This date in history

[Jimbuna]

1801 Napoleonic Wars: The British led by Horatio Nelson destroy the Danish fleet in the naval Battle of Copenhagen.

1912 Titanic undergoes sea trials under its own power.

1917 US President Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to declare war against Germany.

1982 Several thousand Argentine troops invade and seize the Falkland Islands from the United Kingdom.

[Jimbuna]

1882 American outlaw Jesse James is shot in the back of the head and killed by fellow gang member Robert Ford at home in St. Joseph, Missouri.

1922 Joseph Stalin is appointed General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party by an ailing Vladimir Lenin.

1941 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warns Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that a German invasion is imminent.

1944 British dive bombers attack German battleship Tirpitz at Kåfjorden, Norway.

1948 US President Harry Truman signs the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Western Europe after World War II, granting an initial $5 billion in aid to 16 European countries.

1982 UN Security Council demanded Argentina withdraw from Falkland Islands.

[Jimbuna]

1581 Francis Drake knighted by Queen Elizabeth I aboard his galleon "Golden Hind" at Deptford, England.

1915 Germany protests vigorously to the US, claiming it must insist that Britain lifts its blockade and assert American neutrality.

1917 US Senate agrees (82-6) to participate in WWI

1943 WWII: US Army Air Force bomber 'Lady Be Good' fails to return to Soluch, Libya base after its maiden flight; presumed lost at sea, wreck was discovered in desert 15 years later.

1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) treaty signed in Washington, D.C.

1968 US civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated by James Earl Ray at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.

1973 World Trade Center, then the world's tallest building, opens in New York (110 stories). Later destroyed in 9/11 terrorist attacks.

1975 Microsoft is founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800

[Jimbuna]

1621 Mayflower sails from Plymouth, Massachusetts on a return trip to England.

1939 Membership of Hitler Youth becomes obligatory.

1943 Chinese steward Poon Lim is found off the coast of Brazil by a Brazilian fisherman family after being adrift for 133 days, after British ship SS Benlomond was torpedoed by a German U-boat.

1943 Mortsel, Belgium: Allies target Minerva car factory, used for repairing Luftwaffe planes for bombing raid; collateral damage from missed targets kills 936 civilians, Belgium's greatest loss of WWII

1951 Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, atomic spies, sentenced to death.

1955 Anthony Eden succeeds Winston Churchill as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

1971 US Lt William Calley sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre.

1982 British Royal Navy aircraft carriers Invincible and Hermes, with escort vessels, depart Portsmouth, England for the Falkland Islands in response to the Argentine invasion.

1982 Lord Carrington, British Foreign Secretary resigns for his failure to foresee the invasion of the Falkland Islands.

1999 Two Libyans suspected of bringing down Pan Am flight 103 in 1988 are handed over for eventual trial in the Netherlands.

[ABBAFAN]

ABBA, the greatest thing ever, wins Eurovision 1974 with ‘Waterloo’.

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

1621
1939 Membership of Hitler Youth becomes obligatory.

...my office manager, Kristina, of the Social Security Administrative Court, with four courtrooms, 6 judges and ninety assorted other staff from lawyers, secretaries to judicial clerks that I bailiffed solo for 5 of my 9 Federal security years, was a German immigrant and imposing 6'4" blond blue-eyed Valkerie class lady. She had been a Hitler Youth as a child in Berlin. We humorously referred to her as our "Resident Nazi"!!

[Jimbuna]

1916 German parliament approves unrestricted submarine warfare.

1917 The United States declares war on Germany and enters World War I on the side of the Allies.

1945 Battle of Okinawa: Giant Japanese battleship Yamato heads to Okinawa with orders to beach herself and be destroyed defending the island.

1994 Plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira is shot down by surface-to-air missiles, abruptly ending peace negotiations and sparking the Rwandan Genocide. Those responsible have never been identified.

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

1945 Battle of Okinawa: Giant Japanese battleship Yamato heads to Okinawa with orders to beach herself and be destroyed defending the island.

IE: the Yamoto and 9 other vessels sailed on a suicide mission (no wonder they called it Operation Ten Go!??) with only sufficient fuel to reach Okinawa, to intercept the American fleet off Okinawa...it was intercepted the very next day; "Nippon it in the bud" if ever!??

[Jimbuna]

30 Scholars' estimate for Jesus' crucifixion by Roman troops in Jerusalem [or April 3]

1853 Queen Victoria asks John Snow to administer chloroform during the delivery of her eighth child, Leopold, leads to wider acceptance of obstetrical anesthesia.

1943 German Lt colonel Claus von Stauffenberg seriously wounded at allied air raid.

1945 Battle of Okinawa: US planes intercept Japanese fleet heading for Okinawa on a suicide mission, super battleship Yamato and four destroyers are sunk.

1945 Sonderkommando Elbe, special Luftwaffe units designed to destroy Allied planes by ramming them mid-air, are sent on their first and only mission of World War II

1948 World Health Organization is formed by the United Nations.

1966 US recovers a lost hydrogen bomb from the Mediterranean sea floor.

1971 US President Richard Nixon orders lt Calley (Mi Lai) free.

1972 Three members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) die in a premature bomb explosion in Belfast.

2003 U.S. troops capture Baghdad; Saddam Hussein's regime falls two days later.

[Jimbuna]

1913 China's National Assembly opens in Peking, the first free democratic parliament in Chinese history.

1945 Dutch Nazi occupiers executed, Nazi general Christiansen flees Netherlands.

1946 League of Nations assembles for the last time.

1956 6 US Marine Corps recruits drown during a night "marsh march" in Ribbon Creek at Parris Island, South Carolina; drill instructor Staff Sergeant Matthew McKeon is court-martialed.

