202 B.C.: At the Battle of Zama, deep within the (now)Tunisian territory of Carthage, Roman General Scipio Africanus engages with and decisively defeats the great Carthaginian General Hannibal Barca, who, for the last 16 years, had occupied and systematically raided Roman colonies in the Iberian Peninsula, and after his dramatic crossing of the Alps, Italy itself. Hannibal’s domination of the battlefield turned not only the colonies, but many of Rome’s Italian city-states into Carthage’s vassals, a fact that drove the Senate to distraction and led to both periodic armistices and more aggressive military resistance to the hated North Africans. By 202 B.C., Hannibal was recalled to Carthage to shore up the ruling party’s position. Almost simultaneously, the Senate dispatched Scipio Africanus to effect a landing in North Africa and bring Carthage to heel once and for all. The battle this day broke the back of the existing Carthaginian state. The brutal Roman terms against Carthage ushered in a period of peace lasting over 50 years. In the case of the Roman Senate, the fact of Carthage’s continued existence, however weakened, was unacceptable. It lead to continued agitation to solve the problem once and for all, and motivated the great orator Cato the Elder to end every one of his speeches with the phrase, “CARTHAGO DELENDA EST” which you’ve already translated as “Carthage must be destroyed!”
1097: Opening moves of the First Crusade’s Siege of Antioch, the ancient Greek and Roman metropolis that dominated the trade routes of the upper Levant, and which was distinguished in the New Testament as being the city where the followers of Jesus were first called “Christians.” Although the city was in commercial decline during the Crusader period, it remained a singular strategic prize during the centuries of warfare between the Latin Crusaders, the Byzantine and Seljuk Turks, the Saracens of Syria and the Mongols of the Asian Steppes.
1295: A treaty of alliance is signed between the crowns of Scotland and France, pledging that if one of them is attacked by England, the other will attack England in return. The treaty, known informally as the Auld Alliance, was formally renewed by every sovereign of the two countries through 1560, when Scotland became officially Protestant, and after which the accession of Scotland’s James VI (as England’s James I) formally joined the two islands.
1415: An English army under the command of King Henry V decisively defeats a larger and better equipped French army at the Battle of Agincourt. The battle is notable for the effective use of English longbows and the high number of casualties among the French nobles who fought there.Noted here in William Shakespeare’s play Henry V:
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother
be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s Day.”
1512: Augustinian monk Martin Luther is ordained Doctor of Theology, two days later to be received into the faculty of the University of Wittenburg.
1632: Birth of the great English architect, Christopher Wren (d.1723). Sir Christopher Wren was an English scientist and mathematician, as well as being one of the most distinguished and significant architects in the country. He is best known for designing many of the new buildings in the City of London following the devastation caused by the Great Fire of London in 1666, including The Monument and St Paul’s Cathedral. He designed 51 churches.
1642: The first battle of the English Civil War(s) is fought to a desultory conclusion at Edgehill. It is a nominal victory for King Charles I, but does little to change the course of the deep conflict between Royalist and Parliamentarian armies.
1648: Final ratification of the Peace of Westphalia, which brought to an end the Thirty Years’ War. The Thirty Years’ War, fought between 1618 and 1648, was a devastating conflict primarily in Central Europe that began as a religious war between Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire, but eventually evolved into a broader struggle for political power across Europe, with major powers like France and Sweden intervening; the war ended with the Peace of Westphalia, significantly altering the political landscape of Europe by weakening the Habsburg dynasty and establishing a new balance of power, allowing for greater religious tolerance within individual states, although at a cost of immense destruction and loss of life.
1720: The notorious actual pirate of the Caribbean, John “Calico Jack” Rackham, is captured by a Royal Navy pirate hunter after terrorizing multiple small craft and fishermen along Jamaica’s north coast. He was brought to Spanish Town, Jamaica, where he received a fair trial and was found guilty, then hanged by the neck until dead, his corpse thence suspended in a gibbet for several months at the entrance to the bay. His most lasting contribution to society: the “Jolly Roger” flag.
1721: Tsar Peter I (The Great), after defeating the Kingdom of Sweden over four Baltic provinces, declares a Russian Empire with the new city of St Petersburg as its capital. The empire eventually became the Russian Republic at the start of the 1917 revolution.
1746: The College of New Jersey receives its founding charter. Later to become Princeton University in 1896.
1760: Upon the death of his father, George II, George III becomes King of Great Britain.
1781: Two days after asking for surrender terms, at 2:00 this afternoon the British army at Yorktown marches out of their bivouacs with their muskets shouldered and flags furled. The British band plays the tune “The World Turned Upside Down” as the men stack arms and colors and went into custody as prisoners of war.
1797: In Boston, the Joshua Humphrey designed 44 gun frigate USS Constitution is launched. She remains afloat to this day, having just completed a major overhaul and renovation at the old Navy Yard graving dock.
1803: After a relatively short debate, and fully aware of what some argued was the tenuous Constitutionality of the purchase, the U.S. Senate on this day ratifies the Louisiana Purchase as a treaty, essentially doubling the land mass of the United States without firing a shot.
1805: Just off the SW coast of Spain, the 27-ship strong Mediterranean Fleet of the Royal Navy, under the command of the Viscount Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, engages the larger 33-ship Allied combined French & Spanish fleets under the command of French Vice Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve in the pivotal naval battle of the Napoleonic Wars. The Battle of Trafalgar was the culmination of months of British blockades, French breakouts, a trans-Atlantic sea chase to the Caribbean and back, and an ultimately futile attempt by the Allied fleet to break free from their blockaded anchorage at Cadiz in order to make a run back into the Mediterranean for re-arming* and replenishment. Having finally weighed anchor and cleared his fleet for sea, Villeneuve realized almost immediately that Nelson’s fleet lay in wait below the horizon. He formed up his ships into the conventional and powerful line of battle, significantly outnumbering and out-gunning his British foes. Nelson, for his part, correctly anticipated Villeneuve’s move, and at dinner with his captains the night before, laid out an audacious plan to split his fleet into two lines of battle set up to run perpendicular to the Allied line in order to crash through it and break the powerful battle line into a general melee of individual ship actions, of which Nelson was confident that the morale, discipline, seamanship, and marksmanship of the British would carry the day. He was explicit with his captains that night: “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.” The next morning Nelson, aboard his flagship HMS Victory, ordered a flag hoist message to all ships: “England expects that every man will do his duty,” and led his line straight into the middle of the Allied line just ahead of Villeneuve’s flagship. Nelson’s second commander, Vice-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, crashed his line about halfway back between Villenueve’s ship and the rear of the line, thus separating the Allied fleet into three parts and creating havoc as the British gunners pummeled the French and Spanish ships into charnel houses while the vanguard of the Allied line worked vainly for over 90 minutes in the light winds to bring their lumbering ships back into the fray. The final numbers underlines the scope of the stunning British victory: Allied losses: 21 ships captured, one sunk; 4,393 sailors dead, 3,800 sailors wounded, over 8,000 sailors captured. British losses: no ships lost; 488 sailors killed, 1,208 wounded. Prominent among the dead was Lord Nelson himself, felled by sniper fire from a French fighting top.
1812: Five weeks after entering the flaming remains of with his army already depleted by the Battle of Borodino and there being virtually no remaining supplies to plunder, Napoleon Bonaparte orders the Grande Armee to turn around and begin the long retreat back to France. The losses suffered by this once omnipotent force are staggering, and remain a central focus for students at American war colleges to this day.
1818: The United States and Great Britain, in a remarkable display of common sense and reciprocal respect, sign The Convention of 1818, setting the southern Canadian and northern U.S. boundary starting at the northwest shoreline of Minnesota’s Lake of the Woods, due south to 49 degrees latitude, and thence all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Two little warts distract from this otherwise elegant line: a) The Northwest Angle, created by that southward excursion at the east end of the line, a holdover from the 1783 Treaty of Paris, and; 2) Point Roberts, Washington, a tiny peninsula of British Columbia that pokes into Puget sound for a mile or so south of the 49th. It makes for a convenient place for Canadians to buy staple supplies at American prices, not to mention providing a nominal U.S. address for U.S. relatives to mail packages without all the annoyances of clearing Canadian customsBoth the U.S. and UK had to cede prior claims on both sides of the line, and both sides agreed to joint governance of the Oregon Territory (present day OR, WA, ID and part of western MT).
1824: Briton Joseph Aspdin obtains a patent for Portland cement, which you may recognize as quite possibly the most important construction material ever invented. It derives its name not from the lefty city in Oregon, but from its similarity to stone quarried in the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England.
1833: Birth of Albert Nobel (d.1896), Swedish chemist and physicist, inventor of dynamite, whose bequest funds the ongoing Nobel Prize competitions.
1836: Six months after his dramatic victory over the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto, Virginia native Sam Houston is inaugurated as the first president of the Republic of Texas.
