This date in history

[Jimbuna]

1829 The first units of the London Metropolitan Police appear on the streets of the British capital, the city's 1st modern police force.

1940 1st US merchant ship "Booker T. Washington" commanded by a black captain (Hugh Mulzac), launched at Wilmington Delaware.

1941 Nazi massacre at Babi Yar ravine (near Kiev) Ukraine begins, 33,771 mostly Jews murdered.

[Jimbuna]

1938 Treaty of Munich signed by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Édouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain, forces Czechoslovakia to give territory to Germany. Chamberlain infamously declares "Peace for our time" on his return to London.

1939 Germany & Russia agree to partition Poland.

1941 German assault on Moscow, Operation Typhoon, begins.

1942 Admiral Chester Nimitz's B-17 finds Guadalcanal using a National Geographic map.

1946 Twenty-two Nazi leaders, including Joachim von Ribbentrop and Hermann Goering, are found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death or prison at the Nuremberg war trials.

[Aktungbby]

1777: the Continental Congress, forced to flee in theface of advancing British forces, moved from Philadelphia to York Pennsyvania...arguably the only time it acted in unison!

[Jimbuna]

1653 Russian parliament accepts annexation of Ukraine.

1688 Prince William of Orange accepts invitation of take up the British crown.

1914 The first division of Canadian troops, 33,000 sail for Britain; most Canadians are volunteers, anxious to prove their loyalty to the Commonwealth.

1934 Adolf Hitler expands German army and navy, violating Treaty of Versailles.

1939 Winston Churchill calls Russia a "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma"

1942 Bell P-59 Airacomet fighter, 1st US jet, makes maiden flight.

1946 12 Nazi war criminals sentenced to death in Nuremberg.

1947 The F-86 Sabre flies for the first time.

1988 Mikhail Gorbachev becomes Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, effectively head of state of the Soviet Union.

1998 Vladimir Putin became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation.

[Jimbuna]

1901 First Royal Navy submarine launched at Barrow-in-Furness.

1939 Prototype for the Ilyushin Il-2, world's most-produced military airplane designed by Sergey Ilyushin, takes it first flight. Over 36,000 made for Soviet airforce in WWII.

1942 RMS Queen Mary, carrying thousands of US troops, slices cruiser HMS Curacao in half, killing 239

1942 WWII: British Royal Navy boards floundering German U-boat U-559 retrieving abandoned Enigma code machine before it sinks; 2 British sailors go down with the sub.

1944 Polish resistance fighters capitulate in the Warsaw Uprising, with some 250,000 people killed.

2007 President Roh Moo-hyun of South Korea walks across the Military Demarcation Line into North Korea on his way to the second Inter-Korean Summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il

[Jimbuna]

1283 Dafydd ap Gruffydd, Prince of Gwynedd, Wales, becomes the first person executed by being hanged, drawn and quartered.

1941 Adolf Hitler says Russia is "already broken and will never rise again" in a broadcast to the German people.

1942 Launch of 1st A-4/V-2 rocket to altitude of 53 miles (85 km)

1990 Reunification of East and West Germany. West German flag is raised above the Brandenburg Gate on the stroke of midnight.

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

1942 RMS Queen Mary, carrying thousands of US troops, slices cruiser HMS Curacao in half, killing 239

two of my sources reflect 337 or 338 casualties...mostly from the stern-half that sank immediately?

The Queen not only hit the Curcoa but sliced the light cruiser in two amidships at full speed, like a hot scalpel through a stick of butter. The disparity in tonnage was so great that thousands of soldiers and seamen aboard the Queen felt nothing as the huge liner cut the warship in half. No doubt Commodore Illingworth aboard the Queen Mary was sick to his stomach as he watched the aft end of the cruiser sink almost immediately with the men inside trapped and doomed to a watery grave. The other half of the Curacoa sank a few minutes later. Adding even more misery to the tragedy and Commodore Illingworth, the Queen Mary sailed on with a damaged bow, still under strict orders to stop for nothing, even for sailors freezing to death in the ice-cold ocean after their vessel was sliced in half by the ship he commanded.

[Jimbuna]

1883 The Orient Express departs on its first official journey from Paris to Istanbul.

1957 Avro Arrow roll-out ceremony at Avro Canada plant in Malton, Ontario.

1993 Troops and tanks of President Boris Yeltsin shell and occupy the Russian White House in Moscow, the house of government of the Russian Federation.

