70AD: Roman legions, under the command of Titus, breach the middle wall of Jerusalem and commence to destroy the city.
1661: The student Isaac Newton begins his studies at Trinity College.
1664: Nieu Amsterdam is renamed New York.
1692: Port Royal, Jamaica is destroyed by a three minute earthquake that kills 1,600 and leaves over 3,000 injured, with huge sections of the city sinking beneath the water. Many attribute the disaster as a divine retribution for the venal depths to which the pirate-run city had culturally sunk: “Wine and women drained their wealth to such a degree that… some of them became reduced to beggary. They have been known to spend 2 or 3,000 Pieces of eight in one night; and one gave a strumpet 500 to see her naked. They used to buy a pipe of wine, place it in the street, and oblige everyone that passed to drink.” –Quoted of Charles Leslie in his History of Jamaica.
1738: Birth of George, Son of Frederick Prince of Wales and Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, in London (d.1820). In 1751 he will assume the British throne as George III.
1755: Birth of Nathan Hale (d.1776), who famously gave his one life for his country, hanged by a British noose for espionage.
1756: Birth of John Trumbull (d.1843), the American painter who created some of our most memorable images of the American Revolution.
1769: The Transit of Venus, predicted seven years earlier, sends multiple groups of scientists all around the world to make observations of Venus’ movement across the face of the sun from as many locations as possible. Captain James Cook was earlier sent to Tahiti in the South Pacific on the farthest-flung expedition, others of which include Hudson Bay, Baja California, Newfoundland, Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope. The observations were used by the scientific community to confirm Earth’s diameter and distance from the sun.
1776: Virginia delegate Richard Henry “Lighthorse” Lee rises to submit to the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, a resolution calling for independence from Great Britain. The stirring text of his message still carries force today:
“That these United Colonies are, and of right out to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; that measures should be immediately taken for procuring the assistance of foreign powers, and a Confederation be formed to bind the colonies more closely together.”
A lively debate ensued and the Congress agreed to two propositions: 1) A committee would be appointed to draft a formal declaration of independence, and; 2) a vote on Lee’s resolution would be delayed until July 1st.
1794: The first six captains of the United States Navy are appointed to superintend construction of the Six Ship Navy earlier authorized by Congress: John Barry, Samuel Nicholson, Silas Talbot, Joshua Barney, Richard Dale and Thomas Truxtun. Multiple USN ships bear or have borne their names.
1805: President and Mrs. John Adams move in as the first residents of the new presidential mansion, nicknamed the White House.
1808: Birth of Jefferson Davis (d.1889). The West Point graduate served with distinction in the Mexican-American War, was later elected Congressman and Senator from Mississippi, and served as President Franklin Pierce’s Secretary of War 1853-57. Best remembered as the first and only President of the Confederate States of America. Captured by Union troops after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, he was held two years as prisoner in Fort Monroe, released on $100,000 bail raised by prominent citizens of both the North and the South. His indictment for treason was dropped in 1868. He died in New Orleans and was buried in Richmond after a funeral cortege that was attended by a continuous stream of mourners spanning the entire distance between New Orleans and his final resting place.
1864: Union General U.S. Grant orders a third day of direct assaults against the fortified Confederate breastworks at the Battle of Cold Harbor near Mechanicsville, Virginia. The results are similar to the futile Union assault on Fredericksburg two years earlier, with multiple waves of uphill Union assaults repulsed by artillery, musketry, and in the end, vicious hand-to-hand fighting. Toward the end of this day Grant orders yet another push, but his Corps commanders Hancock and Meade resist, having witnessed firsthand the slaughter and complete lack of progress. Grant relents and allows for a strategic pause, and as the Union soldiers entrench for the night, many of them dig into the skeletal remains of their comrades who fell at the Battle of Gaines Mill, fought over the same ground during the Seven Days campaign in 1862. The next two weeks saw no further massed attacks, but settled into sniper fire and random artillery exchanges. The numbers are telling: Union casualties over 12,700 (1,844 dead) versus around 4,500 (83 dead) for the Confederates. Coming so late in the war, the battle provides a singular shock* to the country, including to Grant himself: “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made… At Cold Harbor no advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.” Lee, too, recognized the magnitude of the Union losses at Cold Harbor, but he also recognized the fragility of the Confederate’s strategically defensive positions, as he and Grant over the preceding months leap-frogged their positions in an ever-tightening knot around the Richmond-Petersburg corridor. After two weeks of entrenchment at Cold Harbor, Lee quietly withdrew his army from its redoubts, making a hasty retreat into Petersburg to establish a more secure defense perimeter around the city. At the same time, Grant was making his own move across the James River to City Point (now Hopewell), where he began massing the Army of the Potomac for its eventual siege of Petersburg.
1878: Birth of Barney Oldfield (d.1946), pioneer automobile racer and protégé of Henry Ford, he was the first to drive faster than 60 miles an hour.
1918: First day of the first U.S. offensive in the Great War. Led by the Second “Indian Head” Division of the US Army, the Battle of Belleau Wood rages for three weeks and generates 10,000 U.S. casualties. German General Ludendorf resists with a furious onslaught of machine guns, artillery and poison gas but the American force presses forward to eventually drive the German army from its key salient in the Western Front. Due to the inclusion of the 4th Marine Brigade alongside the Army’s 3rd Infantry Brigade, all of whom operated on a front adjacent to the famous 3rd Army Division- “The Rock of the Marne.” The ferocious fighting also gives rise to some memorable language: German soldiers, un-used to the preternatural tenacity of the Marine Corps, dubs them Teufelshund- “Devil-Dogs” a moniker you will still hear today. The battle also gave us the stirring battle cry “Come on you bastards! Do you want to live forever?”
