dress rehearsal” for the Battles of Lexington and Concord seven and a half months later. Furthermore, actions on both sides to control weaponry, gunpowder, and other military supplies became more contentious, as the British sought to bring military stores more directly under their control, and the Patriot colonists sought to acquire them for their own use.

    1781 – French fleet traps British fleet at Yorktown, VA.

    1807 – Former U.S. vice president Aaron Burr is acquitted of plotting to annex parts of Louisiana and Spanish territory in Mexico to be used toward the establishment of an independent republic. He was acquitted on the grounds that, though he had conspired against the United States, he was not guilty of treason because he had not engaged in an “overt act,” a requirement of the law governing treason. Nevertheless, public opinion condemned him as a traitor, and he fled to Europe.

    1821 – William Becknell led a group of traders from Independence, Mo., toward Santa Fe on what would become the Santa Fe Trail.

    1849 – California Constitutional Convention was held in Monterey.

    1858 – The 1st transatlantic cable failed after less than 1 month.

    1861 – Ulysses Grant assumed command of Federal forces at Cape Girardeau, MI.

    1861 – Lincoln received news late at night from Secretary of the Navy Welles of Flag Officer Stringham’s victory at Hatteras Inlet, in the initial Army- Navy expedition of the war. Coming shortly after the defeat at Bull Run, it electrified the North and greatly raised morale.

    1862 – A federal tax was levied on tobacco, especially that grown in Confederate states.

    1862 – Following his brilliant victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run two days earlier, Confederate General Robert E. Lee strikes retreating Union forces at Chantilly, Virginia, and drives them away in the middle of an intense thunderstorm. Although his army routed the Yankee forces of General John Pope at Bull Run, Lee was not satisfied. By attacking the retreating Federals, Lee hoped to push them back into Washington, D.C., and achieve a decisive victory by destroying the Union army. The Bull Run battlefield lay 25 miles east of the capital, allowing Lee room to send General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s corps on a quick march to cut off part of the Union retreat before reaching the defenses of the capital.

    1864 – With Union General William T. Sherman threatening to cut his only escape route, Confederate General John Bell Hood evacuates Atlanta, Georgia, at the climax of a four-month campaign by Sherman to capture the vital Rebel supply center.

    1918 – US troops landed in Vladivostok, Siberia, and stayed until 1920.

    1925 – Navy CDR John Rodgers and crew of 4 in PN-9 run out of fuel on first San Francisco to Hawaii flight. Landing at sea, they rigged a sail and set sail for Hawaii.

    1939 – At 0445 hours German forces invade Poland without a declaration of war. The operation is code named Fall Weiss (Plan White). The Germans allot 52 divisions for the invasion (some 1.5 million men), including the 6 armored divisions and all their motorized units.

    1940 – Gen. George C. Marshall was sworn in as chief of staff of US Army.

    1942 – First Seabee unit to serve in a combat area, the 6th Naval Construction Battalion, arrives on Guadalcanal.

    1942 – A federal judge in Sacramento, Calif., upheld the wartime detention of Japanese-Americans as well as Japanese nationals.

    1942 – Joseph C. Jenkins was given a temporary promotion to warrant officer (Boatswain); becoming the first African-American warrant officer in the Coast Guard.

    1942 – The Coast Guard transferred responsibility for running the merchant marine training programs to the War Shipping Administration.

    1944 – General Eisenhower establishes his headquarters in France as Commander in Chief of the Allied Expeditionary Forces.

    1944 – CGC Northland captured the crew of a scuttled Nazi supply trawler off Greenland. They had been attempting to establish a weather station on the coast of Greenland.

    1945 – Americans received word of Japan’s formal surrender that ended World War II. Because of the time difference, it was Sept. 2 in Tokyo Bay, where the ceremony took place.

    1945 – USS Benevolence (AH-13) evacuates civilian internees from 2 internment camps near Tokyo, Japan.

    1950 – US Air Force Captain Iven C. Kincheloe, 51st Fighter-Interceptor Wing, claimed his fifth air-to-air victory in his F-86 Sabre “Ivan” to become the 10th ace of the Korean War. Kincheloe accounted for four MiGs in six days.

    1961 – The Soviet Union ended a moratorium on atomic testing with an above-ground nuclear explosion in central Asia.

    1969 – A coup in Libya overthrew the monarchy of King Idris and brought Moammar Gadhafi to power. Gadhafi emerged as leader of the revolutionary government and ordered the closure of a U.S. Air Force base.

    1969 – The 1st Marine Regiment was presented the Presidential Unit Citation for Operation Hue City (Vietnam).

    1970 – The U.S. Senate rejects the McGovern-Hatfield amendment by a vote of 55-39. This legislation, proposed by Senators George McGovern of South Dakota and Mark Hatfield of Oregon, would have set a deadline of December 31, 1971, for complete withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam.

    1974 – The SR-71 Blackbird sets (and holds) the record for flying from New York to London in the time of 1 hour, 54 minutes and 56.4 seconds at a speed of 1,435.587 miles per hour (2,310.353 km/h).

    1976 – NASA launched its space vehicle S-197.

    1977 – The 1st TRS-80 Model I computer was sold.

    1977 – Bobby C. Wilks became the first African American in the Coast Guard to reach the rank of captain.

    1979 – Pioneer 11 made the 1st fly-by of Saturn and discovered new moon rings. Ring F of Saturn was discovered by Lonny Baker at NASA’s Ames Research Center from data sent by Pioneer 11.

    1982 – The United States Air Force Space Command is established. Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) is a major command of the United States Air Force, with its headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.

    1983 – Soviet jet fighters intercept a Korean Airlines passenger flight in Russian airspace and shoot the plane down, killing all on board. The incident dramatically increased tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviets sent two fighters to intercept the plane. According to tapes of the conversations between the fighter pilots and Soviet ground control, the fighters quickly located the KAL flight and tried to make contact with the passenger jet. Failing to receive a response, one of the fighters fired a heat-seeking missile. KAL 007 was hit and plummeted into the Sea of Japan. All 269 people on board were killed.

    2000 – Pres. Clinton put the anti-missile national defense system on hold and passed the decision for moving the project forward to his successor.

    2004 – Accused U.S. Army deserter Charles Jenkins said he will surrender to the US to face charges that have dogged him since he vanished from his unit in South Korea nearly 40 years.

    2004 – The U.N. atomic watchdog agency said Iran has announced plans to turn tons of uranium into a substance that can be used to make nuclear weapons.

    2008 – CGC Dallas visited the port of Sevastopol, Ukraine during a historic voyage through the Black Sea that included delivering relief supplies to Georgia.

    2008 – The U.S. military hands control of Al Anbar Governorate over to the Iraqi government.

    2010 – The name “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is replaced by “Operation New Dawn”.
  3. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 2nd ~

    1776 – The Hurricane of Independence makes landfall. Between this day and 9 September it will kill exactly 4,170 people from North Carolina to Nova Scotia.

    1789 – Although the United States Treasury Department was founded on September 2, 1789, its roots can be traced back to the American Revolution. Back in 1775, the Revolutionary leaders were groping with ways to fund the war. Their solution–issuing cash that doubled as redeemable “bills of credit”–raised enough capital to fuel the Revolution. However, the war notes also led to the country’s first debt. The Continental Congress attempted to reign in the economy, even forming a pre-Constitutional version of the Treasury. Neither this move, nor the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which enabled the U.S. to seek loans from foreign countries, proved effective. The debt kept mounting, while war notes rapidly deflated in value. With the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, the Government established a permanent Treasury Department in hopes of quelling the debt. President Washington named his former “aide-de-camp,” Alexander Hamilton, to head the new office. The former New York lawyer and staunch Federalist stepped in as Secretary of the Treasury on September 11. Hamilton soon outlined a practical plan for reviving the nation’s ailing economy: the Government would pay back its $75 million war debt and thus repair its badly damaged public credit.

    1859 – A solar super storm affects electrical telegraph service.

    1862 – President Lincoln reluctantly restores Union General George B. McClellan to full command after General John Pope’s disaster at Second Bull Run on August 29 and 30. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, saw much of his army transferred to Pope’s Army of Virginia after his failure to capture Richmond during the Seven Days’ Battles in June 1862. Pope, who had one chance to prove his leadership at Second Bull Run against Confederate General Robert E. Lee, failed miserably and retreated to Washington. He had not received any help from McClellan, who sat nearby in Alexandria and refused to go to Pope’s aid.

    1864 – The forces of Union General William T. Sherman march into Atlanta, Georgia—one day after the Confederates evacuate the city.

    1864 – Small, 8-gun paddle-wheeler U.S.S. Naiad, Acting Master Keene, engaged Confederate battery near Rowe’s Landing, Louisiana, and, after a brisk exchange, silenced it.

    1885 – 150 white miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, brutally attack their Chinese coworkers, killing 28, wounding 15 others, and driving several hundred more out of town. The miners working in the Union Pacific coal mine had been struggling to unionize and strike for better working conditions for years.

    1901 – Vice President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt utters the famous phrase, “Speak softly and carry a big stick” at the Minnesota State Fair.

    1912 – Arthur Rose Eldred is awarded the first Eagle Scout award of the Boy Scouts of America.

    1918 – Navy ships and crews assist earthquake victims of Yokohama and Tokyo, Japan.

    1944 – Navy pilot George Herbert Walker Bush was shot down by Japanese forces as he completed a bombing run over the Bonin Islands. Bush was rescued by the crew of the U.S. submarine Finback; his two crew members, however, died.

    1945 – Aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Japan formally surrenders to the Allies, bringing an end to World War II. By the summer of 1945, the defeat of Japan was a foregone conclusion. The Japanese navy and air force were destroyed. The Allied naval blockade of Japan and intensive bombing of Japanese cities had left the country and its economy devastated. At the end of June, the Americans captured Okinawa, a Japanese island from which the Allies could launch an invasion of the main Japanese home islands. U.S. General Douglas MacArthur was put in charge of the invasion, which was code-named “Operation Olympic” and set for November 1945. The invasion of Japan promised to be the bloodiest seaborne attack of all time, conceivably 10 times as costly as the Normandy invasion in terms of Allied casualties.

    1945 – Hours after Japan’s surrender in World War II, Vietnamese communist Ho Chi Minh declares the independence of Vietnam from France. The proclamation paraphrased the U.S. Declaration of Independence in declaring, “All men are born equal: the Creator has given us inviolable rights, life, liberty, and happiness!” and was cheered by an enormous crowd gathered in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square. It would be 30 years, however, before Ho’s dream of a united, communist Vietnam became reality.

    1948 – Christa McAuliffe, the first civilian passenger on a space mission, was born in Boston, Mass. During that 1986 mission, she and the six other crew members on the space shuttle Challenger perished in an explosion shortly after launch.

    1951 – The 2nd Infantry Division attacked enemy positions on Bloody Ridge.

    1951 – Twenty-two F-86 Sabre jets clashed with 40 MiG-15s in a 30-minute dogfight over the skies between Sinuiju and Pyongyang. The air battle resulted in the destruction of four MiGs.

    1956 – Tennessee National Guardsmen halted rioters protesting the admission of 12 African-Americans to schools in Clinton.

    1958 – United States Air Force C-130A-II is shot down by fighters over Yerevan in Armenia when it strays into Soviet airspace while conducting a SIGINT mission. All crew members are killed.

    1969 – President Ho Chi Minh of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam dies of a heart attack in Hanoi.

    1970 – NASA announces the cancellation of two Apollo missions to the Moon, Apollo 15 (the designation is re-used by a later mission), and Apollo 19.

    1972 – Phuc Yen, 10 miles north of Hanoi, and one of the largest air bases in North Vietnam, is smashed by U.S. fighter-bombers. During the attack, a MiG was shot down, bringing the total to 47 enemy aircraft shot down since the beginning of the North Vietnamese offensive. At this point in the war, 18 U.S. planes had been shot down by MiGs.

    1993 – The United States and Russia formally ended decades of competition in space by agreeing to a joint venture to build a space station.

    1996 – The US launched cruise missiles at selected air defense targets in Iraq to discourage Sadam Hussein’s military moves against a Kurd faction.

    1997 – The US demanded exemptions to a proposed global ban on land mines at an int’l meeting in Oslo, Norway. The exemptions were for mines on the Korean peninsula and for certain types of mines.

    1999 – NATO and UN officials agreed to the formation of a civilian emergency force in Kosovo from the remnants of the KLA.

    2002 – Hans Blix rejects the Iraqi request that he travel to Baghdad for technical talks, saying he would not do so until Saddam Hussein approved the return of weapons inspectors.

    2004 – Kidnappers handed over two French journalists in Iraq to an Iraqi Sunni Muslim opposition group. A militant group in Iraq said it had killed three Turkish captives. Gunmen ambushed an Associated Press driver, riddling his car with bullets and killing him near his home in Baghdad.

    2004 – The UN Security Council narrowly approved a U.S.-backed resolution aimed at pressuring Lebanon to reject a second term for its pro-Syrian president and calling for an immediate withdrawal of all foreign forces.

    2005 – The NASA Mars Exploration Rover Mission robotic Spirit rover sends back a partial panoramic view from the top of “Husband Hill” at Gusev Crater on Mars.

    2012 – U.S. special operations personnel temporarily halt the training of all Afghan army and police recruits while a full background check of 27,000 people is ongoing. 45 NATO troops have been killed this year in so-called green-on-blue attacks.

    2014 – ISIS releases an Internet video showing the beheading of American journalist Steven Sotloff.

    2014 – The United States sends an additional 250 US troops to protect American personnel.
  4. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 3rd ~

    1609 – Henry Hudson discovered the island of Manhattan.

    1709 – The 1st major group of Swiss and German colonists reached the Carolinas.

    1752 – The Gregorian Adjustment to the calendar was put into effect in Great Britain and the American colonies followed. At this point in time 11 days needed to be accounted for and Sept. 2 was selected to be followed by Sept. 14. People rioted thinking the government stole 11 days of their lives.

    1777 – The American flag is flown in battle for the first time, during a Revolutionary War skirmish at Cooch’s Bridge, Maryland. Patriot General William Maxwell ordered the stars and strips banner raised as a detachment of his infantry and cavalry met an advance guard of British and Hessian troops. The rebels were defeated and forced to retreat to General George Washington’s main force near Brandywine Creek in Pennsylvania. Three months before, on June 14, the Continental Congress adopted a resolution stating that “the flag of the United States be thirteen alternate stripes red and white” and that “the Union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation.” The national flag, which became known as the “Stars and Stripes,” was based on the “Grand Union” flag, a banner carried by the Continental Army in 1776 that also consisted of 13 red and white stripes.

    On June 14, 1877, the first Flag Day observance was held on the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the Stars and Stripes. As instructed by Congress, the U.S. flag was flown from all public buildings across the country. In the years after the first Flag Day, several states continued to observe the anniversary, and in 1949 Congress officially designated June 14 as Flag Day, a national day of observance.

    1782 – As a token of gratitude for French aid during American Revolution, the U.S. gives America (first ship-of-the-line built by U.S.) to France to replace a French ship lost in Boston.

    1783 – The Treaty of Paris between the United States and Great Britain officially ended the Revolutionary War. The Treaty of 1783, which formally ended the American Revolution, is also known as the Definitive Treaty of Peace, the Peace of Paris and the Treaty of Versailles. Under the treaty, Great Britain recognized the independence of the United States. The treaty bears the signatures of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay.

    1783 – Mackinac Island, Michigan, passed into US hands following the Paris Peace Treaty.

    1812 – A war party of Native Americans (mostly Shawnee, but including some Delaware and Potawatomis) made a surprise attack on the village of Pigeon Roost, Indiana, coordinated with attacks on Fort Harrison (near Terre Haute, Indiana) and Fort Wayne the same month. Twenty-four settlers, including fifteen children, were massacred. Two children were kidnapped. Only four of the Indian attackers were killed.

    1826 – USS Vincennes left NY to become 1st warship to circumnavigate globe.

    1838 – Future abolitionist Frederick Douglass escapes from slavery.

    1855 – General William Harney and 700 soldiers take revenge for the Grattan Massacre with a brutal attack on a Sioux village in Nebraska that left 100 men, women, and children dead. The path to Harney’s bloody revenge began a year before near Fort Laramie, Wyoming, when a brash young lieutenant named John Grattan and 30 of his men were killed while attempting to arrest a Teton Sioux brave accused of shooting a white man’s cow.

    1861 – Confederate General Leonidas Polk commits a major political blunder by marching his troops into Columbus, Kentucky—negating Kentucky’s avowed neutrality and causing the Unionist legislature to invite the U.S. government to drive the invaders away. Kentucky was heavily divided prior to the war. Although slavery was prevalent in the state, nationalism was strong and Unionists prevented the calling of a convention to consider secession after the firing on Fort Sumter in April.

    1885 – First classes at U.S. Naval War College begin.

    1908 – Orville Wright began two weeks of flight trials that impressed onlookers with his complete control of his new Type A Military Flyer. In addition to setting an altitude record of 310 feet and an endurance record of more than one hour, he had carried aloft the first military observer, Lieutenant Frank Lahm.

    1918 – The United States recognized the nation of Czechoslovakia.

    1918 – Five soldiers were hanged for alleged participation in the Houston riot of 1917.

    1925 – The dirigible “Shenandoah” crashed near Caldwell Ohio, 13 die. The 682-foot Shenandoah, built by the U.S. Navy in 1923, broke apart in mid-air, killing 14 persons aboard.

    1926 – Marines served at Shanghai, China, and aboard ship during the Yangtze Service Campaign, from September 3rd, 1926 to October 21st, 1927.

    1939 – In response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Britain and France, both allies of the overrun nation declare war on Germany. The first casualty of that declaration was not German-but the British ocean liner Athenia, which was sunk by a German U-30 submarine that had assumed the liner was armed and belligerent. There were more than 1,100 passengers on board, 112 of whom lost their lives. Of those, 28 were Americans, but President Roosevelt was unfazed by the tragedy, declaring that no one was to “thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields.” The United States would remain neutral. As for Britain’s response, it was initially no more than the dropping of anti-Nazi propaganda leaflets-13 tons of them-over Germany. They would begin bombing German ships on September 4, suffering significant losses. They were also working under orders not to harm German civilians. The German military, of course, had no such restrictions. At this time, 39 of the German fleet of 58 U-boats are at sea. Doenitz, the submarine chief, had hoped for a fleet of 300 before contemplating war with Britain.

    1941 – The Japanese are informed that a meeting between Prince Konoye and President Roosevelt cannot take place.

    1943 – Italy surrendered. The Allied invasion of Italy begins on the same day that U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Italian Marshal Pietro Badoglio sign the Armistice of Cassibile aboard the Royal Navy battleship HMS Nelson off Malta.

    1944 – First combat employment of a missile guided by radio and television takes place when Navy drone Liberator, controlled by Ensign James M. Simpson in a PV, flew to attack German submarine pens on Helgoland Island.

    1945 – Japanese surrender Wake Island in ceremony on board USS Levy (DE-162).

    1950 – A U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) of 35 men arrives in Saigon to screen French requests for American military aid, assist in the training of South Vietnamese troops, and advise on strategy. President Harry Truman had approved National Security Council (NSC) Memorandum 64 in March 1950, proclaiming that French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) was a key area that could not be allowed to fall to the communists and that the United States would provide support against communist aggression in the area.

    1954 – The German U-boat U-505 begins its move from a specially constructed dock to its final site at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

    1954 – The US Espionage & Sabotage Act of 1954 signed.

    1956 – Tanks were deployed against racist demonstrators in Clinton, Tennessee.

    1971 – The Watergate team broke into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.

    1976 – The unmanned U.S. spacecraft Viking 2 landed on Mars to take the first close-up, color photographs of the planet’s surface.

    1989 – The United States began shipping a $65 million package of military aircraft and weapons to help Colombia’s war against drug lords.

    1995 – Testing Serb will, the United Nations reopened a route to Sarajevo and threatened more air attacks if the rebel stranglehold of the Bosnian capital didn’t end.

    1996 – The United States launched 27 cruise missiles at “selected air defense targets” in Iraq as punishment for Iraq’s invasion of Kurdish safe havens.

    1999 – NASA temporarily grounded its space shuttle fleet after inspections had uncovered damaged wires that could endanger a mission.

    2002 – The US Senate opened debate on legislation creating a new Homeland Security Department.

    2002 – Iraq said it was ready to discuss a return of U.N. weapons inspectors, but only in a broader context of ending sanctions and restoring Iraqi sovereignty over all its territory.

    2004 – Libya signed an agreement to pay a total of $35 million US in compensation for 168 non-U.S. victims of a 1986 Berlin disco bombing.

    2005 – Over 40,000 military personnel will be deployed along the Gulf Coast in the coming week: President George W. Bush orders 7,023 additional active duty forces to the Gulf Coast to add to the 4,000 active duty personnel and 21,000 National Guard troops already in the area. The Pentagon announced an additional 10,000 troop deployment from the National Guard.

    2007 – U.S. President George W. Bush makes a surprise visit to Iraq and addresses military leaders and the troops, saying that with success, a U.S. Iraq troop cut is possible.

    2012 – A car bomb explodes near the U.S. consulate in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, killing at least three people and wounding up to 19 others.
  5. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 4th ~

    1781 – Mexican Provincial Governor, Felipe de Neve, founded Los Angeles. He founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles (Valley of Smokes), originally named Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, by Gaspar de Portola, a Spanish army captain and Juan Crespi, a Franciscan priest, who had noticed the beautiful area as they traveled north from San Diego in 1769. 44 Spanish settlers named a tiny village near San Gabriel, Los Angeles. Los Angeles, first an Indian village Yangma, was founded by Spanish decree. 26 of the settlers were of African ancestry.

    1807 – Robert Fulton began operating his steamboat.

    1862 – Robert E. Lee’s Confederate 50,000-man army invaded Maryland, starting the Antietam Campaign. New York Tribune reporter George Smalley scooped the world with his vivid account of the Battle of Antietam.

    1864 – Bread riots took place in Mobile, Alabama.

    1864 – An amazing career ends when feared Confederate cavalry leader John Hunt Morgan is killed during a Union cavalry raid on the town of Greenville, Tennessee.

    1882 – Thomas Edison displayed the first practical electrical lighting system. He successfully turned on the lights in a one square mile area of New York City with the world’s 1st electricity generating plant.

    1886 – For almost 30 years he had fought the whites who invaded his homeland, but Geronimo, the wiliest and most dangerous Apache warrior of his time, finally surrenders in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona. Known to the Apache as Goyalkla, or “One Who Yawns,” most non-Indians knew him by his Spanish nickname, Geronimo.

    1888 – George Eastman received patent #388,850 for his roll-film camera and registered his trademark: “Kodak.” George Eastman introduced the box camera.

    1915 – The U.S. military placed Haiti under martial law to quell a rebellion in its capital Port-au-Prince.

    1917 – The American expeditionary force in France suffered its first fatalities in World War I.

    1923 – Maiden flight of the first U.S. airship, the USS Shenandoah.

    1940 – The United States warns the Japanese government against making aggressive moves in Indochina.

    1940 – American destroyer Greer becomes the first U.S. vessel fired on in the war when a German sub aims a few torpedoes at it, sparking heightened tensions between Germany and the United States. It was a case of mistaken identity. As the Greer made its way through the North Atlantic, a British patrol bomber spotted a German sub, the U-652. The British bomber alerted the Greer, which responded by tracking the sub. As the American destroyer approached Iceland, the area in which the sub had been spotted, a British aircraft dropped a depth charge into the water, rocking the sub. The U-652, believing the Greer responsible for the charge, fired its torpedoes. They missed. The Greer made it safely to Iceland.

    1942 – At Guadalcanal, the Japanese receive additional reinforcements. Off the coast, two older American destroyers utilized as transports are sunk by Japanese destroyers.

    1945 – 2,200 Japanese soldiers finally lay down their arms-days after their government had already formally capitulated. Wake Island was one of the islands bombed as part of a wider bombing raid that coincided with the attack on Pearl Harbor. In December of 1941, the Japanese invaded in force, taking the island from American hands, losing 820 men, while the United States lost 120. The United States decided not to retake the island but to cut off the Japanese occupiers from reinforcement, which would mean they would eventually starve.

    1945 – The Coast Guard Cutter USCG 83434 became the first and only cutter to host an official surrender ceremony when Imperial Japanese Army Second Lieutenant Kinichi Yamada surrendered the garrison of Aguijan Island on board this Coast Guard 83-footer. Rear Admiral Marshall R. Greer, USN, accepted the surrender for the United States.

    1950 – The Mort Walker Beetle Bailey cartoon appeared for the 1st time in syndication.

    1950 – The 1st helicopter rescue of American pilot behind enemy lines.

    1951 – President Truman addressed the nation from the Japanese peace treaty conference in San Francisco in the first live, coast-to-coast television broadcast. The broadcast was carried by 94 stations.

    1954 – Icebreakers, USS Burton Island (AGB-1) and USCG Northwind, complete first transit of Northwest passage through McClure Strait.

    1969 – Radio Hanoi announces the death of Ho Chi Minh, proclaiming that the National Liberation Front will halt military operations in the South for three days, September 8-11, in mourning for Ho.

    1989 – The US Air Force launched its last Titan 3 rocket, which reportedly carried a reconnaissance satellite. Since 1964, the Titan 3 had sent more than 200 satellites into space.

    1996 – Anti-aircraft fire lit up the skies of Baghdad, hours after the United States fired a new round of cruise missiles into southern Iraq and destroyed an Iraqi radar site. The US again launched Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraqi air defense sites. The 2nd launch was deemed a success after the first launch failed to destroy intended targets. The Tomahawks were made by Hughes Aircraft Co. and cost about $1 mil apiece. Kurdish leader Barzani wrote a latter to Sec. of State Christopher Warren and asked that the US mediate. 44 cruise missiles were launched over 2 days plus a rocket from an F-16 fighter.

    1998 – In Nevada two Air Force helicopters crashed during training and all 12 people aboard were killed.

    2002 – President Bush promised to seek Congress’ approval for “whatever is necessary” to oust Saddam Hussein including using military force.

    2002 – In Puerto Rico US Navy security officers fired tear gas at protesters who hurled rocks over a fence during bombing exercises on the island of Vieques.

    2004 – Insurgents clashed with American and Iraqi troops in northern Iraq. A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb outside a police academy in the northern city of Kirkuk as hundreds of trainees and civilians were leaving for the day, killing 17 people and wounding 36. Saboteurs blew up an oil pipeline in southern Iraq.

    2007 – A bomb plot in Germany was discovered following an extensive nine-month investigation, involving some 300 people, three men were arrested while leaving a rented cottage in the Oberschledorn district of Medebach, Germany where they had stored 700 kg (1,500 lb) of a hydrogen peroxide-based mixture and 26 military-grade detonators and were attempting to build car bombs intended for use against “a disco filled with American sluts”, as well as Ramstein Air Base and the Frankfurt airport. They were convicted and sentenced to jail sentences of 11-12 years.

    2009 – The United States eases more restrictions on Cuba, allowing unlimited family visits and telephone exchanges.
  6. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 5th ~

    1664 – After days of negotiation, the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam surrendered to the British, who would rename it New York. The citizens of New Amsterdam petitioned Peter Stuyvesant to surrender to the English.

    1774 – In response to the British Parliament’s enactment of the Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convenes at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia. Fifty-six delegates from all the colonies except Georgia drafted a declaration of rights and grievances and elected Virginian Peyton Randolph as the first president of Congress. Patrick Henry, George Washington, John Adams, and John Jay were among the delegates. The first major American opposition to British policy came in 1765 after Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a taxation measure designed to raise revenues for a standing British army in America. Under the argument of “no taxation without representation,” colonists convened the Stamp Act Congress in October 1765 to vocalize their opposition to the tax. With its enactment in November, most colonists called for a boycott of British goods, and some organized attacks on the customhouses and homes of tax collectors. After months of protest in the colonies, Parliament voted to repeal the Stamp Act in March 1766. Most colonists continued to quietly accept British rule until Parliament’s enactment of the Tea Act in 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the East India Company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny. In response, militant Patriots in Massachusetts organized the “Boston Tea Party,” which saw British tea valued at some ý18,000 dumped into Boston Harbor. Parliament, outraged by the Boston Tea Party and other blatant acts of destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.

    1776 – Adoption of first uniforms for Navy officers.

    1778 – Gideon Olmstead and 3 fellow Americans took over the British sloop Active and sailed it toward the New Jersey coast, where it was intercepted by the American brig Convention, owned by the state of Pennsylvania. A state court ruled the sloop a prize of the state. An appeals committee overturned the Philadelphia court. Olmstead spent the next 30 years fighting for his claim and won in 1808.

    1781 – The Battle of the Chesapeake; a British fleet arrived off the Virginia Capes and found 26 French warships in three straggling lines. Rear Adm. Thomas Graves waited for the French to form their battle lines and then fought for 5 days. Outgunned and unnerved he withdrew to New York. The French had some 37 ships and 29,000 soldiers and sailors at Yorktown while Washington had some 11,000 men engaged. French warships defeated British fleet, trapping Cornwallis in Yorktown.

    1804 – In a daring night raid, American sailors under Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, boarded the captured USS Philadelphia and burned the ship to keep it out of the hands of the Barbary pirates who captured her.

    1813 – USS Enterprise captures HM brig Boxer off Portland, ME.

    1836 – Sam Houston was elected president of the Republic of Texas.

    1862 – General Robert E. Lee crossed the Potomac & entered Maryland at White’s Ford.

    1863 – United States Foreign Minister to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, sends an angry letter to the British government warning that war between the two nations may erupt if it allows two powerful ironclad ships, designed to help the Confederates break the Union naval blockade, to set sail.

    1877 – Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse is fatally bayoneted by a U.S. soldier after resisting confinement in a guardhouse at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. A year earlier, Crazy Horse was among the Sioux leaders who defeated George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana Territory. The battle, in which 265 members of the Seventh Cavalry, including Custer, were killed, was the worst defeat of the U.S. Army in its long history of warfare with the Native Americans.

    1905 – The Russo-Japanese War comes to an end as representatives of the two nations sign the Treaty of Portsmouth in New Hampshire.

    1918 – USS Mount Vernon torpedoed by German submarine off France.

    1918 – U.S. Marines paraded with the Royal Marines in Rosyth, Scotland.