1983 In front of a live audience of 20 tourists, David Copperfield makes the Statue of Liberty disappear.

[Jimbuna]

1768 John Hancock refuses to allow two British customs agents to go below deck of his ship, considered by some to be the first act of physical resistance to British authority in the colonies.

1865 Confederate General Robert E. Lee and 26,765 troops surrender at Appomattox Court House to US Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant ending the Civil War in North Virginia.

1914 Tampico incident - US ship crew arrested in Mexico.

1916 The Libau sets sail from Germany with a cargo of 20,000 rifles to assist Irish republicans; Captain Karl Spindler changes the name of the vessel to the Aud to avoid British detection.

1940 German cruiser Blucher torpedoed and capsizes in Oslofjord, 1,000 die.

1940 Nazi Germany invades Denmark and Norway, and Denmark surrenders after a six-hour battle.

1945 Battleship Admiral Scheer sunk by RAF bombing in Kiel.

1963 Winston Churchill becomes 1st honorary US citizen.

1976 US & Russia agreed on size of nuclear tests for peaceful use.

1981 US sub George Washington rams Japanese freighter Nisso Maru.

1991 Georgia SSR votes to secede from USSR

[Jimbuna]

1858 "Big Ben", a 13.76 tonne bell, is recast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.

1887 US President Abraham Lincoln's re-buried with his wife in Springfield, Illinois.

1912 RMS Titanic sets sail from Southampton for her maiden (and final) voyage.

1923 Adolf Hitler demands "hatred & more hatred" in Berlin, Germany.

1932 Paul von Hindenburg is re-elected President of Germany in a runoff election against Adolf Hitler.

1940 Vidkun Quisling forms Norwegian "national government"

1963 USS Thresher, a nuclear powered submarine, sinks 220 miles east of Boston killing 129 men, including 17 civilians.

1971 The Republican commemorations is held in Belfast of the Easter Rising (in 1916 in Dublin), revealing conflicts between the two wings of the Irish Republican Army.

1972 The US, USSR and 70 other nations agree to ban biological weapons at the Biological Weapons Convention.

1972 Two British soldiers are killed in a bomb attack in Derry.

1998 The Good Friday Agreement [Belfast Agreement] for Northern Ireland is signed by the British and Irish governments.

[Jimbuna]

1783 Hostilities formally cease in the American Revolutionary War after the Continental Congress proclaims the "Cessation of Arms" against and His Britannic Majesty.

1814 Napoléon Bonaparte abdicates unconditionally and is exiled to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean.

1868 The Shogunate is abolished in Japan.

1900 The first modern submarine designed and built by John Philip Holland, USS Holland is acquired by the U.S. Navy.

1912 RMS Titanic leaves Queenstown, Ireland, for NY

1933 Hermann Goering becomes Premier of Prussia.

1945 Four soldiers in the Sixth Armored Division of the US Third Army liberate the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald, freeing thousands including Elie Wiesel.

1979 Tanzanian army captures Kampala, the capital of Uganda forcing Ugandan dictator Idi Amin to flee into exile in Libya.

1981 Ronald Reagan arrives home from hospital after Hinkley shot him.

1983 In the first 'supergrass' trial in Northern Ireland, fourteen Ulster Volunteer Force members are jailed for a total of two hundred years.

1990 Customs officers in Middlesbrough, United Kingdom, say they have seized what they believe to be the barrel of a massive gun on a ship bound for Iraq.

1992 Irish Republican Army bombs London financial district, killing 3

[Jimbuna]

1782 Battle at Les Saintes: British fleet under Admiral George Rodney defeats the French fleet under Comte de Grasse off Dominica in the West Indies. Prevents a planned French and Spanish invasion of Jamaica.

1811 The first US colonists on the Pacific coast arrive at Cape Disappointment, Washington.

1861 Fort Sumter in South Carolina is attacked by the Confederacy, beginning the American Civil War.

1916 Irish nationalist activist and poet Roger Casement boards submarine U-19 at Wilmshaven, Germany, bound for a rendezvous with the Aud at Tralee.

1941 Vichy-France's head of government Admiral François Darlan consults with Adolf Hitler.

1945 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies in office and Vice President Harry Truman is sworn in as 33rd US President.

1945 British Royal Navy captures German U-boat U-1024 in the Irish Sea; it sinks while being towed the next day.

1961 Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to travel into space and orbit Earth, aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft.

1975 Six Catholic civilians are killed in a Ulster Volunteer Force gun and grenade attack on Strand Bar in Belfast, North Ireland.

[Jimbuna]

1796 First elephant arrives in US from India.

1861 After 34 hours of bombardment, Fort Sumter surrenders to Confederates (US Civil War)

1904 A squadron of the Russian fleet is decoyed out of Port Arthur by Japanese maneuvers, when they realize they are sailing into a trap; their battleship Petropavlovsk hits a mine and sinks, with a loss of 700 men.

1912 Royal Flying Corps forms (later Royal Air Force)

1940 Second battle of Narvik; 3 German destroyers and one U-boat sunk by the Royal Navy, 5 more German destroyers scuttled.

1945 Canadian soldier Léo Major single-handedly liberates Dutch town of Zwolle by fooling Germans into thinking a raid had begun.

1970 Apollo 13 announces "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here", as Beech-built oxygen tank explodes en route to Moon.