This date in history

[Jimbuna]

1836 Battle of the Alamo: After 13 days of fighting 1,500-3,000 Mexican soldiers overwhelm the Texan defenders, killing 182-257 Texans including William Travis, Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett.

1918 US naval boat "Cyclops" disappears in Bermuda Triangle.

[ABBAFAN]

The Car ferry Herald of Free Enterprise capsized in Zeebrugge Harbour in 1987 after sailing with bow doors open.

[DicheBach]

"Meathead" (aka Rob Reiner), creator of "This is Spinal Tap" (among others) was born on this day!

[Jimbuna]

1530 King Henry VIII's divorce request is denied by the Pope. Henry then declares that he, not the Pope, is supreme head of England's church.

1936 Hitler breaks Treaty of Versailles, sends troops to Rhineland.

[Jimbuna]

2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with 239 people loses contact and disappears, prompting the most expensive search effort in history.

[Jimbuna]

1918 Russian Bolshevik Party becomes the Communist Party.

1935 Adolf Hitler announces the creation of a new air force.

1945 334 US B-29 Superfortresses attack Tokyo with 120,000 fire bombs.

1951 Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam submit a classified paper at the Los Alamos lab, in which they proposed their revolutionary new design, staged implosion, for a practical megaton-range hydrogen bomb.

1953 Josef Stalin buried in Moscow.

1974 Last Japanese soldier, a guerrilla operating in Philippines, surrenders, 29 years after World War II ended.

[Jimbuna]

1783 USS Alliance under Captain Barry fights and wins last naval battle of US Revolutionary War off Cape Canaveral.

1849 Abraham Lincoln applies for a patent (only US president to do so) for a device to lift a boat over shoals and obstructions.

1927 Bavaria lifts ban on Hitler's speeches.

1931 Oswald Mosley leaves British Labour party and founds the "New Party".

1944 U-575 sinks British corvette HMS Asphodel in the Atlantic Ocean killing 92 of the 97 men aboard.

1975 Dog spectacles patented in England.

[Jimbuna]

1918 Moscow becomes capital of revolutionary Russia.

1935 Hermann Goering officially creates the Luftwaffe (German Air Force).

1941 FDR signs Lend-Lease Bill.

1958 American B-47 accidentally drops nuclear bomb without its nuclear capsule 15,000 ft on a family home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina; creates crater 75 ft across.

[Jimbuna]

1916 French airship mistakenly attacks and sinks British submarine D3 with loss of all hands.

1917 A German submarine sinks an unamred US merchant ship, the 'Algonquin' on the same day that US President Woodrow Wilson gives executive order to arm US merchant ships.

1938 Nazi Germany invades Austria (Anschluss).

1940 Finland surrenders to Russia during WW II, gives Karelische Isthmus.

1957 German DR accepts 22 Russian divisions.

1958 British Empire Day is renamed "Commonwealth Day"

1984 National Union of Mine Workers in Britain begins a 51 week strike.

1984 British ice dancing team, Torvill & Dean, become 1st skaters to receive 9 perfect 6.0s in world championships.

[Jimbuna]

1933 Joseph Goebbels becomes Nazi Germany's Minister of Information and Propaganda.

1943 Failed assassin attempt on Hitler during Smolensk-Rastenburg flight.

[Jimbuna]

1757 On board HMS Monarch (his own flagship), British Admiral John Byng is executed by firing squad for neglecting his duty "Pour encourager les autres".

1889 German Ferdinand von Zeppelin patents his "Navigable Balloon"

1915 German cruiser Dresden scuttled off Más a Tierra, Chile, having been pursued by the Royal Navy after the Battle of the Falkland Islands, with her engines worn out and virtually no coal.

1943 Kraków Ghetto is "liquidated"

1964 Dallas, Texas; Jack Ruby sentenced to death for Lee Harvey Oswald's murder.

[Jimbuna]

44 BC Julius Caesar is stabbed to death by Brutus, Cassius and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March in Rome.

1940 Hermann Goering says 100-200 church bells enough for Germany, smelt the rest.

1944 Italian town of Cassino destroyed by Allied bombing.

1957 Great Britain becomes the third nation to explode a nuclear bomb.

[Aktungbby]

44 BC Julius Caesar is stabbed to death by Brutus, Cassius and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March in Rome.

From which we get the expressions: "Et tu Brute" "...beware the Ides of March", " A funny thing happened on the way to the forum"...Even First lady Eleanor Roosevelt held a toga party to spoof those that compared her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt to "Caesar". May their respective memories never 'go bust!'(as I collect my $ocial $ecurity...thanks FDR! ) I'm in line with this theory:

And on that fateful day in March more than 2,000 years ago, Caesar dragged his aching, sick body out of bed and headed toward the Senate, likely knowing exactly what he was walking into. He wasn’t just ignoring warnings of impending death; he was achieving immortality. Caesar may not have had to actually guide the hands that drove those daggers into his body 23 times, but his yet-shrewd mind saw all the pieces falling together. He even got to one-up his betrayers by selecting the Senate as the scene of the murder.
“If the conspirators are going to kill him, what would be the worst place? Where they would lose their legitimacy?” The Senate was a traditionally weapon-free location the conspirators violated by attacking him.
Bursztajn’s conclusion is startling, The (London) Sunday Times asserted.
The godfather who directs and controls the events of March 15, 44BC, is not hot-headed Cassius or scheming Brutus. They are, as they always have been, far out of their depth, minnows in a political ocean patrolled by sharks. No: the man pulling the strings, the orchestrator of his own death, is none other than Julius Caesar himself.
The outcome is exactly as he had planned it. In every particular, he gets what he wants. The naive and foolish conspirators, on the other hand, go away empty-handed, beaten by superior tradecraft and the poverty of their own imagination. In defending the republic they ensured its demise. In fighting dictatorship they have guaranteed its victory. By killing Caesar they have made him immortal The flashing blades on the ides of March delivered to Julius Caesar exactly what he had planned that they should: immortality....the verdict is unconventional but unavoidable. Suicide by conspirator.

....bottom line: to every Roman family, Caesar bequeathed enough money for them to live for up to three months at his expense. $ocial $ecurity??!! The crowd at the funeral broke into a frenzy of posthumous adulation. His adopted heir, Octavian, eventually became the first Roman Emperor as Augustus. Caesar saw it all coming and turned his demise into a useful political tool: He was the first historical Roman to be officially deified. He was posthumously granted the title Divus Iulius (the divine Julius ) by decree of the Roman Senate on 1 January 42 BC. The appearance of a comet during was taken as confirmation of his divinity. http://www.forensic-psych.com/articles/artLTimesEtTuJulius3903.php

[Jimbuna]

1915 British battle cruisers Inflexible & Irresistible hit mines in Dardanelles.

1935 Adolf Hitler orders German rearmament in violation of The Treaty of Versailles.

1940 German air raid on British fleet base Scapa Flow.

1968 My Lai massacre occurs (Vietnam War); 450 die.

[Jimbuna]

432 Saint Patrick, aged about 16 is captured by Irish pirates from his home in Great Britain and taken as a slave to Ireland (traditional date).

1800 British warship Queen Charlotte catches fire; 700 die.

1891 British Steamer "Utopia" sinks off Gibraltar killing 574.

1942 Bełżec Concentration Camp opens with the transport of 30,000 Lublin Polish Jews.