[Jimbuna]

1863 Confederate sub David damages Union ship Ironsides.

1916 Adolf Hitler is wounded in the left thigh by an exploding shell during the Battle of the Somme.

1942 Budy Massacre at Auschwitz sub-camp, 90 French-Jewish women beaten to death by prison guards.

1943 US air raid on Wake, Japanese execute 98 US prisoners in retaliation.

1947 Harry Truman makes the 1st Presidential address televised from the White House.

1993 Russian President Boris Yeltsin removes honor guard from Lenin's mausoleum.

2020 US President Donald Trump leaves Walter Reed National Military Medical Center while still infectious with COVID-19 and returns to the White House.

[Jimbuna]

1917 Battle of Passchendaele: Canadian troops capture the village of Passchendaele in the Third Battle of Ypres, after 250,000 casualties on both sides.

1939 Adolf Hitler announces plans to regulate Jewish problem.

1939 Adolf Hitler denies he intends to go to war against France and Britain.

1944 Royal Dutch Navy submarine Zwaardvis (Swordfish) sinks German submarine U168 in the Java Sea.

1945 US General Eisenhower welcomed in The Hague (on Hitler's train)

1949 US President Harry Truman signs Mutual Defense Assistance Act (for NATO)

1951 Joseph Stalin proclaims the Soviet Union has the atomic bomb.

1961 JFK advises Americans to build fallout shelters.

1976 US President Gerald Ford says there is "no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe"

[Jimbuna]

1916 The German submarine U-53 arrives off Newport, Rhode Island, and sinks 9 British merchant ships in international waters.

1929 Ramsay MacDonald is first British Prime Minister to address US Congress.

1935 Himmler, Hess and Heydrich inspect the concentration camp at Dachau.

1940 the McCollum memo proposes bringing the U.S. into the war in Europe by provoking the Japanese to attack the United States.

1942 Last camouflaged German raider Komet leaves Flushing (Netherlands)

1944 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel ordered to return to Berlin.

1944 Uprising at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Jews burn down crematoriums.

2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan starts with an air assault and covert operations on the ground.

[Jimbuna]

1769 Captain James Cook lands in New Zealand at Poverty Bay on the East Coast of the North Island.

1918 American soldier Alvin York single-handedly attacks German gun nest, killing at least 25 and capturing 132 Germans.

1941 Building at Concentration Camp Birkenau begins.

1945 US President Harry Truman announces atomic bomb secret shared with Britain and Canada.

[Jimbuna]

1799 Sinking of British frigate HMS Lutine, with the loss of 240 men and cargo worth £1,200,000 off Dutch coast.

1932 Soviet leader Joseph Stalin expels Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev from the Communist Party after a power struggle.

1941 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt approves an atomic program that would become the Manhattan Project.

1990 Saddam Hussein threatens to hit Israel with a new missile.

2006 North Korea conducts its first nuclear test, with an estimated yield of between 0.4-2 kilotons.

[Jimbuna]

1871 The Great Chicago Fire is finally extinguished after 3 days, leaving approximately 300 dead, 100,000 homeless, and costing $222m in damage.

1938 Germany completes its annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland.

1941 Battle of Moscow - Germans Wehrmacht forces encounter stronger than expected resistance at the Mozhaisk line, west of Moscow.

1957 A fire at the Windscale nuclear plant in Cumbria, England becomes the world's first major nuclear accident.

1957 US President Eisenhower apologizes to the finance minister of Ghana, Komla Agbeli Gbdemah, after he is refused service in a restaurant in Dover, Delaware.

1974 The Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) and its political wing the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP) founded at the Spa Hotel in the village of Lucan near Dublin.

1975 Israel formally signs protocol for the Sinai II Agreement accord with Egypt, in Jerusalem.

1985 US fighter jets force Egyptian plane carrying hijackers of Italian ship Achille Lauro to land in Italy, gunmen are placed in custody.

[Jimbuna]

1797 Battle of Camperdown (Kamperduin): British navy defeats Dutch fleet.

1939 FDR and advisor Alexander Sachs meet to discuss Albert Einstein's letter warning of the possibilities of an atomic bomb.

1969 Three people shot dead during street violence in the loyalist Shankill area of Belfast.

1985 US intercepts Egyptian Boeing with Achille Lauro terrorists.

1992 1st three-way US presidential debate (George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot)