This date in history

[Kaye T. Bai]

1954 - The first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, is launched.

[Jimbuna]

1879 - Battle of Rorke's Drift: British garrison of 150 holds off 3,000-4,000 Zulu warriors. Eleven Victoria Crosses and a number of other decorations were awarded to the defenders.

[Aktungbby]

1189: Philip Augustus, Henry II of England and Frederick Barbarossa assemble the troops for the Third Crusade. That 'crusader' mentality is still with us today!

[Jimbuna]

1924 - Ramsey MacDonald forms 1st Labour government in Britain.

1945 - World War II: Karl Dönitz launches Operation Hannibal.


1978 - Sweden becomes the first nation in the world to ban aerosol sprays, believed to be damaging to earth's ozone layer.

[Oberon]

1795 - French cavalry capture the Dutch Fleet moored in the Zuiderzee at Den Helder.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captur..._at_Den_Helder

[Jimbuna]

1915 - German-British sea battle at Dogger Bank & Helgoland.

1943 - Hitler orders German troops at Stalingrad to fight to the death.

[Jimbuna]

1915 - Alexander Graham Bell in NY calls Thomas Watson in SF.

1916 - Montenegro surrenders to Austria-Hungary.

1918 - Russia declared a republic of Soviets.

1919 - Founding of League of Nations, 1st meeting 1 year later.

1939 - 1st nuclear fission experiment (splitting of a uranium atom) in the US, in basement of Pupin Hall, Columbia University by a team including Enrico Fermi.

1940 - Nazi decrees establishment of Jewish ghetto in Lodz Poland.

1949 - 1st Israeli election - Ben-Gurion's Mapai party wins.

1955 - Russia ends state of war with Germany.

[Jimbuna]

1788 - Captain Arthur Phillip and British colonists hoist the Union Flag at Sydney Cove, New South Wales, now celebrated as Australia Day.

1940 - Nazis forbid Polish Jews to travel on trains.

1942 - WW II Navy flier Don Mason sends message "Sighted sub sank same."

1945 - Soviet forces reach Auschwitz concentration camp.

1998 - President Bill Clinton says "I want to say one thing to the American people; I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

1998 - President Bill Clinton says "I want to say one thing to the American people; I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

The press made a fortune! AHHH the good ol' days! As my slightly demented rabid Republican mom said knowingly: "Well...they're Democrats U know" And the way things are goin' he's about to become the 'First man" in the White House if Hillary wins???!!!

[Eichhörnchen]

Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops.

[Jimbuna]

1944 Leningrad liberated from Germany in 880 days at the loss of 600,000 killed.

1945 Russia liberates Birkenau Concentration Camp in Poland.

1967 The Beatles sign a 9 year worldwide contract with EMI records.

1973 US & North Vietnam's William Rogers & Nguyen Duy Trinh sign cease-fire, ending longest US war and miltary draft.

1996 Germany celebrates its 1st Holocaust Remembrance Day.

[Aktungbby]

1951: On January 27, 1951, (42 days B 4 the biggest day of my life) the government detonated its first (1 kiloton) atomic device on the Frenchman's Flat site, resulting in a tremendous explosion, the flash from which was seen as far away as San Francisco.
Forcefully marking the continued importance of the West in the development of nuclear weaponry, the government detonates the first of a series of nuclear bombs at its new Nevada test site.
Although much of the West had long lagged behind the rest of the nation in technological and industrial development, the massive World War II project to build the first atomic bomb single-handedly pushed the region into the 20th century. Code named the Manhattan Project, this ambitious research and development program pumped millions of dollars of federal funds into new western research centers like the bomb building lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico and the fissionable material production center at Hanford, Washington. Ironically, the very conditions that had once impeded western technological development became benefits: lots of wide-open unpopulated federal land where dangerous experiments could be conducted in secret.
After the war ended, the West continued to be the ideal region for Cold War-era nuclear experimentation for the same reasons. In December 1950, the Atomic Energy Commission designated a large swath of unpopulated desert land 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas as the Nevada Proving Ground for atmospheric atomic testing.
The government continued to conduct atmospheric tests for six more years at the Nevada site. They studied the effects on humans by stationing ground troops as close as 2,500 yards from ground zero and moving them even closer shortly after the detonation. By 1957, though, the effects of radioactivity on the soldiers and the surrounding population led the government to begin testing bombs underground, and by 1962, all atmospheric testing had ceased. WARNING: MAY GIVE U THE "WILLY'S"

[Jimbuna]

1807 London's Pall Mall is 1st street lit by gaslight.

1915 1st US ship lost in WW I, William P Frye (carrying wheat to UK).