1940: Completion of the Allied evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk (DLH 5/25 has the numbers).
1940: The Luftwaffe makes its first bombing raids on Paris, killing over 500 civilians. The attacks were carefully calibrated to create a sense of impending panic without causing a complete collapse of order in the city.
1942: First day of the three-day Battle of Midway. Three U.S. Navy carriers USS Yorktown (CV-5), USS Enterprise (CV-6) and USS Hornet (CV-8), the sole operational carriers in the Pacific Fleet, follow up their nominal victory at the Battle of Coral Sea with a crushing victory against the combined Japanese battle fleet. The individual stories of the intelligence buildup to the U.S. rendezvous and attacks, the dramatic three day post-Coral Sea repairs to the Yorktown, the loss of Torpedo Squadron 8 and the luck that put LCDR Wade McClusky’s strike group right on top of the re-arming Japanese carriers are the stuff of legend and are fantastic in their own right. But the importance of the larger battle is strategically decisive. Despite the eventual loss of Yorktown, four front line Japanese carriers*, Kaga, Akagi, Soryu and Hiryu, are sunk, and as a result, Admiral Yamamoto cancels his plans for the invasion of Midway Island itself. Coming six months after Pearl Harbor, the battle halts the Japanese juggernaut in its tracks and turns initiative in the Pacific War to the United States.
1942: On the heels of the battle of Midway, Japanese forces successfully complete their concurrent invasion and occupation of Attu and Kiska Islands in the Aleutian chain. 25 Americans are killed and the remaining residents are herded into concentration camps. The islands will be liberated a year later in a bitter and usually overlooked three week campaign.
1944: The USS Guadalcanal (CVE-60) anti-submarine Hunter-Killer Group under the command of Captain Dan Gallery captures the German submarine U-505 in mid-Atlantic. It is the first capture of an enemy warship since the War of 1812 and provides a treasure trove of intelligence data that helps undercut the German wolfpack attacks on Atlantic convoys.
1944: Major League Baseball cancels all games this day in honor of the Normandy invasion.
1944: Operation OVERLORD: The Allied invasion of German-occupied Normandy.
1947: At Harvard University, Secretary of State George Marshall lays out his plan for the European Economic Recovery Program, eventually known world-wide as the Marshall Plan. Over the course of its existence, 1947-52, the United States invested over $13 billion (1948 GDP of $258b) in re-organizing the economies and industrial base of western Europe along the American model. The plan was offered as well to Russia, who rejected it, and by extension forced its rejection by the eastern European countries under Soviet occupation.
1949: Publication of British author George Orwell’s novel of life in a socialist paradise, Nineteen-Eighty-four
1967: After months of Arab diplomatic saber-rattling and concurrent military buildup on its borders, the state of Israel launches a preemptive strike on Egyptian forces in Sinai. The attack expands into a decisive six-day rout of Arab armies on three fronts. Israel essentially tripled the land area under its control, taking all of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The Egyptian Air Forces loses over 300 of their 450 Soviet-built planes and the Syrians lose 2/3 of their air force as well.
1967: Death of Dorothy Parker (b.1893), the acerbic literary critic, poet and writer, whose wit was the centerpiece of the Algonquin Round Table published in Vanity Fair through the 1920s. Her attraction to leftist causes was energized by the Sacco and Vanzetti case in 1927, when she traveled to Boston to protest their upcoming execution. She ended up on Hollywood’s notorious Black List, but remained vocal and engaged to the end. Some choice quotes:
“You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.”
“Katherine Hepburn gave a striking performance that ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B.”
“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” – Caption in Vogue, 1916
1968: Senator Robert Kennedy, stepping off the stage from his victory speech in the California Democratic primary, is shot and killed by Palestinian radical Sirhan Sirhan. After receiving the death sentence, Sirhan’s penalty is changed to life imprisonment. Despite several clemency hearings Sirhan remains imprisoned to this day.
1975: Eight years after its closure, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat re-opens the Suez Canal.
1975: Sony introduces the BetaMax video cassette.
1981: A strike force of 10 Israeli aircraft destroy the nearly-completed Osirak reactor complex just outside of Baghdad. News of the raid does not emerge for 24 hours until the IAF itself announces it, after which Iraq expresses its indignation.
1985: In Brazil, the grave of a certain Wolfgang Gerhard is exhumed. The body is then examined and re-identified as none other than Joseph Mengele, the doctor known as “The Angel of Death” at Auschwitz. His experiments conducted on prisoners included subjecting individuals to multiple recurrences of progressively deeper hypothermia to see how low a body’s core temperature could get and still remain alive. Similar experiments were conducted in hypobaric chambers to study the effects of hypoxia to the point of death. He also performed grizzly surgeries on twins, switching body parts from one to the other, or killing both and performing dual dissections to compare parts. He escaped Allied custody in 1949 and lived out his life in South America, beginning in Argentina, and fled to Paraguay after Mossad captured Adolf Eichmann.
1986: After six weeks of student protests that grew increasingly assertive against the government, China’s communist leadership orders the Peoples Liberation Army to enter Tienanmen Square to decisively break up the demonstrations. Two days of violence result in the deaths of thousands and trigger virtually universal condemnation by governments around the world. The iconic image from the final days of the protests was taken on the 5th as the PLA was completing its encirclement and occupation of the square. The unidentified Tank Man intentionally stopped in front of the column of tanks, climbed up onto the lead machine and spoke to the driver. He then climbed down and defiantly remained in place until hustled away by police. He was never seen or heard from again. His identity remains unknown.
1991: Mount Pinatubo erupts in the Philippines, solving the problem of what to do with Clark AFB and Subic Bay Naval Station by burying both of them under tons of ash.
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