    1923 – U.S. Asiatic Fleet arrives at Yokohama, Japan, to provide medical assistance and supplies after Kondo Plain earthquake.

    1939 – The United States proclaimed its neutrality in World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders Navy and Coast Guard to form a Neutrality Patrol to report the presence of foreign warships within 300 miles of eastern United States.

    1944 – Germany launched its first V-2 missile at Paris, France.

    1945 – Iva Toguri D’Aquino, a Japanese-American suspected of being wartime radio propagandist “Tokyo Rose,” was arrested in Yokohama. D’Aquino served six years in prison.

    1953 – The 1st privately operated atomic reactor opened in Raleigh NC.

    1958 – The 1st color video recording on magnetic tape was presented in Charlotte, NC.

    1961 – President Kennedy signed a law against hijacking. It called for the death penalty for convicted hijackers.

    1969 – Lt. William Calley is charged with six specifications of premeditated murder in the death of 109 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in March 1968. Calley, a platoon leader in Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade (Light) of the 23rd (Americal) Division had led his men in a massacre of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, at My Lai 4, a cluster of hamlets that made up Son My village in Son Tinh District in Quang Ngai Province in the coastal lowlands of I Corps Tactical Zone on March 16, 1968.

    1975 – In Sacramento, California, an assassination attempt against President Gerald Ford is foiled when a Secret Service agent wrests a semi-automatic .45-caliber pistol from Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of incarcerated cult leader Charles Manson. Fromme was pointing the loaded gun at the president when the Secret Service agent grabbed it. Seventeen days later, Ford escaped injury in another assassination attempt when 45-year-old Sara Jane Moore fired a revolver at him.

    1977 – The United States launched the Voyager 1 spacecraft two weeks after launching its twin, Voyager 2.

    1978 – US Pres. Carter, Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt met at Camp David, Md.

    1984 – STS-41-D: The Space Shuttle Discovery lands after its maiden voyage.

    1986 – Pan Am Flight 73, a Pan American World Airways Boeing 747-121, was hijacked while on the ground at Karachi, Pakistan, by four armed Palestinian men of the Abu Nidal Organization. The aircraft, with 360 passengers on board, had just arrived from Sahar International Airport in Mumbai, India, and was preparing to depart Jinnah International Airport in Karachi for Frankfurt Airport in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, ultimately continuing on to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, United States. The motivation for the hijacking was to attack the Israeli defense ministry, using the aircraft as a missile, but the crew escaped while the hijackers were seizing the aircraft, making that impossible.

    1990 – Iraqi President Saddam Hussein urged Arabs to rise up in a Holy War against the West and former allies who had turned against him.

    1990 – USS Acadia (AD-42) departs San Diego for first war-time deployment of male-female crew on combat vessel.

    1991 – Jury selection began in Miami in the drug and racketeering trial of former Panamanian ruler Manuel Noriega.

    2002 – Afghan President Hamid Karzai survived an assassination attempt in the southern city of Kandahar. The attack, by a man dressed in military uniform, occurred shortly after a powerful car bomb in the capital killed at least 26 people and wounded 150.

    2004 – A Turkish company said it was withdrawing from Iraq a day after Iraqi militants threatened to behead its employee unless it ceased operations there.

    2008 – Condoleezza Rice becomes the first United States Secretary of State to visit Libya since 1953.

    2014 – Iranian air traffic control requires a plane chartered by US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan to land over issues with the flight plan. The flight later resumes without further incident.
  7. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 6th ~

    1492 – Columbus’ fleet sailed from Gomera, Canary islands, his final port of call before crossing the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.

    1620 – The Pilgrims sail from Plymouth, England, on the Mayflower to settle in North America.

    1628 – Puritans settle Salem, which will later become part of Massachusetts Bay Colony.

    1776 – The Turtle, the 1st submarine invented by David Bushnell, attempted to secure a cask of gunpowder to the HMS Eagle, flagship of the British fleet, in the Bay of NY but got entangled with the Eagle’s rudder bar, lost ballast and surfaced before the charge was planted.

    1776 – Continental Congress prescribed first Marine uniform.

    1781 – The Battle of Groton Heights (also known as the Battle of Fort Griswold, and occasionally called the Fort Griswold massacre) was a battle of the American Revolutionary War between a small Connecticut militia force led by Lieutenant Colonel William Ledyard and the more numerous British forces led by Brigadier General Benedict Arnold and Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Eyre. In an unsuccessful attempt to divert General George Washington from marching against Lord Cornwallis’s army in Virginia, Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton ordered General Arnold to raid the Connecticut port of New London. Although the raid was a success, the Connecticut militia stubbornly resisted British attempts to capture Fort Griswold, across the Thames River in Groton. Several leaders of the attacking British force were killed or seriously wounded, and much of the defending garrison was either killed, mortally wounded, or captured when the fort was stormed. High British casualties led to criticism of General Arnold by some of his superiors. The battle was the last major military encounter of the war in the northern United States, preceding the decisive American victory at Yorktown, Virginia, by about six weeks.

    1844 – Western explorer John C. Fremont arrives at the shores of the Great Salt Lake, one of the many areas he will map for the lasting benefit of a westward-moving nation. When Fremont reached the strange saltwater inland lake (a remnant of the much larger prehistoric Lake Bonneville), he was not the first Euro-American to view its shores. As early as the 1820s, fur trappers had returned to the East with tales of a bizarre salt lake where no fish swam, and the French explorer Benjamin Bonneville was the first to map the lake’s outlines in 1837. But for the far-ranging John C. Fremont, the Great Salt Lake was only one small part of a much wider journey of discovery and mapping.

    1861 – Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s forces capture Paducah, Kentucky, in a bloodless takeover—allowing the Federals to control the mouth of the Tennessee River, and greatly assisting in the Union campaign in Tennessee in 1862.

    1862 – Stonewall Jackson occupied Frederick, Maryland.

    1862 – U.S.S. Louisiana, Acting Lieutenant Richard T. Renshaw, joined with Union troops in repelling the Confederate attack on Washington, North Carolina. Major General John G. Foster reported that Louisiana rendered most efficient aid, throwing her shells with great precision, and clearing the streets, through which her guns had range.” U.S. Army gunboat Picket was destroyed by an accidental magazine explosion during engagement.

    1901 – President William McKinley is shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley was greeting the crowd in the Temple of Music when Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, stepped forward and shot the president twice at point-blank range. McKinley lived for another week before finally succumbing to a gangrene infection on September 14. At the time of the shooting, President McKinley was very popular and America was in the midst of a period of peace and prosperity.

    1915 – The first tank prototype was completed and given its first test drive on this day, developed by William Foster & Company for the British army. Several European nations had been working on the development of a shielded, tracked vehicle that could cross the uneven terrain of World War I trenches, but Great Britain was the first to succeed. Lightly armed with machine guns, the tanks made their first authoritative appearance at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917, when 474 British tanks managed to break through the German lines. The Allies began using the vehicles in increasing numbers throughout the rest of the war. After World War I, European nations on all sides continued to build tanks at a frantic pace, arming them with even heavier artillery and plating. This competitive stockpiling came to a lethal head on the battlefields of World War II.

    1918 – Sailors fire first of the 5 railroad batteries at Tergnier, a German rail head in the Comeigne Forest. These 14″-50 caliber guns were originally designed for battleships.

    1944 – USS Independence (CVL-22) begins use of specially trained air group for night work. First time that a fully equipped night carrier operates with fast carrier task force.

    1944 – All four carrier groups of US Task Force 38 (Admiral Mitscher), 16 aircraft carriers, begin air strikes on Japanese positions on the islands. The commander of the US 3rd Fleet, Admiral Halsey, is present on board the battleship USS New Jersey.

    1945 – George Weller (d.2002), a Chicago Daily News journalist, wrote his 1st story on the bombing of Nagasaki. Posing as a US Army colonel Weller had slipped into Nagasaki in early September. His stories infuriated MacArthur so much he personally ordered that they be quashed, and the originals were never returned. Carbon copies of his stories, running to about 25,000 words on 75 typed pages, along with more than two dozen photos, were discovered by his son, Anthony, in 2004 at Weller’s apartment in Rome, Italy. In 2005 the national Mainichi newspaper began serializing the stories and photographs for the first time since they were rejected by U.S. military censors.

    1945 – U.S. troops begin returning to U.S. when Task Force 11 left Tokyo Bay for U.S.

    1945 – General Eisenhower lifts press censorship. Meanwhile, British field security troops, acting on orders of the Allied Control Commission, arrest 44 prominent Ruhr industrialists.

    1953 – The last American and Korean prisoners were exchanged in Operation Big Switch, the last official act of the Korean War.

    1954 – A United States plane was shot down above Siberia.

    1966 – The Coast Guard’s GM1 Lester K. Gates was awarded the Bronze Star Medal with a combat “V” device for “meritorious service and action against the enemy” while serving on board CGC Point White (WPB-82308) in Vietnam. The Point White attacked and captured a Viet Cong junk while patrolling the Soi Rap River. GM1 Gates was the first enlisted Coast Guardsman to be awarded the Bronze Star since World War II.

    1967 – U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara announces plans to build an electronic anti-infiltration barrier to block communist flow of arms and troops into South Vietnam from the north at the eastern end of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The “McNamra Line,” as it became known, would employ state-of-the-art, high-tech listening devices to alert U.S. forces when North Vietnamese troops and supplies were moving south so that air and artillery strikes could be brought to bear on them.

    1970 – In the Dawson’s Field hijackings four jet aircraft bound for New York City and one for London were hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and instead landed at the PFLP’s “Revolutionary Airport”.

    1976 – A Soviet Air Force pilot lands his MIG fighter jet in Japan and asks for asylum in the United States. The incident was a serious embarrassment for the Soviets, and also provided a bit of a surprise for U.S. officials. When the Soviets first put the MIG-25 (known as the Foxbat) into production in the 1960s, U.S. officials became nearly hysterical. The new plane, they claimed, was the fastest, most advanced, and most destructive interceptor jet ever built. Its debut, they argued, meant that the United States was falling dangerously behind in the race to control the skies. On September 6, 1976, those officials got a close-up look at the aircraft. Soviet Air Force Lt. Viktor Belenko took his MIG-25 out of Soviet airspace and landed it at a Japanese airfield at Hakodate on the island of Hokkaido. Japanese police took the pilot into custody, where he immediately asked for asylum in the United States.

    1983 – The Soviet Union admits to shooting down KAL (Korean Air Lines) Flight 007, stating that the pilots did not know it was a civilian aircraft when it violated Soviet airspace.

    1997 – The USS Hopper, the 354th ship in the modern naval fleet, was commissioned. The high-tech destroyer is the 2nd warship to be named after a woman. Grace Hooper (d.1992) was a computer programmer for the Navy until she retired in 1986 at age 79. She coined the term “debugging” when she pulled a moth from her computer.

    2002 – Meeting outside Washington D.C., for only the second time since 1800, Congress convened in New York to pay homage to the victims and heroes of Sept. 11, 2001.

    2006 – The United States government announces that fourteen suspected terrorists are to be transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp and admits that these suspects have been held in CIA black sites. These people include Khalid Sheik Mohammed, believed to be the No. 3 al-Qaida leader before he was captured in Pakistan in 2003; Ramzi Binalshibh, an alleged would-be 9/11 hijacker; and Abu Zubaydah, who was believed to be a link between Osama bin Laden and many al-Qaida cells before he was also captured in Pakistan in March 2002.

    2014 – The United States says that it will not coordinate with Iran in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
  8. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 7th ~

    1630 – The Massachusetts town of Trimontaine (Shawmut), was renamed Boston, and became the state capital. It was named after a town of the same name in Lincolnshire, England.

    1776 – During the Revolutionary War, the American submersible craft Turtle attempts to attach a time bomb to the hull of British Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship Eagle in New York Harbor. It was the first use of a submarine in warfare. Submarines were first built by Dutch inventor Cornelius van Drebel in the early 17th century, but it was 150 years later before they were first used in naval combat.

    1778 – Shawnee Indians attacked and laid siege to Boonesborough, Kentucky.

    1813 – The earliest known printed reference to the United States by the nickname “Uncle Sam” occurred in the Troy Post.

    1814 – USS Wasp captures HMS Avon.

    1825 – The Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution, bade farewell to President John Quincy Adams at the White House.

    1864 – In preparation for his march to the sea, Union General William T. Sherman orders residents of Atlanta, Georgia, to evacuate the city.

    1864 – Union General Phil Sheridan’s troops skirmished with the Confederates under Jubal Early outside Winchester, Virginia.

    1864 – USS Wachusett captures commerce raider, CSS Florida at Bahia, Brazil.

    1867 – President Andrew Johnson extended amnesty to all but a few of the leaders of the Confederacy.

    1876 – In Northfield, Minnesota, Jesse James and the James–Younger Gang attempt to rob the town’s bank but are driven off by armed citizens.

    1901 – The Peace of Peking (Beijing) ended the Boxer Rebellion in China.

    1903 – Marines from the USS Brooklyn landed at Beirut to protect American lives.

    1927 – American television pioneer Philo T. Farnsworth, 21, succeeded in transmitting an image through purely electronic means by using a device called an image dissector.

    1940 – Nazi Germany began its initial blitz on London during the World War II Battle of Britain. The German Luftwaffe blitzed London for the 1st of 57 consecutive nights. Nazi Germany launched the aerial bombing of London that Adolf Hitler believed would soften Britain for an invasion. “Operation Sea Lion” never materialized. The Luftwaffe lost 41 bombers over England. The blitz only strengthened Britain’s resistance. The defense of London was for the Royal Air Force what Churchill called “their finest hour.”

    1942 – First air evacuation of casualties to hospital ships off shore occurs at Guadalcanal.

    1942 – First flight of the Consolidated B-32 Dominator. The B-32 (Consolidated Model 34) was a heavy bomber made for United States Army Air Forces during World War II, and had the distinction of being the last Allied aircraft to be engaged in combat during World War II. It was developed in parallel with the Boeing B-29 Superfortress as a fallback design should the Superfortress prove unsuccessful. It only reached units in the Pacific during mid-1945, and subsequently only saw limited combat operations against Japanese targets before the end of the war. Most of the extant orders of the B-32 were cancelled shortly thereafter and only 118 B-32s of all types were built.

    1951 – The US signs an agreement with Saigon for direct aid to South Vietnam.

    1977 – In Washington, President Jimmy Carter and Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos sign a treaty agreeing to transfer control of the Panama Canal from the United States to Panama at the end of the 20th century.

    1986 – Off the Coast of Florida — An F-106 “Delta Dart” of the 125th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron encounters a Soviet Air Force Tu-95 “Bear” bomber flying parallel to the twelve-mile limit of U.S. airspace as it makes its way from Russia to Cuba.

    1990 – The 13th MEU embarked and arrived in the Gulf of Oman, joining U.N. forces.

    1991 – Iraq blocks UNSCOM’s use of helicopters to conduct inspections.

    1993 – Two Rangers are WIA during a two-hour assault against an Aidid compound.

    1994 – U.S. Marines began training on a Puerto Rican island amid talk in Washington of a U.S.-led intervention in Haiti.

    1995 – The space shuttle “Endeavour” thundered into orbit with five astronauts on a mission to release and recapture a pair of science satellites.

    1997 – The US F-22 Raptor Advanced Tactical Fighter took its first flight from Dobbins Air Reserve Base north of Atlanta, Ga. The plane was estimated to cost $100 million.

    1999 – In NY twelve Puerto Rican prisoners agreed to accept Pres. Clinton’s offer of conditional amnesty. The House of Rep. Later condemned the offer in a symbolic vote of 311-41.

    1999 – In Vietnam Madeleine Albright commissioned the new US consulate in Ho Chi Minh City... ( formally Saigon ).

    2001 – The US State Dept. issued a memo that warned Americans “may be the target of a terrorist threat.”

    2002 – U.S. Navy fighter jets dropped dummy bombs and inert missiles on Vieques in military exercises that have divided this outlying Puerto Rican island for years.

    2003 – The top American commander in Afghanistan said Taliban fighters, paid and trained by al-Qaida, were pouring into Afghanistan from Pakistan.

    2007 – United States District Court judge Royce Lamberth orders Iran to pay $2.6 billion to victims and families in the 1983 Hezbollah bombing of a United States Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon that claimed 241 American lives.

    2010 – United States Army General David Petraeus, the Commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, condemns plans by a small Florida church to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks as inflammatory.

    2012 – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton notifies Congress of her intent to include the Haqqani network on the government’s terror list. An attaché at the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington dismisses the decision as an “internal matter” of the United States and reaffirms Pakistan’s commitment to “combating extremism and terrorism.” Haqqani senior commanders say the decision will not help in bringing peace to Afghanistan.

    2014 – The United States launches new airstrikes on ISIS in western Iraq, in an effort to protect the Haditha Dam.
  9. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 8th ~

    1565– A Spanish expedition under Pedro Menendez de Aviles established the first permanent European colony in the present day St. Augustine, Florida. Aviles founded St. Augustine on the site of the Timucuan Indian village of Seloy, 42 years before the English settled at Jamestown and 55 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest permanent European settlement in the US. Castillo de San Marco fortress was built by the Spanish to defend St. Augustine.

    1628 – John Endecott arrived with colonists at Salem, Massachusetts, where he would become the governor.

    1664 – Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant surrenders New Amsterdam, the capital of New Netherland, to an English naval squadron under Colonel Richard Nicolls. Stuyvesant had hoped to resist the English, but he was an unpopular ruler, and his Dutch subjects refused to rally around him. Following its capture, New Amsterdam’s name was changed to New York, in honor of the Duke of York, who organized the mission.

    1740 – Eight hundred volunteers drawn from the militia of several colonies board transports to sail as part of the joint British/American colonial expedition to capture the Spanish colony of Cartagena (today the nation of Columbia). In all, troops from eleven colonies take part in this endeavor, which ends in failure, due more to disease than enemy actions. Perhaps the most memorable aspect was Captain Lawrence Washington’s service with the expedition’s commander, Admiral Edward Vernon. When Washington returned home he renamed his house overlooking the Potomac River in northern Virginia as “Mount Vernon” in honor of his former commander.

    1755 – The Battle of Lake George was fought in the north of the Province of New York. The battle was part of a campaign by the British to expel the French from North America in the French and Indian War.

    1756 – The Kittanning Expedition, also known as the Armstrong Expedition or the Battle of Kittanning, was a raid during the French and Indian War that led to the destruction of the American Indian village of Kittanning, which had served as a staging point for attacks by Delaware (Lenape) warriors against colonists in the British Province of Pennsylvania. Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John Armstrong, this raid deep into hostile territory was the only major expedition carried out by Pennsylvania militia during a brutal backcountry war. Early on this morning they launched a surprise attack on the Indian village.

    1760 – The French surrendered the city of Montreal to British Gen. Jeffrey Amherst.

    1771 – Mission San Gabriel Archangel formed in California.

    1847 – The US under Gen. Scott defeated Mexicans at Battle of Molino del Rey.

    1883 – The Northern Pacific Railway (reporting mark NP) was completed in a ceremony at Gold Creek, Montana. Former president Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final “golden spike” in an event attended by rail and political luminaries.

    1892 – An early version of “The Pledge of Allegiance” appeared in “The Youth’s Companion,” published in Boston and edited by Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist, and cousin of writer Edward Bellamy.

    1923 – The Honda Point Disaster was the largest peacetime loss of U.S. Navy ships. In the evening, as a result of navigation error, an earthquake in japan creating unexpected tidal effects, and poor weather, seven of fourteen Clemson class destroyers of DESRON 11, all less than 5 years old, while traveling at 20 knots (37 km/h), ran aground at Honda Point, a few miles from the northern side of the Santa Barbara Channel off Point Arguello on the coast in Santa Barbara County, California. Two other ships grounded, but were able to maneuver free of the rocks. Twenty-three sailors died in the disaster.

    1939 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaims limited national emergency and increases enlisted strength in the Navy and Marine Corps; also authorizes the recall to active duty of officer, men and nurses on the retired lists of the Navy and Marine Corps.

    1943 – General Dwight Eisenhower publicly announces the surrender of Italy to the Allies.

    1945 – Hideki Tojo, Japanese PM during most of WW II, failed in his attempted suicide rather than face war crimes tribunal attempt. He was later hanged.

    1945 – U.S. troops land in Korea to begin their postwar occupation of the southern part of that nation, almost exactly one month after Soviet troops had entered northern Korea to begin their own occupation. Although the U.S. and Soviet occupations were supposed to be temporary, the division of Korea quickly became permanent. Korea had been a Japanese possession since the early 20th century.

    1945 – The US 1st Cavalry Division enters Tokyo.

    1951 – A formal Treaty of Peace was signed by 48 nations of the United Nations and Japan at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. On the same day the US and Japan signed a Joint Security Pact at the Presidio. The Soviet delegation refused to sign and said the deal provided for the exclusive existence of American military bases in Japan.

    1952 – Major Frederick C. Blesse, 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing, earned his sixth and seventh aerial kills after downing a pair of MiG-15 jet fighters.

    1954 – Having been directed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to put together an alliance to contain any communist aggression in the free territories of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, or Southeast Asia in general, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles forges an agreement establishing a military alliance that becomes the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).

    1958 – LT R. H. Tabor, wearing a Navy developed pressure suit, completes 72-hour simulated flight at altitudes as high a 139,000 feet. It was another step in the development of the Navy spacesuit, which NASA accepted in 1959 for use by Mercury astronauts.

    1960 – NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., was dedicated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

    1974 – In a controversial executive action, President Gerald Ford pardons his disgraced predecessor Richard Nixon for any crimes he may have committed or participated in while in office.

    1990 – President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev arrived in Helsinki, Finland, for a one-day summit sparked by the Persian Gulf crisis.

    1994 – The last US, British & French troops left West-Berlin.

    2000 – The space shuttle Atlantis blasted into orbit to deliver supplies to the new int’l. space station. LCDR Daniel C. Burbank became the second Coast Guard astronaut to fly on a shuttle mission.

    2002 – The Guardian reports that the United States has begun a massive military build-up required for a war against Iraq, ordering the movement of tens of thousands of men and tons of material to the Gulf region.

    2003 – NASA presented a “return to flight” plan for the shuttle fleet.

    2004 – NASA’s $260 million Genesis space capsule crashed in the Utah desert after its parachute failed to open. It carried a cargo of solar wind particles.

    2005 – Two Russian EMERCOM Il-76 aircraft carrying aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina land at a disaster aid staging area at Little Rock Air Force Base; the first time Russia has flown such a mission to North America.

    2010– The U.S. Army announced the arrival in Iraq of the first specifically-designated Advise and Assist Brigade, the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment. It was announced that the unit would assume responsibilities in five southern provinces.
  10. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 9th ~

    1675 – New England colonial authorities officially declared war on the Wampanoag Indians. War soon spread to include the Abenaki, Norwottock, Pocumtuck and Agawam warriors.

    1739 – A slave revolt in Stono, SC, led by an Angolan slave named Jemmy, killed 20-25 whites. Three slave uprisings occurred in South Carolina in 1739. Whites soon passed black codes to regulate every aspect of slave life.

    1753 – The 1st steam engine arrived in US colonies.

    1776 – The term “United States” was adopted by the second Continental Congress to be used instead of the “United Colonies.”

    1786 – George Washington called for the abolition of slavery.

    1791 – Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, is named after President George Washington.

    1825 – USS Brandywine sails for France to carry the Marquis de Lafayette home after his year long visit to America.

    1841 – First iron ship authorized by Congress.

    1850 – Though it had only been a part of the United States for less than two years, California becomes the 31st state in the union (without ever even having been a territory) on this day in 1850. Mexico had reluctantly ceded California and much of its northern territory to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,. When the Mexican diplomats signed the treaty, they pictured California as a region of sleepy mission towns with a tiny population of about 7,300-not a devastating loss to the Mexican empire.

    1850 – Territories of New Mexico and Utah were created.

    1850 – The Compromise of 1850 transfers a third of Texas’s claimed territory (now parts of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Wyoming) to federal control in return for the U.S. federal government assuming $10 million of Texas’s pre-annexation debt.

    1861 – Sally Louisa Tompkins (b.1833) was commissioned as a Confederate captain of cavalry. Born into a wealthy and altruistic family in coastal Mathews County, Virginia, Tompkins was destined for a life of philanthropy. After moving to Richmond, she spent much of her time and a considerable portion of her fortune assisting causes she considered worthy. With the onset of civil war, she labored on the behalf of the South’s wounded soldiers, and for this she became the first and only woman to receive an officer’s commission in the Confederate army.

    1862 – General Robert E. Lee split his army and sent General Stonewall Jackson to capture Harpers Ferry.

    1863 – Union General William Rosecrans completes a brilliant campaign against the army of Confederate General Braxton Bragg when his forces capture Chattanooga, Tennessee.

    1919 – The infamous Boston Police Strike of 1919 begins, causing an uproar around the nation and confirming the growing influence of unions on American life. Using the situation to their advantage, criminals took the opportunity to loot the city. As society changed in the 20th century, police were expected to act more professionally. Some of their previous practices were no longer countenanced. Explanations such as that given by the Dallas chief of police in defense of their unorthodox tactics-“Illegality is necessary to preserve legality”-was no longer acceptable to the public. Police forces were brought within the civil service framework and even received training for the first time. Soon, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) began to create local police unions.

    1940 – A new $5,500,000,000 appropriations bill becomes law in the United States. Contracts are placed for 210 vessels for the navy, including seven battleships and 12 carriers.

    1940 – The first of the 50 old destroyers given to Britain is taken over by a Royal Navy crew.

    1940 – George Stibitz pioneers the first remote operation of a computer.

    1942 – USS Muskeget (Coast Guard-manned) was sunk without trace while on weather patrol. Her entire crew of 9 officers and 111 enlisted men were lost. It was learned after the war that she had been torpedoed by the U-755.

    1942 – A Japanese floatplane drops incendiary bombs on an Oregon state forest-the first and only attack on the U.S. mainland in the war. Launching from the Japanese sub I-25, Nobuo Fujita piloted his light aircraft over the state of Oregon and firebombed Mount Emily, alighting a state forest–and ensuring his place in the history books as the only man to ever bomb the continental United States. The president immediately called for a news blackout for the sake of morale. No long-term damage was done, and Fujita eventually went home to train navy pilots for the rest of the war.

    1945 – American servicemen begin to returning to the United States (Operation Magic Carpet).

    1947 – A “computer bug” is first identified and named by LT Grace Murray Hopper while she was on Navy active duty in 1945. It was found in the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator at Harvard University. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, where it still resides, with the entry: “First actual case of bug being found.” They “debugged” the computer, first introducing the term.

    1950 – Captain Leslie E. Brown became the first Marine Corps aviator to a fly a jet in combat.

    1951 – Fourth Fighter-Interceptor Wing Captains Richard S. Becker and Ralph D. Gibson became the second and third aces of the Korean War, with five kills each. On this day, they each shot down a MiG-15 in an air battle that pitted 28 Sabres against 70 MiGs.

    1970 – U.S. Marines launched Operation Dubois Square, a 10-day search for North Vietnamese troops near DaNang. Marine pilots in their diminutive Douglas A-4 Skyhawks provided vital close air support for ground forces in Vietnam.

    1971 – The four-day Attica Prison riot begins, which eventually results in 39 dead, most killed by state troopers and New York National Guard retaking the prison.

    1972 – U.S. Air Force Capt. Charles B. DeBellevue (Weapons Systems Officer) flying with his pilot, Capt. John A. Madden, in a McDonnell Douglas F-4D, shoots down two MiG-19s near Hanoi. These were Captain DeBellevue’s fifth and sixth victories, which made him the leading American ace (an unofficial designation awarded for having downed at least five enemy aircraft in air-to-air combat) of the war. All of his victories came in a four-month period. Captain Madden would record a third MiG kill two months later.

    1976 – Mao Zedong, who led the Chinese people through a long revolution and then ruled the nation’s communist government from its establishment in 1949, dies. Along with V.I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Mao was one of the most significant communist figures of the Cold War.

    1990 – President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev held a one-day summit in Helsinki, Finland, after which they joined in condemning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

    1994 – The space shuttle Discovery blasted off on an 11-day mission.

    1998 – The Tripartite Gold Commission closed. It was set up in 1946 by Britain, France and the United States to oversee the return of some $4 billion in gold plundered by the Nazis from European treasuries.

    2002 – Iraq challenged the United States to produce “one piece of evidence” that it was producing weapons of mass destruction. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the Security Council must be allowed to have its say on a possible attack against Iraq.

    2004 – It was reported that a munitions plant in Oklahoma had suspended production of “bunker buster” bombs after workers there developed anemia.

    2004 – Ayman al-Zawahri said in an al Qaeda videotape that the US will be ultimately defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    2004 – US jets pounded the rebel stronghold of Fallujah, and American and Iraqi forces entered the central city of Samarra for the first time in months to try to reseat the city council and regain control.

    2005 – United States Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff appoints Vice Admiral Thad W. Allen, chief of staff of the United States Coast Guard, to direct Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in New Orleans, in place of Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael D. Brown, who returns to Washington to direct planning for future disaster relief.

    2006 – Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off from John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin STS-115. mission to the International Space Station (ISS) flown by Space Shuttle Atlantis. It was the first assembly mission to the ISS after the Columbia disaster, following the two successful Return to Flight missions, STS-114 and STS-121. The mission delivered the second port-side truss segment (ITS P3/P4), a pair of solar arrays (2A and 4A), and batteries. A total of three spacewalks were performed, during which the crew connected the systems on the installed trusses, prepared them for deployment, and did other maintenance work on the station.

    2010 – United States Marines board and seize control of a German-owned vessel, Magellan Star, previously captured by pirates off the coast of Somalia.
  11. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 10th ~

    1608 – English adventurer John Smith is elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia–the first permanent English settlement in North America.

    1776 – George Washington asked for a spy volunteer and Nathan Hale volunteered.

    1813 – In the first unqualified defeat of a British naval squadron in history, U.S. Captain Oliver Hazard Perry leads a fleet of nine American ships to victory over a squadron of six British warships at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812.

    1897 – The Lattimer Massacre was the violent deaths of 19 unarmed striking immigrant anthracite coal miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania. The miners, mostly of Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German ethnicity, were shot and killed by a Luzerne County sheriff’s posse. Scores more workers were wounded. This initial incident did not result in military activity, but 2500 troops of the Third Brigade of the Pennsylvania National Guard were deployed to restore order to the resulting mob rule and prevented a reprisal by mine workers on the 20th. The artillery units were withdrawn on the 24th and all troops were returned home by the 29th.

    1919 – New York City welcomed home Gen. John J. Pershing and 25,000 soldiers who had served in the U.S. First Division during World War I.

    1925 – Submarine R-4 rescues crew of PN-9 10 miles from their destination of Hawaii.

    1939 – The government of Canada declares war on Germany. The Canadians are the last of the great Dominions to declare war, however, the few days of hesitation permits the accelerated delivery from the US of large amounts of war goods which are now barred under American neutrality laws.

    1942 – Following the example of several European nations, President Franklin D. Roosevelt mandated gasoline rationing in the U.S. as part of the country’s wartime efforts. Gasoline rationing was just one of the many measures taken during these years, as the entire nation was transformed into a unified war machine: women took to the factories, households tried to conserve energy, and American automobile manufacturers began producing tanks and planes. The gasoline ration was lifted in 1945, at the end of World War II.

    1945 – At a meeting of the Allied Control Commission (Zhukov, Eisenhower, Montgomery and Koenig), it is decided to transmit to all neutral states a request for the return to Germany of “all German officials and obnoxious Germans” now in those countries. The states affected are Afghanistan, Eire (Ireland), Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland as well as Vatican City and the Tangier Zone.

    1945 – General MacArthur order the dissolution of the Imperial general headquarters and imposes censorship of the printed press and radio.

    1948 – Mildred Gillars, accused of being Nazi wartime radio broadcaster “Axis Sally,” was indicted in Washington, D.C., on treason charges. She was later convicted, and served 12 years in prison.

    1963 – 20 black students entered public schools in Birmingham, Tuskegee and Mobile, Ala., following a standoff between federal authorities and Gov. George C. Wallace. President John F. Kennedy federalized Alabama’s National Guard to prevent Governor George C. Wallace from using guardsmen to stop public-school desegregation.

    1964 – Following the Tonkin Gulf incidents, in which North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked U.S. destroyers, and the subsequent passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution empowering him to react to armed attacks, President Lyndon Johnson authorizes a series of measures “to assist morale in South Vietnam and show the Communists [in North Vietnam] we still mean business.”

    2000 – The US federal government agreed to drop its case against Wen Ho Lee, a former Los Alamos scientist, in exchange for a single guilty plea for downloading classified material to an insecure computer. Lee was released 3 days later.

    2000 – The space shuttle Atlantis docked with the international space station.

    2001 – Iraq said it shot down a 2nd US spy plane. The US reported an unmanned plane missing.

    2002 – The Bush administration raised the nationwide terror alert to yellow, its second-highest level, closed nine U.S. embassies overseas and heightened security at federal buildings and landmarks in America on the eve of the Sept. 11 anniversary.

    2006 – A lengthy statement from al-Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks calls on Muslims to step up their resistance against the United States.

    2007 – In a speech made to Congress, General Petraeus “envisioned the withdrawal of roughly 30,000 U.S. troops by next summer, beginning with a Marine contingent [in September].” He warns against a too rapid withdrawal.

    2013 – Barack Obama gives a televised address to the nation, saying that he has asked the United States Congress to postpone a vote on the use of force in Syria while he pursues a diplomatic solution.

    2014 – Barack Obama authorizes $25 million for “immediate military assistance” to the Iraqi government and Kurdistan Regional Government. He also outlines plans to expand US operations against Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant to Syria in a televised address to the nation.
  12. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 11th ~

    1609 – Henry Hudson discovers Manhattan Island and the indigenous people living there.

    1775 – Benedict Arnold’s expedition to Quebec leaves Cambridge, Massachusetts. Colonel Benedict Arnold led a force of 1,100 Continental Army troops on an expedition from Cambridge, Massachusetts to the gates of Quebec City. Part of a two-pronged invasion of the British Province of Quebec, his expedition passed through the wilderness of what is now Maine. By the time Arnold reached the French settlements above the Saint Lawrence River in November, his force was reduced to 600 starving men. The plan turned into nothing but failure, but Arnold was rewarded for his effort in leading the expedition with a promotion to brigadier general.

    1776 – British–American peace conference on Staten Island fails to stop the American War of Independence. The conference took place at Billop Manor, the residence of Colonel Christopher Billop, on Staten Island, New York. The participants were the British Admiral Lord Richard Howe, and members of the Second Continental Congress John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Edward Rutledge. Since Lord Howe’s authority was, by design, extremely limited, the Congressional delegation was pessimistic about the meeting’s outcome. The conference, held in the days after the British capture of Long Island, lasted just three hours and was a failure. The Americans insisted on recognition of their recently declared independence, and Howe’s limited authority was inadequate to deal with that development. After the conference, the British continued their military campaign for control of New York City.

    1777 – General George Washington and his troops were defeated by the British under General Sir William Howe at the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania between the American army of General George Washington and the British army of General Sir William Howe. The British defeated the Americans and forced them to withdraw toward the American capital of Philadelphia. The engagement occurred near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania during Howe’s campaign to take Philadelphia, part of the American Revolutionary War. Howe’s army sailed from New York City and landed near Elkton, Maryland in northern Chesapeake Bay. Marching north, the British Army brushed aside American light forces in a few skirmishes. Washington offered battle with his army posted behind Brandywine Creek. While part of his army demonstrated in front of Chadds Ford, Howe took the bulk of his troops on a long march that crossed the Brandywine beyond Washington’s right flank. Due to poor scouting, the Americans did not detect Howe’s column until it reached a position in rear of their right flank. Belatedly, three divisions were shifted to block the British flanking force near a Quaker meeting house. After a stiff fight, Howe’s wing broke through the newly formed American right wing which was deployed on several hills. At this point Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Knyphausen attacked Chadds Ford and crumpled the American left wing. As Washington’s army streamed away in retreat, he brought up elements of Nathanael Greene’s division which held off Howe’s column long enough for his army to escape to the northeast. The defeat and subsequent maneuvers left Philadelphia vulnerable. The British captured Philadelphia on September 26, beginning an occupation that would last until June 1778.

    1783 – Benjamin Franklin drafted the Treaty of Paris.

    1786 – The US Convention of Annapolis opened with the aim of revising the Articles of Confederation.

    1813 – British troops arrive in Mount Vernon and prepare to march to and invade Washington, D.C..

    1814 – During the Battle of Plattsburg on Lake Champlain, a newly built U.S. fleet under Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough destroys a British squadron, forcing the British to abandon their siege of the U.S. fort at Plattsburg and retreat to Canada on foot.

    1857 – Mormon guerillas, stoked by religious zeal and a deep resentment of decades of public abuse and federal interference, murder 120 emigrants at Mountain Meadows, Utah. Although historical accounts differ, the conflict with the wagon train of emigrants from Missouri and Arkansas apparently began when the Mormons refused to sell the train any supplies. Some of the emigrants then began to commit minor depredations against Mormon fields, abuse the local Paiute Indians, and taunt the Mormons with reminders of how the Missourians had attacked and chased them out of that state during the 1830s. Angered by the emigrants’ abuse and fired by a zealous passion against the growing tide of invading gentiles, a group of Mormons guerillas from around Cedar City decided to take revenge. Cooperating with a group of Paiute Indians who had already attacked the train on their own initiative, the Mormon guerillas initially pretended to be protectors. The guerillas persuaded the emigrants that they had convinced the Paitues to let them go if they would surrender their arms and allow the Mormons to escort the wagon train through the territory. But as the train again moved forward under the Mormon escort, a guerilla leader gave a pre-arranged signal. The Mormons opened fire on the unarmed male emigrants, while the Paiutes reportedly murdered the women. Later accounts suggested that some Mormons had only fired in the air while others killed as few of the emigrants as they could. But when the shooting stopped in Mountain Meadows, 120 men and women were dead. Only 18 small children were spared. As a direct result of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the U.S. government demanded a new settlement from Brigham Young. In 1858, the Mormons agreed to accept a continued presence of federal troops and a Gentile governor for Utah Territory. No further significant Mormon-Gentile violence occurred, and the Latter Day Saints were thereafter largely left to govern themselves. But the era of complete Mormon domination of Utah ended as a result of the tragedy that day in Mountain Meadows.

    1861 – Confederate troops under General Robert E. Lee move into position against a Union stronghold on Cheat Mountain in western Virginia, only to retreat three days later without firing a shot.

    1864 – A 10-day truce was declared between generals Sherman and Hood so civilians could leave Atlanta, Georgia.

    1904 – The battleship Connecticut, launched in New York, introduced a new era in naval construction.

    1918 – US troops landed in Russia to fight the Bolsheviks.

    1918 – Often called the “war of the machines,” World War I marked the beginning of a new kind of warfare, fought with steel and shrapnel. Automotive manufacturers led the way in this new technology of war, producing engines for planes, building tanks, and manufacturing military vehicles. Packard was at the forefront of these efforts, being among the first American companies to completely cease civilian car production. Packard had already been the largest producer of trucks for the Allies, but the company began devoting all of its facilities to war production on this day, just a few months before the end of the war. Even after Packard resumed production of civilian vehicles, its wartime engines appeared in a number of vehicles, from racing cars and boats to British tanks in the next world war.

    1919 – US Marines invaded Honduras (again).

    1939 – Churchill begins correspondence with Roosevelt which he signs as “A Naval Person”.

    1941 – As a result of public outrage over the Greer incident, the president announces that American warships will be able to “shoot on sight” to ensure the protection of waters “necessary for American defense.” This formalizes a situation which has been commonly occurring.

    1941 – Ground is broken for the construction of The Pentagon.

    1942 – Wheeler Bryson Lipes (1921-2005), a US Navy pharmacist’s mate, saved the life of sailor Darrell Dean Rector (19) by operating, following a medical manual, in the officer’s mess aboard the Sea Dragon below the surface of the South China Sea. George Weller (d.2002), war correspondent, won the Pulitzer in 1943 for his account of the operation.

    1952 – Six Marine Corps F9F-4s from VMF-115 crashed into a mountain during an instrument letdown in the vicinity of airfield K-2, Korea. All pilots were killed instantly.

    1965 – 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) begins to arrive in South Vietnam at Qui Nhon, bringing U.S. troop strength in South Vietnam to more than 125,000. The unit, which had a long and storied history, was the first full U.S. Army division deployed to Vietnam.

    1969 – Heavy bombing of Vietnam resumed under orders from President Nixon.

    1990 – President Bush addressed Congress on the Persian Gulf crisis, vowing that “Saddam Hussein will fail” in his takeover of Kuwait.

    1992 – President Bush announced he was approving the sale of 72 F-15 jet fighters to Saudi Arabia.

    1997 – NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor reaches Mars.
  13. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2001 ~

    At 8:45 a.m. on a clear Tuesday morning, an American Airlines Boeing 767 loaded with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel crashes into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact left a gaping, burning hole near the 80th floor of the 110-story skyscraper, instantly killing hundreds of people and trapping hundreds more in higher floors. As the evacuation of the tower and its twin got underway, television cameras broadcasted live images of what initially appeared to be a freak accident.
    Then, 18 minutes after the first plane hit, a second Boeing 767–United Airlines Flight 175–appeared out of the sky, turned sharply toward the World Trade Center, and sliced into the south tower at about the 60th floor. The collision caused a massive explosion that showered burning debris over surrounding buildings and the streets below. America was under attack.

    The attackers were Islamic terrorists from Saudi Arabia and several other Arab nations. Reportedly financed by Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist organization, they were allegedly acting in retaliation for America’s support of Israel, its involvement in the Persian Gulf War, and its continued military presence in the Middle East. Some of the terrorists had lived in the United States for more than a year and had taken flying lessons at American commercial flight schools. Others had slipped into the U.S. in the months before September 11 and acted as the “muscle” in the operation. The 19 terrorists easily smuggled box-cutters and knives through security at three East Coast airports and boarded four flights bound for California, chosen because the planes were loaded with fuel for the long transcontinental journey. Soon after takeoff, the terrorists commandeered the four planes and took the controls, transforming the ordinary commuter jets into guided missiles. As millions watched in horror the events unfolding in New York, American Airlines Flight 77 circled over downtown Washington and slammed into the west side of the Pentagon military headquarters at 9:45 a.m. Jet fuel from the Boeing 757 caused a devastating inferno that led to a structural collapse of a portion of the giant concrete building. All told, 125 military personnel and civilians were killed in the Pentagon along with all 64 people aboard the airliner.

    Less than 15 minutes after the terrorists struck the nerve center of the U.S. military, the horror in New York took a catastrophic turn for the worse when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed in a massive cloud of dust and smoke. The structural steel of the skyscraper, built to withstand winds in excess of 200 mph and a large conventional fire, could not withstand the tremendous heat generated by the burning jet fuel. At 10:30 a.m., the other Trade Center tower collapsed. Close to 4,000 people died in the World Trade Center and its vicinity, including a staggering 343 firefighters and 23 policemen who were struggling to complete an evacuation of the buildings and save the office workers trapped on higher floors. Only six people in the World Trade Center towers at the time of their collapse survived. Almost 10,000 other people were treated for injuries, many severe.

    Meanwhile, a fourth California-bound plane–United Flight 93–was hijacked about 40 minutes after leaving Newark International Airport in New Jersey. Because the plane had been delayed in taking off, passengers on board learned of events in New York and Washington via cell phone and Airfone calls to the ground. Knowing that the aircraft was not returning to an airport as the hijackers claimed, a group of passengers and flight attendants planned an insurrection. One of the passengers, Thomas Burnett, Jr., told his wife over the phone that “I know we’re all going to die. There’s three of us who are going to do something about it. I love you, honey.” Another passenger–Todd Beamer–was heard saying “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll” over an open line. Sandy Bradshaw, a flight attendant, called her husband and explained that she had slipped into a galley and was filling pitchers with boiling water. Her last words to him were “Everyone’s running to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye.” The passengers fought the four hijackers and are suspected to have attacked the cockpit with a fire extinguisher. The plane then flipped over and sped toward the ground at upwards of 500 miles per hour, crashing in a rural field in western Pennsylvania at 10:10 a.m. All 45 people aboard were killed. Its intended target is not known, but theories include the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, or one of several nuclear power plants along the eastern seaboard.
    At 7 p.m., President George W. Bush, who had spent the day being shuttled around the country because of security concerns, returned to the White House. At 9 p.m., he delivered a televised address from the Oval Office, declaring “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.” In a reference to the eventual U.S. military response he declared: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

    Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S.-led international effort to oust the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and destroy Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network based there, began on October 7th.
  14. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 11th ~

    2002 – The “Don’t Tread on Me” First Navy Jack is flown by Navy ships marking the first anniversary of the terrorists attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

    2005 – An eleven minute video tape purporting to be from Al Qaeda is delivered to American network ABC in Pakistan and shown on Good Morning America, warns of future attacks on Los Angeles, California and Melbourne, Australia. Adam Yahiye Gadahn, an American convert to Islam, called the September 11, 2001 attacks “blessed events” and commenting on possible attacks in the future stated, “This time, don’t count on us demonstrating restraint and compassion.”

    2008 – The Pentagon Memorial in Washington, DC, dedicated to the 184 people who died in the attack on the building on September 11, 2001, is opened to the public.

    2012 – Islamic militants attacked the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith. Stevens was the first U.S. Ambassador killed on duty since 1979. Three members of the team responsible for the Embassy’s security believe that Stevens would have survived the attack had they not been delayed three times for thirty minutes by the top CIA officer in Benghazi. Several hours later, a second assault targeted a different compound about one mile away, killing two CIA contractors, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty. Ten others were also injured in the attacks.
  15. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 12th ~

    1609 – English explorer Henry Hudson sailed into the river that now bears his name. Hudson sailed for the Dutch East India Company in search of the Northwest Passage, a water route linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, when he sailed up the present-day Hudson River.

    1786 – Despite his failed efforts to suppress the American Revolution, Lord Cornwallis was appointed governor general of India.

    1814 – A British fleet under Sir Alexander Cochrane began the bombardment of Fort McHenry, the last American defense before Baltimore. Lawyer Francis Scott Key had approached the British attackers seeking the release of a friend who was being held for unfriendly acts toward the British. Key himself was detained overnight on September 13 and witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry from a British ship. As the sun rose, Key was amazed to see the American flag still flying over the battered fort. This experience inspired Key to write the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner” and adapt them to the tune of a well-known British drinking song. “The Star-Spangled Banner” was officially recognized as the national anthem in 1931.

    1814 – The Battle of North Point was fought near Baltimore during War of 1812 between General John Stricker’s Maryland Militia and a British force led by Major General Robert Ross. Although the Americans retreated, they were able to do so in good order having inflicted significant casualties on the British, killing one of the commanders of the invading force, significantly demoralizing the troops under his command and leaving some of his units lost among woods and swampy creeks, with others in confusion. This combination prompted British colonel Arthur Brooke to delay his advance against Baltimore, buying valuable time to properly prepare for the defense of the city as Stricker retreated back to the main defenses to bolster the existing force. The engagement was a part of the larger Battle of Baltimore, an American victory in the War of 1812.

    1847 – The Battle of Chapultepec was a United States victory over Mexican forces holding Chapultepec Castle west of Mexico City during the Mexican-American War.

    1861 – Confederate General Sterling Price continues his campaign to secure Missouri in the early days of the war by converging on a Union garrison at Lexington, Missouri. The nine-day siege ended with the surrender of the Federals. The Battle of Lexington followed shortly after the much larger Battle of Wilson’s Creek on August 10, 1861. That engagement, in southwestern Missouri, resulted in heavy losses and the scattering of the Union force in the area. Price, who was also the Confederate commander at Wilson’s Creek, now headed north to expand the Confederates’ hold on the state.

    1862 – The Battle of Harpers Ferry took place in Virginia.

    1916 – First demonstration of automatic stabilization and direction gear in aircraft.

    1917 – General John J. Pershing selected the 7th Marine Company to guard his headquarters in France.

    1918 – The US First Army and the French II Colonial Corps launch a five day attack on the salient at St. Mihiel. It has been held continuously by the Germans since 1914.

    1919 – Adolf Hitler joined the German Worker’s Party.

    1938 – Adolf Hitler demands autonomy and self-determination for the Germans of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.

    1939 – The US Navy begins regular neutrality patrols along the entire length of the eastern seaboard and in the Caribbean.

    1941 – The US ship Busko captured the 1st German ship in WW II.

    1942 – On Guadalcanal, major attacks by the Japanese units, from General Kawaguchi’s 35th brigade, begin. Fighting is heavy especially around the aptly named “Bloody Ridge”. Reinforcements of aircraft are flown to the Americans from the USS Wasp.

    1942 – German U-boat U-156 sinks the passenger liner Laconia, just south of the equator, off the coast of Africa.

    1943 – German paratroopers took Benito Mussolini from the hotel where he was being held by Italian resistance forces. Waffen-SS troops under Otto Skorzeny freed Mussolini at Gran Sasso in the Abruzzi Mountains.

    1943 – German paratroopers took Benito Mussolini from the hotel where he was being held by Italian resistance forces. Waffen-SS troops under Otto Skorzeny freed Mussolini at Gran Sasso in the Abruzzi Mountains.

    1944 – During World War II, U.S. Army troops entered Germany for the first time, near Trier.

    1944 – Three groups of US Task Force 38, with 12 carriers, conduct air strikes on Japanese positions on the Visayas or central Philippine islands.

    1945 – British troops arrive in Saigon to accept surrender of the Japanese according to the terms of the Potsdam Conference.

    1952 – USS Coral Sea (CVB-43) took Marshall Josip Tito for a one-day cruise in the Adriatic Sea where he was shown flight operations.

    1953 – When the 6,000 ton ore carrier SS Maryland grounded off Marquette, Michigan, a Coast Guard helicopter, in the face of driving wind and rain that required the combined efforts of both pilots to hold the controls and stabilize the aircraft, removed 12 crew members with a breeches buoy without any casualties.

    1958 – Jack Kilby, an engineer at Texas Instruments, demonstrates the first integrated circuit.

    1966 – Launch of Gemini 11, piloted by CDR Charles Conrad Jr., USN and LCDR Richard F. Gordon Jr., USN. Their mission lasted 2 days and 23 hours and included 44 orbits at an altitude of 1368.9 km.. Recovery was by HS-3 helicopter from USS Guam (LPH-9).

    1970 – US professor Timothy Leary, LSD proponent, escaped from a California jail. Leary escaped from the State Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo with the help of his third wife, Rosemary and the Weather Underground. He went to Algiers and joined Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who kidnapped the Learys after a political disagreement. They soon escaped and made their way to Afghanistan. In 1974 he was caught and revealed his collaborators to the FBI.

    1972 – U.S. intelligence agencies (the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency) report to the National Security Council that the North Vietnamese have 100,000 regular troops in South Vietnam and can sustain fighting “at the present rate” for two years.

    1986 – Joseph Cicippio, the acting comptroller at the American University in Beirut, was kidnapped; he was released in December 1991.

    1991 – The space shuttle Discovery blasted off on a mission to deploy an observatory designed to study the Earth’s ozone layer.

    1992 – The space shuttle Endeavour blasted off, carrying with it Mark Lee and Jan Davis, the first married couple in space; Mae Jemison, the first black woman in space; and Mamoru Mohri, the first Japanese citizen to fly on a U.S. spaceship.

    1993 – The space shuttle Discovery blasted off from Cape Canaveral on a 10-day mission.

    1994 – Frank Eugene Corder crashes a single-engine Cessna 150 into the White House’s south lawn, striking the West wing and killing himself.

    1999 – North Korea agreed indirectly to freeze its missile testing program.

    2001 – Pres. Bush called Tuesday’s terrorist attacks “acts of war.” Stunned rescue workers continued to search for bodies in the World Trade Center’s smoking rubble a day after a terrorist attack that shut down the financial capital, badly damaged the Pentagon and left thousands dead. The US began building a broad int’l. coalition for a possible military retaliation against those responsible for the terrorist attacks on Sep 11. Federal authorities said followers of Osama bin Laden were responsible for airline hijackings directed at NYC and the Pentagon. The US air system remained grounded and financial markets closed.

    2001 – In Afghanistan Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, went into hiding. The Taliban military repositioned weaponry in anticipation of a US strike.

    2002 – Pres. Bush addressed the UN and laid out his case against Iraq’s Pres. Saddam Hussein. Bush told skeptical world leaders at the United Nations to confront the “grave and gathering danger” of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or to stand aside as the United States acted.

    2011 – The 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City opens to the public. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum (also known as the 9/11 Memorial and 9/11 Memorial Museum) is the principal memorial and museum commemorating the September 11 attacks of 2001, which killed 2,977 people, and the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, which killed six. The memorial is located at the World Trade Center site, on the former location of the Twin Towers, which were destroyed during the attacks. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation was renamed the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center in 2007. The winner of the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition was Israeli architect Michael Arad of Handel Architects, a New York- and San Francisco-based firm. Arad worked with landscape architecture firm Peter Walker and Partners on the design which calls for a forest of trees with two square pools in the center, where the Twin Towers once stood.

    2013 – NASA announces the Voyager 1 space probe has left the solar system becoming the first man-made object to reach interstellar space.

    2014 – NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover reaches its final destination Aeolis Mons, a mountain that rises 5.5 km at the center of Gale Crater.
  16. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 13th ~

    1759 – During the Seven Years War, a worldwide conflict known as the French and Indian War in America, the British under General James Wolfe achieve a dramatic victory when they scale the cliffs over the city of Quebec, defeating the Marquis de Montcalm’s French forces on the Plains of Abraham. Wolfe himself was fatally wounded during the battle, as did Montcalm...but his victory ensured British supremacy in Canada.

    1782 – Franco-Spanish troops, acting abroad to distract British efforts from The American War of Independence, launch the unsuccessful “grand assault” during the Great Siege of Gibraltar. An attempt by Spain and France to capture Gibraltar from the British. This was the largest action fought during the war in terms of numbers, particularly the Grand Assault of 18 September 1782. At three years and seven months, it is the longest siege endured by the British Armed Forces.

    1788 – The Congress of the Confederation authorized the first national election, and declared New York City the temporary national capital. The Constitutional Convention authorized the first federal election resolving that electors in all the states will be appointed on January 7, 1789. The Convention decreed that the first federal election would be held on the first Wednesday in February of the following year.

    1789 – Start of the US National Debt as the government took out its first loan, borrowed from the Bank of North America (NYC) at 6 percent interest. The US debt had reached $77 million when Washington became president.

    1803 – Commodore John Barry, considered by many the father of the American Navy, died in Philadelphia.

    1814 – In a turning point in the War of 1812, the British fail to capture Baltimore.

    1847 – General Winfield Scott wins the last major battle of the Mexican-American War, storming the ancient Chapultepec fortress at the edge of Mexico City. The war between the U.S. and its southern neighbor began the year before when President James Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to advance to the disputed Rio Grande border between the newly-minted American state of Texas and Mexico. The Mexican government had once controlled Texas and refused to recognize the American claim on the state or the validity of the Rio Grande as an international border. Viewing Taylor’s advance as an invasion of Mexican soil, the Mexican army crossed the Rio Grande and attacked the U.S. forces in Texas in April 1846. By mid-May the two nations were formally at war. The Mexican army was larger than the American army, but its leadership, training, and supplies were all inferior to those of the U.S. forces. Mexican gunpowder was notoriously weak, and cannon balls from their guns often just bounced slowly across battlefields where the American soldiers simply stepped out of the way. As a result, by January of 1847, General Taylor had conquered California and the northern Mexican territories that would later make up much of the American southwest.

    1862 – Union soldiers find a copy of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s orders detailing the Confederates’ plan for the Antietam campaign near Frederick, Maryland. But Union General George B. McClellan was slow to act, and the advantage the intelligence provided was lost. On the morning of September 13, the 27th Indiana rested in a meadow outside of Frederick, Maryland, which had served as the site of a Confederate camp a few days before. Sergeant John Bloss and Corporal Barton W. Mitchell found a piece of paper wrapped around three cigars. The paper was addressed to Confederate General D.H. Hill. Its title read, “Special Order No. 191, Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia.” Realizing that they had discovered a copy of the Confederate operation plan, Barton and Mitchell quickly passed it up the chain of command. By chance, the division adjutant general, Samuel Pittman, recognized the handwriting on the orders as that of a colleague from the prewar army, Robert Chilton, who was the adjutant general to Robert E. Lee. Pittman took the order to McClellan. The Union commander had spent the previous week mystified by Lee’s operations, but now the Confederate plan was clear. He reportedly gloated, “Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home.” McClellan now knew that Lee’s forces were split into five parts and scattered over a 30-mile stretch, with the Potomac River in between. At least eight miles separated each piece of Lee’s army, and McClellan was just a dozen miles from the nearest Confederate unit at South Mountain. Bruce Catton, the noted Civil War historian, observed that no general in the war “was ever given so fair a chance to destroy the opposing army one piece at a time.” Yet McClellan squandered the opportunity. His initial jubilation was overtaken by his caution. He believed that Lee possessed a far greater number of troops than the Confederates actually had, despite the fact that the Maryland invasion resulted in a high rate of desertion among the Southerners.

    1867 – Gen. E.R.S. Canby ordered South Carolina courts to impanel blacks as jurors.

    1881 – Ambrose Everett Burnside, US Union general, died at 57.

    1898 – Hannibal Goodwin patents celluloid photographic film.

    1906 – Sailors and Marines from USS Denver land in Havana at the request of the Cuban government to preserve order during a revolution.

    1918 – U.S. and French forces took St. Mihiel, France, in America’s first action as an expeditionary army.

    1939 – Navy suspends transfers to the Fleet Reserve after 20 years service and retains men on active duty.

    1939 – The US ambassador to Poland, Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, Jr., reports that German bombers are attacking the civilian population. He says “they are releasing bombs they carry even when they are in no doubt as to the identity of their objectives.”

    1950 – Task Force 77 struck Wolmi-do with naval gunfire in preparation for the amphibious assault against Inchon. Lieutenant David H. Swenson was killed aboard the destroyer USS Swenson when the North Koreans hit the ship with a two-gun salvo. Ironically, the ship was named after his uncle, Captain Lyman K. Swenson, who was killed in the South Pacific during World War II.

    1951 – The U.S. Marine Corps conducted Operation “Windmill I,” the first mass helicopter resupply mission in military history.

    1956 – IBM introduced the Model 305 computer capable of storing 20 megabytes of data. Reynold B. Johnson, IBM lab leader, developed a way to store computer data on a metal disk instead of on tape or drum. His Random Access Method of Accounting Control began the disk drive industry.

    1961 – An unmanned Mercury capsule was orbited and recovered by NASA in a test for the first manned flight.

    1971 – State police and National Guardsmen storm New York’s Attica Prison to quell a prison revolt. By the time the facility was retaken, nine hostages and 29 inmates had been killed.

    1976 – The United States announced it would veto Vietnam’s UN bid.

    1978 – The 1st flight of McDonnell Douglas F-18A Hornet.

    1985 – Commander Middle East Force orders escort of Military Sealift Ships in Persian Gulf because of Iranian seizure of merchant vessels.

    1990 – The 1st Battalion, 2d Marine Regiment embarked and arrived in Saudi Arabia in support of Desert Shield.

    1993 – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shakes hands with Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat at the White House after signing the Oslo Accords granting limited Palestinian autonomy.

    1994 – Ulysses probe, a joint NAS ESA project, launched from teh Space Shuttle Discovery, passes the Sun’s south pole.

    1995 – With the threat of terrorism growing, small and medium-sized companies started buying kidnapping and ransom insurance to protect workers heading overseas to conduct business.

    2000 – With the US government all but abandoning its case against him, former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee pleaded guilty in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a single count of mishandling nuclear secrets; he was then set free with an apology from U.S. District Judge James Parker, who said the government’s actions had “embarrassed our entire nation.”

    2001 – Pres. Bush asked Congress for powers to wage war against an unidentified enemy. Bush called the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington “the first war of the 21st century” as his administration labeled fugitive Osama bin Laden a prime suspect. The United States promised to wage all-out retaliation against those responsible and any regime that protected them. Jetliners returned to the nation’s skies for the first time in two days, carrying nervous passengers who faced strict new security measures.

    2001 – The US requested that Pakistan grant air and land space for military actions in Afghanistan. US Special Forces arrived in Afghanistan.

    2001 – The data flight recorder for United Flight 93 was found at the Pennsylvania crash site. In the Sep 11 terrorist attack, 18 hijackers were identified as ticketed passengers.

    2001 – Civilian aircraft traffic resumes in the United States after the September 11 attacks.

    2012 – Protestors breach the walls of the U.S. embassy compound in Sana’a, Yemen. Yemeni police fire warning shots in the air and four people are killed. The Egyptian ministry of health says 224 people are injured in demonstrations around the embassy in Cairo. In Kuwait, 500 people gather and chant near the embassy.

    2012 – The U.S. deploys destroyers and surveillance drones to Libya to hunt for those responsible for the attack in Benghazi. The Libyan Deputy Interior minister says there were two parts in the attack – the second attack was on the safe house of which the location was previously leaked.
  17. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 14th ~

    1763 – Seneca warriors defeat British forces at the Battle of Devil’s Hole during Pontiac’s War. Also known as the Devil’s Hole Massacre, was fought near Niagara Gorge in present-day New York state between a detachment of the British 80th Regiment of Light Armed Foot and about 300 Seneca warriors. The Seneca warriors killed 81 British soldiers and wounded 8 before they managed to retreat.

    1716 – The 1st lighthouse in US was lit in Boston Harbor.

    1847 – During the Mexican-American War, U.S. forces under General Winfield Scott enter Mexico City and raise the American flag over the Hall of Montezuma, concluding a devastating advance that began with an amphibious landing at Vera Cruz six months earlier. The Mexican-American War began with a dispute over the U.S. government’s 1845 annexation of Texas. In January 1846, President James K. Polk, a strong advocate of westward expansion, ordered General Zachary Taylor to occupy disputed territory between the Nueces and Rio Grande Rivers. Mexican troops attacked Taylor’s forces, and on May 13, 1846, Congress approved a declaration of war against Mexico.

    1862 – General Robert E. Lee’s exhausted Confederate forces hold off the pursuing Yankees by closing two passes through Maryland’s South Mountain, allowing Lee time to gather his forces further west along Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg.

    1872 – Britain paid US $15 million for damages during Civil War. The British government paid £3 million in damages to the United States in compensation for building the Confederate commerce-raider Alabama. The confederate navy‘s Alabama was built at the Birkenhead shipyards. Despite its official neutrality during the American Civil War, Britain allowed the warship to leave port, and it subsequently played havoc with Federal shipping.

    1899 – Gunboat Concord and monitor Monterey capture two insurgent schooners at Aparri, Philippine Islands.

    1901 – Twenty-fifth President of the United States William McKinley, Jr., dies today of an assassin’s bullet shot into him on September 6th.

    1939 – In the 1930s Igor Sikorsky turned his attention again to helicopter design and on this day flew the VS-300 on its first test flight. Sikorsky, scientist, engineer, pilot and businessman, was a pioneer in aircraft design who is best known for his successful development of the helicopter. He was fascinated with flight even as a child in Russia, and a 1908 meeting with the Wright brothers determined the course of his life in aviation.

    1940 – Congress passed the Selective Service Act, providing for the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. It passed by one vote.

    1944 – U.S. 1st Marine Division lands on the island of Peleliu, one of the Palau Islands in the Pacific, as part of a larger operation to provide support for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was preparing to invade the Philippines. The cost in American lives would prove historic.

    1944 – CGC Bedloe (ex-Antietam) and Jackson foundered off Cape Hatteras during a hurricane. 26 crewmen were lost from the Bedloe, 21 from the Jackson.

    1950 – Sixty-two year old singer Al Jolson arrived in Korea to entertain the troops after paying his own way from the United States.

    1958 – The 720th Missile Battalion, California National Guard, becomes operational on a 24-hour, seven day a week basis. Manning four batteries of NIKE-AJAX missiles, this is the first Army Guard unit armed with these surface-to-air missiles used to replace anti-aircraft guns in defensive positions. By 1962 a force of 17,000 Guardsmen (combined technicians and traditional) maintained 82 batteries stationed in 15 states. All were located around harbors and large cities important to national strategic interests. In the early 1960s the AJAX missiles were replaced by the longer-ranged and nuclear capable NIKE-HERCULES missile. The program, running from 1958 until it was discontinued in 1974, was one of the Guard’s most successful homeland defense missions performed in the 20th century.

    1959 – The Soviet space probe Luna 2 became the first man-made object to reach the moon as it crashed onto the lunar surface.

    1960 – The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries was founded on this day at the Baghdad Conference of 1960, established by five core members: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. Originally made up of just these five, OPEC began as an attempt to organize and unify petroleum policies, securing stable prices for the petroleum producers.

    1965 – ARVN paratroopers and several U.S. advisers parachute into the Ben Cat area, 20 miles north of Saigon. This was the first major parachute assault of the war by the South Vietnamese. Although they failed to make contact with the enemy, they achieved their goal of driving the Viet Cong away from Route 13 (running between Saigon and the Cambodian border) at least temporarily.

    1969 – The US Selective Service selects September 14 as the First Draft Lottery Date.

    1989 – Sikorsky Aircraft unveiled the replacement for the Sikorsky HH-3F Pelican helicopter: the HH-60J. The Coast Guard planned to purchase 33 of the new helicopters and gave it the moniker “Jayhawk.”

    1990 – During the Persian Gulf crisis, the US Navy reported that American troops had fired a warning shot at an Iraqi tanker, then boarded it briefly before allowing it to proceed.

    1990 – The Secretary of Transportation and the Commandant of the Coast Guard authorized the first-ever deployment of a reserve port security unit overseas. PSU 303, staffed by reservists from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was the first of three PSUs deployed. PSU 303 was stationed in Al-Dammam, Saudi Arabia.

    1997 – An Air Force F-117A Stealth fighter broke apart in midair at a Baltimore County air show. The pilot ejected safely but about a dozen people on the ground were slightly injured.

    1998 – In Miami ten people were charged in what prosecutors said was the largest Cuban spy ring uncovered in the United States since Fidel Castro came to power. Five men later pleaded guilty to lesser charges; the trial of the other five has been postponed until May 2000.

    1998 – Iraq’s Parliament threatens to cut off all contacts with U.N. arms inspectors if the Security Council does not resume its review of sanctions.

    2001 – The State Department, in a memo demanded that the Taliban surrender all known al-Qaeda associates in Afghanistan, provide intelligence on bin Laden and his affiliates and expel all terrorists from Afghanistan.

    2001 – Congress passed legislation titled Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, which was signed on 18 September 2001 by President Bush. It authorized the use of U.S. Armed Forces against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

    2001 – Pres. Bush declared a national emergency and summoned as many as 50,000 military reservists. Congress authorizes President George W. Bush to use “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” The number of hijackers involved in the Sep 11 attacks was raised from 18 to 19 and their names were made public.

    2001 – Six chartered flights carrying mostly Saudi nationals departed from the US over the course of the next week.

    2002 – President Bush said the United States was willing to take Iraq on alone if the United Nations failed to “show some backbone” by confronting Saddam Hussein.

    2002 – In Lackawanna, New York, 5 men of Yemeni descent were charged with supporting foreign terrorist organizations. They trained in an al Qaeda camp run by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network in the spring of 2001. A 6th member of the cell was arrested in Bahrain. All 6 were indicted Oct 21. In 2003 Mukhtar al-Bakri was sentenced to 10 years, Yasein Taher to 9 years. All terms ranged from 7-10 years.

    2004 – Saboteurs blew up a junction where multiple oil pipelines cross the Tigris River in northern Iraq, setting off a chain reaction in power generation systems that left the entire country without power.

    2007 – President Bush backed a limited withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Bush said 5,700 personnel would be home by Christmas 2007, and expected thousands more to return by July 2008. The plan would take troop numbers back to their level before the surge at the beginning of 2007.

    2009 – U.S. special forces launch an attack on Islamist militants from Al-Shabab in Somalia. The Baraawe raid, code named Operation Celestial Balance, was a helicopter assault by United States Special Operations Forces against the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and associated al-Shabaab militants near the town of Baraawe in southern Somalia.

    2012 – Fifty U.S. Marines are deployed to the American embassy in Yemen as a “precautionary measure” after clashes in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

    2012 – The bodies of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Officer Sean Smith, and former SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, killed in the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, are returned to the United States, for their eventual funerals, at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland in a solemn military ceremony attended by President Barack Obama, Vice President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

    2014 – North Korea holds a trial for American tourist Matthew Miller who was detained in April and sentences him to six years of hard labor.
  18. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 15th ~

    1762 – The Battle of Signal Hill was the last battle of the North American theatre of the Seven Years’ War. The British under Lieutenant Colonel William Amherst forced the French to surrender St. John’s, which they had seized earlier that year in a surprise attack.

    1776 – British forces occupied New York City during the American Revolution.

    1776 – British forces captured Kip’s Bay, Manhattan, during the American Revolution. The Landing at Kip’s Bay was a British amphibious landing during the New York Campaign in the American Revolutionary War occurring on the eastern shore of present-day Manhattan.

    1789 – The United States Department of State is established (formerly known as the “Department of Foreign Affairs”).

    1862 – Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson captures Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and 12,000 Union soldiers as General Robert E. Lee’s army moves north into Maryland. The Federal garrison inside Harpers Ferry was vulnerable to a Confederate attack after Lee’s invasion of Maryland.

    The strategic town on the Potomac River was cut off from the rest of the Union army. General George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, sent messages to Union General Dixon Miles, commander of the Harpers Ferry garrison, to hold the town at all costs. McClellan promised to send help, but he had to deal with the rest of the Confederate army. Jackson rolled his artillery into place and began to shell the town on September 14. The Yankees were short on ammunition, and Miles offered little resistance before agreeing to surrender on the morning of September 15. As Miles’ aid, General Julius White, rode to Jackson to negotiate surrender terms, one Confederate cannon continued to fire. Miles was mortally wounded by the last shot fired at Harpers Ferry. The Yankees surrendered 73 artillery pieces, 13,000 rifles, and 12,500 men at Harpers Ferry. It was the largest single Union surrender of the war.

    1862 – John T. Wilder, the Union commander at Munfordville, used unconventional methods to stall Confederate General Braxton Bragg’s advance through Kentucky. On September 15, Bragg arrived to find some 4,000 men behind well-built defenses–far more than he had anticipated. He brought up more units and surrounded the area, but instead of pressing his advantage, agreed to a suggestion made by his subordinate, Maj. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner. Buckner suggested that he be allowed to parley with the garrison and convince them of the hopelessness of their position. Bragg grudgingly acquiesced.

    1904 – Wilbur Wright made his 1st controlled half-circle while in flight.

    1914 – President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Punitive Expedition out of Mexico. The Expedition, headed by General John Pershing, had been searching for Pancho Villa, a Mexican revolutionary.

    1935 – In Berlin, the Reich under Adolf Hitler adopted The Nuremberg Laws which deprived German Jews of their citizenship, made the swastika the official symbol of Nazi Germany and established gradations of “Jewishness.” “Full Jews,” people with four “non-Aryan” grandparents, were deprived of German citizenship and forbidden to marry members of the “Aryan race.” German Jews, had been barred since 1938 from government, medical, and legal professions, and shut out from every area of German public life. After the war Gen’l. Patton gave the documents to a friend and they were stored in the Huntington Museum in California.

    1941 – The Attorney General rules that the Neutrality Act is not violated when US ships carry war material to British territories in the Near and Far East or the Western Hemisphere.

    1942 – Offshore at Guadalcanal, the Japanese submarine, I-19 sinks the USS Wasp with three torpedoes, also damaging the battleship USS North Carolina. A destroyer is sunk as well.

    1945 – A hurricane in southern Florida and the Bahamas destroys 366 planes and 25 blimps at Richmond Naval Air Station in Florida.

    1945 – The US Department of War issues figures showing that a total of 7,306,000 soldiers (including a small number of Allied forces and civilians) and 126,859,000 tons of war cargo have been moved from American ports to all fronts between December 1941 and August 31, 1945.

    1948 – The F-86 Sabre sets the world aircraft speed record at 671 miles per hour.

    1950 – This was D-Day for the Inchon landing by Joint Task Force 7. This 230-ship task force, commanded by Vice Admiral Arthur D. Struble, was the largest naval armada since World War II. Meanwhile, the battleship USS Missouri bombarded the East Coast of Korea as a diversion to the landing.

    1961 – The US resumed underground nuclear testing.

    1962 – The Soviet ship Poltava arrives in Cuba with a cargo of R-12 medium range ballistic missiles, one of the events that sets into motion the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is the second shipment.

    1990 – France announced it would send 4,000 more soldiers to the Persian Gulf and expel Iraqi military attaches in Paris in response to Iraq’s raids on French, Belgian and Canadian diplomatic compounds in Kuwait.

    1997 – In Oman a US Navy F/A-18 crashed and the pilot was killed.

    1997 – A US Marine F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet crashed in North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound and its pilot was killed.

    2001 – As many as 300,000 Afghans reportedly had fled Kandahar in fear of US air strikes against their Taliban rulers who were harboring Osama bin Laden.

    2002 – 82d Airborne Division launched another big operation, Champion Strike. Approximately one thousand troops, including Schweitzer’s 3d Battalion; elements of the newly arrived 1st Battalion, 504th Infantry, led by Lt. Col. David T. Gerard; Special Forces teams; and Afghan militia, conducted air assaults into the Bermail valley of Paktika Province. They captured an al-Qaeda or Taliban financier along with other suspects and also uncovered weapons caches and Taliban documents. Female military police soldiers discovered that some Afghan females were concealing weapons and ammunition under their full-length garments (called burkas), probably because enemy fighters thought they would not be searched. Changes in U.S. troop behavior in these searches did not produce the same disruptions as in previous operations.

    2002 – U.S. and British warplanes bombed Iraqi installations in the southern no-fly zone. Major air defense sites were being targeted.

    2002 – Saudi Arabia indicates that American forces would be free to attack Iraq from bases on its soil if Baghdad rejects a fresh United Nations resolution on weapons inspectors.

    2007 – A NATO-led Coalition Force in Afghanistan intercepted a shipment of Iranian arms intended for the Taliban.

    2010 – Operation Dragon Strike, to reclaim the strategic southern province of Kandahar, which was the birthplace of the Taliban movement. The area where the operation took place has been dubbed “The Heart of Darkness” by Coalition troops. The main force leading the operation were units from the 101st Airborne Division. By the end of December 2010, the operation’s main objectives had been accomplished. The majority of Taliban forces in Kandahar had withdrawn from the province, and much of their leadership was said to have been fractured.
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 14, 2015
  19. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 16th ~

    1620 – The Mayflower sails from Plymouth, England, bound for the New World with 102 passengers. The ship was headed for Virginia, where the colonists–half religious dissenters and half entrepreneurs–had been authorized to settle by the British crown. However, stormy weather and navigational errors forced the Mayflower off course, and on November 21 the “Pilgrims” reached Massachusetts, where they founded the first permanent European settlement in New England in late December.

    1776 – The Battle of Harlem Heights was fought during the New York and New Jersey campaign of the American War of Independence. The action took place in what is now the Morningside Heights and west into the future Harlem neighborhoods of northwestern Manhattan Island in New York Town. The Continental Army, under Commander-in-Chief General George Washington, Major General Nathanael Greene, and Major General Israel Putnam, totaling around 1,800 men, held a series of high ground positions in upper Manhattan against an attacking British Army division totaling around 5,000 men under the command of Major General Alexander Leslie.

    British troops made a tactical error by having their light infantry buglers sound a fox hunting call, “gone away,” while in pursuit. This was intended to insult Washington, himself a keen fox hunter, who learned the sport from his neighbor and mentor near Alexandria, Virginia, the Sixth Lord Fairfax (Thomas Fairfax) during the French and Indian War. “Gone away” means that a fox is in full flight from the hounds on its trail. The Continentals, who were in orderly retreat, were infuriated by this and galvanized to hold their ground. After flanking the British attackers, the Americans slowly pushed the British back. After the British withdrawal, Washington had his troops end the pursuit. The battle went a long way to restoring the confidence of the Continental Army after suffering several defeats. It was Washington’s first battlefield victory of the war.

    1814 – A detachment of Marines under Major Daniel Carmick from the Naval Station at New Orleans, together with an Army detachment, destroyed a pirate stronghold at Barataria, on the Island of Grande Terre, near New Orleans.

    1854 – CDR David G. Farragut takes possession of Mare Island, the first U.S. Navy Yard on the Pacific.

    1864 – Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest led 4,500 men out of Verona, Miss. to harass Union outposts in northern Alabama and Tennessee.

    1893 – The largest land run in history begins with more than 100,000 people pouring into the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma to claim valuable land that had once belonged to Native Americans. With a single shot from a pistol the mad dash began, and land-hungry pioneers on horseback and in carriages raced forward to stake their claims to the best acres. Ironically, not many years before that same land had once been considered worthless desert.

    1917 – Navy Department authorizes establishment of 16 Naval air stations abroad.

    1918 – CGC Seneca’s crew attempted to bring the torpedoed British collier Wellington into Brest, France. Eleven of Seneca‘s crew, sent as a boarding party aboard the collier, were lost when Wellington foundered in a gale on 16 September 1918.

    1919 – The American Legion was incorporated by an act of Congress.

    1920 – As lunchtime approached on September 16, 1920, New York’s financial district was grinding through its regular motions–people were gathering outside to eat, and brokers were holed up inside, busily trading away the day. But before the clock hit noon, routine gave way to panic, as a horse-drawn wagon filled with explosives suddenly detonated near the subtreasury. Flames flooded Wall Street, shooting up nearly six-stories-high. The blast shattered windows around the area and sent a pipe crashing against the neck of a man strolling some six blocks away from the subtreasury. All told, 300 people were killed and a hundred more were wounded. The only famous financial figure to be injured was Junius Spencer, J.P. Morgan’s grandson, who suffered a slight gash on one hand. Since radical bashing was in vogue at the time, Communists, Anarchists, and anyone else leaning too far to the left were accused of having staged a violent protest against capitalism. More pragmatic souls argued that the wagon belonged to an explosives operation and had simply strayed from its prescribed route. Whatever merits these theories have, the ensuing investigation failed to uncover the culprit or cause of the blast, and the case remains a mystery.

    1940 – The Burke-Wadsworth Act is passed by Congress, by wide margins in both houses, and the first peacetime draft in the history of the United States is imposed. Selective Service was born. The registration of men between the ages of 21 and 36 began exactly one month later, as Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who had been a key player in moving the Roosevelt administration away from a foreign policy of strict neutrality, began drawing draft numbers out of a glass bowl. The numbers were handed to the president, who read them aloud for public announcement.

    1940 – Under authority granted by Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt orders the Army to begin mobilizing the entire National Guard for one year’s training prompted by the worsening conditions in Europe.

    1942 – The Japanese base at Kiska in the Aleutian Islands was raided by American bombers.

    1958 – USS Grayback fires first operational launch of Regulus II surface to surface guided missile off CA coast; Missile carries first U.S. mail sent by guided missile.

    1961 – The United States Navy’s National Hurricane Research Project drops eight cylinders of silver iodide into the eyewall of Hurricane Esther. Wind speed temporarily reduces by 10%, giving rise to Project Stormfury.

    1969 – President Richard Nixon announces the second round of U.S. troop withdrawals from Vietnam.

    1974 – President Ford announced a conditional amnesty program for Vietnam War deserters and draft-evaders. Limited amnesty was offered to Vietnam-era draft resisters who would now swear allegiance to the United States and perform two years of public service.

    1990 – Iraqi television broadcast an eight-minute videotaped address by President Bush, who warned the Iraqi people that Saddam Hussein’s brinkmanship could plunge them into war “against the world.”

    1991 – A federal judge in Washington dismissed all Iran-Contra charges against Oliver North.

    1992 – Manuel Noriega, former Panamanian strongman, is sentenced to 40 years in prison, later reduced to 30 years, on charges of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering. His sentence was later further reduced to 17 years and sentence ended in 2007 so he could be extradited to France to stand trial there, where he was sentenced to 7 years in 2010, then released from French prison and extradited to Panama to be tried for human rights violations.

    1994 – Two astronauts from the space shuttle Discovery went on the first untethered spacewalk in 10 years.

    1996 – Space shuttle Atlantis blasted off more than six weeks late on a mission to pick up NASA astronaut Shannon Lucid, aloft since last March, from the Russian space station Mir.

    1996 – Kuwait agreed to allow the US to send 3,300 troops to its soil over the confrontation with Iraq.

    1997 – Two Air national Guard F-16 fighters collided off Atlantic City, N.J. All the crew members survived.

    1998 – Iraq urges the Security Council to reverse its decision on sanctions reviews.

    2001 – President George W. Bush pledged a crusade against terrorists, saying there was “no question” Osama bin Laden was the “prime suspect” in the Sept. 11 attack. US officials warned that the new war on terrorism will be a long, often secret and a “dirty” contest.

    2001 – Pakistan told Afghanistan to surrender Osama bin Laden within 3 days or face almost certain military action.

    2001 – More than 10,000 Army and Air Guard personnel from 29 states and Washington, DC, are on active duty providing humanitarian relief, security, air defense and communications support as a result of the attacks of September 11th.

    2002 – Iraq said it would allow UN weapons inspectors unconditional access to suspected weapons sites. Naji Sabri, Iraq’s minister of foreign affairs, addressed the letter to UN Sec. Gen. Kofi Annan. The inspection commission, headed by Hans Blix, is responsible for overseeing the destruction of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons and the long-range missiles to deliver them. Core staff: 63 people from 17 nations.

    2006 – Operation Mountain Fury was a NATO-led operation begun as a follow-up operation to Operation Medusa, to clear Taliban rebels from the eastern provinces of Afghanistan.

    2007 – Employees of Blackwater Worldwide, a private security firm engaged for the protection of US officials, allegedly shoot and kill 17 Iraqis in Nisour Square, Baghdad; all criminal charges against them are later dismissed, sparking outrage in the Arab world.

    2013 – Lone gunman Aaron Alexis fatally shot twelve people and injured three others in a mass shooting at the headquarters of the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) inside the Washington Navy Yard in Southeast Washington, D.C. The attack, which took place in the Navy Yard’s Building 197, began around 8:20 a.m. EDT and ended when Alexis was killed by police around 9:20 a.m. EDT.

    2013 – The United States and Russia agree to a deal to eradicate chemical weapons in Syria.

    2014 – The United States announces it will send thousands of troops to West Africa to build Ebola virus clinics and train health workers.
  20. SHOOTER13

    SHOOTER13 Guest

    September 17th ~

    1630 – The city of Boston, Massachusetts is founded.

    1766 – Samuel Wilson, the future Uncle Sam, was born in Menotomy Mass. Menotomy later became Arlington. Samuel moved to Troy, New York, where he and his brother set up meat packing plants which later provided food for the US Army during the War of 1812.

    1776 – The Presidio of San Francisco formed as a Spanish fort.

    1778 – The Treaty of Fort Pitt — also known as the Treaty With the Delawares, the Delaware Treaty, or the Fourth Treaty of Pittsburgh, — was signed and was the first written treaty between the new United States of America and any American Indians—the Lenape (Delaware Indians) in this case. Although many informal treaties were held with Native Americans during the American Revolution years of 1775–1783, this was the only one that resulted in a formal document. It was signed at Fort Pitt, Pennsylvania, site of present-day downtown Pittsburgh.

    1787 – The Constitution of the United States of America is signed by 38 of 41 delegates present at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Supporters of the document waged a hard-won battle to win ratification by the necessary nine out of 13 U.S. states. Today, the U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution in operation in the world.

    1787 – The “College of Electors” (electoral college) was established at the Constitutional Convention with representatives to be chosen by the states. Pierce Butler of South Carolina first proposed the electoral college system.

    1796 – President George Washington delivered his “Farewell Address” to Congress before concluding his second term in office. Washington counseled the republic in his farewell address to avoid “entangling alliances” and involvement in the “ordinary vicissitudes, combinations, and collision of European politics.” Also “we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.”

    1862 – Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Union General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac fight to a standstill along a Maryland creek on the bloodiest day in American history. Although the battle was a tactical draw, it forced Lee to end his invasion of the North and retreat back to Virginia.

    1862 – At the end of the single bloodiest day in American military history, both Union and Confederate armies arrayed along Antietam Creek stop fighting due to exhaustion. More than 23,000 soldiers on both sides were killed, wounded or missing. After the 18th passed quietly Confederate General Robert E. Lee started withdrawing his army on the morning of the 19th back into Virginia without interference.

    1862 – The Allegheny Arsenal explosion results in the single largest civilian disaster during the Civil War. On Wednesday, around 2 pm, the arsenal exploded. The explosion shattered windows in the surrounding community and was heard in Pittsburgh, over two miles (3 km) away. At the sound of the first explosion, Col. John Symington, Commander of the Arsenal, rushed from his quarters and made his way up the hillside to the lab. As he approached, he heard the sound of a second explosion, followed by a third. Fire fighting equipment as well as a bucket brigade tried to douse the flames with water. The volunteer fire company from Pittsburgh arrived and assisted in bringing the fire under control.

    1863 – Union cavalry troops clashed with a group of Confederates at Chickamauga Creek.

    1863 – Reports of Confederate vessels building in the rivers of North Carolina were a source of grave concern to the Union authorities. Secretary Welles wrote Secretary of War Stanton suggesting an attack to insure the destruction of an ironclad– which would be C.S.S. Albemarle and a floating battery, reported nearing completion up the Roanoke River. Should they succeed in getting down the river, Welles cautioned, “our possession of the sounds would be jeopardized.”

    1864 – General Grant approved Sheridan’s plan for Shenandoah Valley Campaign. “I want it so barren that a crow, flying down it, would need to pack rations.”

    1900 – The Battle of Mabitac was an engagement in the Philippine-American War, when Filipinos under General Juan Cailles defeated an American force commanded by Colonel Benjamin F. Cheatham.

    1902 – U.S. troops were sent to Panama to keep train lines open over the isthmus as Panamanian nationals struggled for independence from Colombia.

    1908 – Orville Wright’s passenger on a test flight was Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge. They were circling the landing field at Fort Myer, Va., when a crack developed in the blade of the aircraft’s propeller. Wright lost control of the Flyer and the biplane plunged to the ground. Selfridge became powered flight’s first fatality, and Wright was seriously injured in the crash. But despite the tragic mishap, the War Department awarded the contract for the first military aircraft to Wright.

    1919 – General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War I, leads the National Victory Day Parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and past the White House.

    1942 – All atomic research is place under military control.

    1944 – Operation Market Garden begins. The Allied intention is to secure key bridges over a series of rivers and canals in Holland to achieve a rapid advance onto the north German plain.

    1950 – North Korean Air Force aircraft slightly damaged the USS Rochester at Inchon during the first enemy air attack of the war on a U.S. ship.

    1959 – The X-15 rocket plane made its first flight.

    1962 – U.S. space officials announced the selection of nine new astronauts, including Neil A. Armstrong, who became the first man to step onto the moon.

    1976 – NASA publicly unveils its first space shuttle, the Enterprise, during a ceremony in Palmdale, California. Development of the aircraft-like spacecraft cost almost $10 billion and took nearly a decade. In 1977, the Enterprise became the first space shuttle to fly freely when it was lifted to a height of 25,000 feet by a Boeing 747 airplane and then released, gliding back to Edwards Air Force Base on its own accord.

    1972 – Three U.S. pilots are released by Hanoi. They were the first POWs released since 1969. North Vietnamese officials cautioned the United States not to force the freed men to “slander” Hanoi, claiming that “distortions” about Hanoi’s treatment of POWs from a previous release of prisoners in 1969 caused Hanoi to temporarily suspend the release of POWs. The conditions for their release stipulated that they would not do anything to further the U.S. war effort in Indochina. The rest of the POWs were released in March 1973 as part of the agreement that led to the Paris Peace Accords.

    1990 – Defense Secretary Dick Cheney sacked Air Force chief of staff General Mike Dugan for openly discussing contingency plans to launch massive air strikes against Baghdad and target Iraqi President Saddam Hussein personally.

    1991 – The first version of the Linux kernel (0.01) is released to the Internet. While attending the University of Helsinki, Linus Torvalds became curious about operating systems and frustrated by the licensing of MINIX, which limited it to educational use only. He began to work on his own operating system which eventually became the Linux kernel. Torvalds began the development of the Linux kernel on MINIX and applications written for MINIX were also used on Linux. Linus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention Freax, a portmanteau of “free”, “freak”, and “x” (as an allusion to Unix). During the start of his work on the system, he stored the files under the name “Freax” for about half of a year. Torvalds had already considered the name “Linux,” but initially dismissed it as too egotistical.

    2001 – President Bush said the United States wanted terrorism suspect Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.” President Bush visited a mosque in Washington as he appealed to Americans to get back to everyday business and not turn against their Muslim neighbors.

    2001 – In Afghanistan Islamic clerics demanded proof from the US that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the Sep 11 terrorist attacks. They also requested that the Organization of Islamic Conference, a group of over 50 Muslim countries, make a formal demand for bin Laden’s handover.

    2004 – The Coast Guard made the largest cocaine seizure in its history (to date) when Coast Guard and Navy forces located and seized 30,000 pounds of cocaine aboard the fishing vessel Lina Maria approximately 300 miles southwest of the Galapagos Islands. LEDET 108, embarked aboard the USS Curts, made the seizure.

    2007 – The Iraqi government announced that it was revoking the license of the U.S. security firm Blackwater USA over the firm’s involvement in the killing of eight civilians, including a woman and an infant, in a firefight that followed a car bomb explosion near a State Department motorcade.

    2012 – United States and Japanese government officials agree to put a second missile defense system in Japan.

    2013 – Iranian President Hassan Rouhani confirmed he had contacted U.S. President Barack Obama via letters. Both countries cut all diplomatic relations after the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1980.

    2014 – Al-Qaeda announced that it had temporarily captured the Pakistani Navy frigate PNS Zulfiquar, with the intent to attack the U.S fleet with onboard missiles, before it was recaptured by Pakistani Forces.

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