1854: In a crucial decision during the Crimean War, FizRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, orders an unnecessary attack on Russian positions of unknown strength. It lead to the debacle of the Charge of the Light Brigade, who rode under the direct leadership of Lord Cardigan, who survived the battle but who remained furious at the tendentiousness of the original order. As noted by Alfred Lord Tennyson:
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d ?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d & thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred
1861: President Abraham Lincoln, under the provisions of Article I, section 9 of the Constitution, suspends the writ of habeus corpus, giving the federal government the ability to hold suspected rebels indefinitely without trial. Here’s the pertinent Constitutional clause, because I know you’re curious: “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Given the events of the previous six months, Lincoln certainly was dealing with a significant rebellion south of the Potomac River.
1873: Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Rutgers Universities agreed this day to set up a set of consistent rules for intercollegiate football play.
1881: Birth of artist Pablo Picasso (d.1973).
1882: Birth of Bela Ferenc Dezso Blasco a.k.a. Bela Lugosi (d.1956), Hungarian-American actor best known for his defining characterization of Count Dracula in the 1931 movie.
1884: The International Meridian Conference formally designates the Prime Meridian as running through the Naval Observatory in Greenwich, just outside of London.
1891: Birth of radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin (d.1979), whose fiery populism originally supported, but later turned on the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration. His on-air and public shtick descended steadily into virulent anti-Semitism, which eventually led to an increasingly bitter battle between himself and broadcast regulators, finally causing him to be silenced from radio ministry in 1939.
1901: Birth of Arleigh “31 Knot” Burke (d.1996), American naval officer renowned during WWII for the aggressiveness of his destroyer squadron in combat.
1911: Reprising the brothers’ 1903 success with their flying machine, Orville Wright returns to Kill Devil Hill, NC with a newly designed glider that incorporates many of the lessons they learned during their Huffman Prairie flights back in Dayton. The new machine uses a now-conventional elevator and rudder combination at the rear of the plane, and the pilot sits upright with hand controls, as opposed to lying prone in a hip cradle. On this day, with 40 knot winds blowing up the hill, Wright and his team get the machine airborne and remain aloft, under complete control, for 9 minutes 45 seconds, a record for non-powered flight that will stand for ten years.
1917: Russians under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks, storms and captures Tsar Nicholas II’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, thus creating the opening battle of the “October Revolution” phase of the larger Russian Revolution.
1917: Birth of American trumpeter and Big Band leader Dizzy Gillespie (d.1993).
1931: Birth of the NY Yankees slugger, Mickey Mantle (d.1995).
1937: Birth of the SF Giants’ great right-hander, Juan Marichal.
1944: Opening guns of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which over the course of three days became the largest naval battle in history. The battle’s first shots were actually a highly successful torpedo attack by two American submarines yesterday against a Japanese cruiser force getting underway from Brunei. Two cruisers of the force went to the bottom, forcing a Japanese reversal overnight.
1944: Battle of Leyte Gulf, Day 2– The torpedo shot in Brunei yesterday should have given the Imperial Japanese Navy pause as they sortied toward the central Philippines, but it didn’t. As the American invasion fleet continued its offload in Leyte Gulf, two of the six carriers of the US Third Fleet intercepted Admiral Kurita’s Japanese Center Force of battleships and cruisers in the Subuyian Sea east of Leyte, making a furious and continuing attack on the Japanese super-battleship Musahsi in particular, which eventually sank after taking direct hits from at least 17 bombs and 18 torpedoes. The IJN Yamato and Nagato also took several hits, but remained operational as the Japanese fleet turned around for several hours to get out from under the American attackers.
Late in the afternoon they reestablished their course for San Bernardino Strait. During the ensuing melee, land-based Japanese fighters swarmed toward the American striking aircraft, but were completely overpowered by the supporting American fighter aircraft. Commander David McCampbell distinguished himself this day with 9 confirmed kills. As the day wound down, the Third Fleet Commander, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, acting on intelligence about the discovery of the Japanese Northern Force, withdrew the two carriers to join with his other four carriers and their associated battleship forces to dash north east to intercept and destroy Japan’s remaining carriers. The American surface fleet that expected to be guarding the San Bernardino Strait was included in the run north, leaving the entire northern approaches of Leyte Gulf un-monitored and un-protected by the US Navy.
1944: Battle of Leyte Gulf, Day* 3. There are three climactic actions this day:
1) Battle of Suriago Strait, the world’s final all-gun naval battle. Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf positioned himself at the northern end of the passage with a massive blocking formation of 6 battleships (five of which were Pearl Harbor survivors), 4 heavy cruisers, 4 light cruisers, 28 destroyers and 39 PT boats, creating a gauntlet of fire that would, for six hours on this night, destroy the Japanese Southern Force in detail, sinking both of its battleships, two heavy cruisers and at least three destroyers outright, with several more surviving Japanese ships sunk by aircraft later in the morning as they tried to escape back south through the strait.
2) Battle off Samar. Admiral Kurita’s still-potent Central Force slipped through San Bernardino Strait unopposed overnight, making its way down the eastern coastline of Samar Island with what appeared to be a clear run to General MacArthur’s invasion fleet. Kurita’s four battleships, including the massive Yamato, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and eleven destroyers carried enough firepower to systematically obliterate the American landing force, which would be ranged by their guns in mere hours. Nothing now stood between Kurita and his targets except a handful of startled escort carriers (CVE) carrying only ~30 planes each, and another handful of destroyers, armed with 5″ guns and torpedoes.
Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague ordered all of his planes- about 90 total- to launch as the CVEs scuttled toward rain squalls to the east. The old Wildcats and Avengers attacked with such fury that Kurita believed he had roused the large carriers of Third Fleet rather than nearly hopeless escorts of the Seventh Fleet. When the planes ran out of ammunition, they kept making dry runs to try to force the Japanese out of ammo. The destroyer squadrons also ran at flank speed into the Japanese formation, firing their little 5 inchers into the huge armored targets before them. The CVEs themselves came under direct Japanese gunfire, with USS Gambier Bay (CVE-73) the particular object of IJN Yamato’s 18″ artillery, which crippled and sank the thin-skinned carrier, the only carrier in the war to be sunk by naval gunfire. Then suddenly, when the American position looked doomed, Admiral Kurita fired one last salvo at the American ships and turned around to the north to retire from the fight, a stroke of luck in the famous “fog of war” that no-one anticipated. May I recommend a book, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (2004) by James D. Hornfischer. It will give you a mesmerizing insight into the reality of this nearly point blank David-and-Goliath slugfest.
3) Battle of Cape Engano. The Japanese Northern Force of four aircraft carriers and old battleships, the decoy fleet designed to draw off Halsey’s Third Fleet from the main event, actually did decoy Halsey and his five fleet carriers, five light carriers, six battleships, eight cruisers and forty destroyers to chase them several hundred miles away from the main fight at Leyte. But they paid for it, as they expected. Admiral Ozawa’s 108 aircraft were no match for Halsey’s 7-800, and after his planes were swept from the skies, the virtually undefended ships came under withering attack from the Americans, who sank three carriers and a destroyer, and heavily damaged the two light carriers. Despite these important victories, the main story of this battle was the fact that it happened at all, epitomized by the message to Halsey from Fleet Admiral Nimitz at the height of the crisis off Samar: “Where is Third Fleet? The World Wonders.”
1947: Opening gavel for the House Un-American Activities Committee, a multi-administration exercise in detecting and black-listing Communists in the entertainment industry (there were lots of them), the State Department (ibid.), and other influential public and quasi-public organizations.
1956: British colonial forces capture rebel Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi, effectively collapsing the brutal Mau Mau Rebellion that terrorized Kenya from 1952 until this day. The insurgency was completely crushed by the end of the year. Kimathi was tried and executed for war crimes in February, 1957.
1962: One week after obtaining conclusive proof of Soviet nuclear missile deployments to Cuba President John F. Kennedy gives a speech to the nation, publicly revealing the Soviet deployments, and declaring a naval quarantine around the island to prevent further Soviet military supplies from landing there. It’s worth pointing out that the term “quarantine” was carefully developed to avoid its more accurate description as a blockade, which is an explicit act of war under international law. “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
1973: Last day of the Yom Kippur War, which didn’t turn out as expected for Egypt and Syria.
1994: The United States signs the “Agreed Framework” with the regime of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) in which the DPRK agrees to shut down its nuclear program in consideration of the US delivering annually 500,000 tons of heavy petroleum, making arrangements for construction of two light water reactors, providing a formal “no first use” of nuclear weapons statement, and moving toward full diplomatic and economic recognition of the DPRK. The NORKS, for their part will “freeze” their graphite modulated reactors, remain within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, “take steps” to implement the de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula, and dismantle the graphite reactors after the LW reactors are completed.
About the Author
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