1944 U-271 & U-571 sunk off Ireland.

[Oberon]

1986 - The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after launch killing all on board.

[Aktungbby]

1915: President Woodrow Wilson signs a bill merging the Lifesaving Service and the Revenue Cutter Service into The United States Coast Guard! The Amercan Barque SS William P. Frye with a cargo of 186,950 bushels of wheat for England is the first US ship sunk during WWI by Auxillary Cruiser Prinz Eitel Fredrick. On January 27, it was intercepted in the South Atlantic Ocean off the Brazilian coast and ordered to jettison its cargo as contraband. When the American ship’s crew failed to fulfill these orders completely by the next day, the German captain, Max Thierichens, ordered the destruction of the ship. Oddly enough; On 11 March 1915 Prinz Eitel Friedrich, now low on supplies and burdened by over 300 prisoners, arrived at Newport News, Virginia. Allied warships were lying outside US waters and to avoid them she exceeded the time limit under international law for a combatant ship to remain in a neutral port. As a result the US authorities interned her. Later she was moved, still under the German flag, to Philadelphia Navy Yard In April 1917, on US entry into the war, Prinz Eitel Friedrich, engines tired and interned, was seized by the US Navy and recondtioed for conversion as a troopship. She was commissioned on 7 April 1917. as USS DeKalb (ID-3010) and served for the remainder of the war as a troopship on the trans Atlantic route.[wiki] USS DeKalb ...looking dazzling indeed! c.1918 Footnote to History:

The United States was still 3,000 miles and two years away from the horrors of the Great War in Europe during the spring of 1915.
But when an audacious German commerce raider eluded its pursuers and anchored off Newport News Shipbuilding — drawing a snarling pack of British cruisers to the gates of the Chesapeake Bay — Hampton Roads suddenly found itself perilously close to joining the shooting. The port was already the hub of an epic British effort that would comb the country for more than 500,000 horses and mules worth nearly $3 billion today, then transport them to France. Several British freighters were waiting when they saw the Prinz Eitel Friedrich and its feared German naval ensign make the turn up the James early on March 10. But the fleeting scare was just the first in a nerve-wracking international crisis. Within days, the river teemed with steamers from New York, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. — all choked with sightseers drawn by the defiant vessel that had become the front-page scourge of Allied shipping and the frustrated Royal Navy. The verandas of the Old Point Comfort resort hotels bristled with onlookers, too, all watching the channel for the battered German ship and its promised dash to the Atlantic.
So tense was the standoff that Washington sent Marines from Norfolk Navy Yard and soldiers from Fort Monroe to the Prinz Eitel's pier, where they warded off bomb threats with sandbags and machine guns.
It also put the fort's powerful coastal guns and searchlights on high alert, rousting six companies of artillerymen from the theaters and bars in Phoebus after a British cruiser reportedly ventured in as far as Thimble Shoals.
Just when the Prinz Eitel's reluctant acceptance of internment seemed to bring the danger to an end, however, a second German raider — the Kronprinz Wilhelm — dashed through the blockade and anchored off Newport News, breathing new life into a six-weeks-long drama.
"No place in America was drawn into World War I more quickly than Hampton Roads — and that's because the ports, the military, the shipyard and all those horses intertwined us with the war long before it started," says John V. Quarstein, author of "World War I on the Virginia Peninsula."
"But when these German commerce raiders dash in, they pull us into a spectacular moment in history. We were in the war zone."
Built for Nordeutscher Lloyd shipping company in 1904, the 16,000-ton, 503-foot-long Prinz Eitel served as a passenger liner in the Far East before the war broke out in August 1914.
Designed from the first for easy conversion into an armed commerce raider, the vessel spent less than a week at the Imperial German Navy base at Tsingtao, China, while being refitted and recrewed with deck guns and sailors from the gunboats Luchs and Tiger.
With Korvettenkapitan Max Thierichens of the Luchs in command, the new warship steamed into the Pacific on Aug. 5 to join the German Far East Squadron in the Caroline Islands. But almost immediately it detached for an independent, seven-month cruise during which it sank 11 merchant vessels across the South Pacific and South Atlantic.
"People feared that this ship would show up anywhere," Quarstein says, describing the Prinz Eitel's quick transformation into a dreaded ocean predator and global front-page story.
Yet for most of its 71/2 months at sea, the wary Prinz Eitel avoided potentially dangerous port calls to repair or recoal, preferring instead to depend on occasional German supply ships it met in the open ocean or — much more frequently — whatever it could find in the holds of its victims.
"It was as if a roast pigeon were to fly into the mouth of a starving man," Thierichens told the Daily Press when the ship arrived, describing in fluent English how the Prinz Eitel was nearly stranded at sea until it received a serendipitous identification message from a merchant vessel encountered off Easter Island.
"French ship Jean," the signal read: "Loaded with Cardiff coal."
Turning south, the raider sank five more vessels off the coast of Chile, spurring the pursuit of six British and French cruisers that repeatedly came close but always missed their target.
Veering far toward the Antarctic, the Prinz Eitel evaded the frustrated pack as it rounded Cape Horn, where the bemused crew heard a wireless report announcing its demise almost halfway across the planet.
"The one message that made us laugh was to hear we were sunk again," a German marine told the Daily Press after arriving in Newport News.
"When we rounded the Horn, we heard we'd been lost in the South China Sea."
By the time the fleeing Prinz Eitel left South America and approached the U.S. coast, its coal bunkers were nearly empty and its overworked boilers on the verge of bursting.
Even in a straight line, its extended voyage from Tsingtao measured more than 20,000 miles — and the raider had steered a course of search and evasion that was anything but direct.
Guided in part by Capt. H. H. Kiehne of the Frye, the blacked-out vessel emerged from the darkness off Cape Henry late on the night of March 9, eluding four English warships whose wireless chatter could be heard by Thierichens, his radio man and Kiehne.
At daybreak the Prinz Eitel steamed into the bay, passed quarantine and entered Hampton Roads, dropping anchor off 33rd Street in Newport News by midmorning. Within minutes, a Coast Guard cutter came alongside to safeguard the port's neutrality. Soon crowds of spectators packed the shores, mesmerized by the sight of the notorious but completely unexpected rover.
"Sudden Arrival of German Warship in this Port Creates a Sensation," the Daily Press reported in a giant front-page headline the following morning.
"Until She Put into Newport News Today, Her Whereabouts Were a Mystery."
Prime attraction
When Customs Collector Norman R. Hamilton stepped aboard the Prinz Eitel the next morning, he was greeted by Thierichens with lunch and music from the ship's orchestra.
Both men knew the vessel's rust-streaked hull and blackened stacks were the least of its problems, and that the 24-hour limit for combatant ships to resupply and refuel would be waived because of the repairs it needed.
Within hours of their meeting to discuss the secret terms of the Prinz Eitel's stay, the ship eased into Drydock No. 3, where large crowds looked on as the shipyard prepared to scrape and paint the barnacle-encrusted bottom. Most of more than 300 prisoners taken from the raider's victims were escorted ashore along with each vessel's consignment of mail and the passenger and crew's personal baggage.
The masters of each ship left aboard Hamilton's launch, then gathered to pose for pictures and tell reporters about what they described as generally considerate treatment. The British crews left soon afterward, singing "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" as they boarded streetcars and headed for the horse freighters waiting to carry them home.
Inside the Daily Press, an editorial headlined "German Prowess" described the Prinz Eitel's commander and crew as "famous above all other sailors connected with the war.
"The fact that this ship, which is not a fighting ship at all but a passenger ship with a few guns installed on her decks, should have traveled the high seas for seven months, capturing and sinking 11 vessels, taking and preserving all the captives, including men, women and children, without mishap to any; that she should have eluded every hostile ship of war … never having had the occasion to fire a gun and not losing a man of her crew is a record that distinguishes Capt. Thierichens as one of the greatest navigators and all-round strategists who ever sailed the ocean blue.
"If it were not a violation of neutrality, we should wish him and them good luck and a safe voyage."
Many Americans agreed, and soon the waterfront and river filled with spectators lured by the "terror of the sea" and its "destructive but brilliant record."
A German postcard dated March 12 shows the vessel surrounded by steamers and launches and the shoreline packed with crowds. By March 16, the Daily Press was reporting arriving trains filled to capacity and boats streaming in from New York, Baltimore and Washington — all adding up to some 10,000 people who'd come to see the German raider.
British threats
Embraced by the public and press, Thierichens soon found himself mixing with some of Hampton Roads' leading figures.
On March 21, he was honored at a luncheon staged by Fort Monroe commander Col. Ira P. Haynes, after which he reviewed a full-dress parade of the garrison, Casemate Museum historian Robert Kelly said.
He also attended the March 15 christening of the battleship USS Pennsylvania as a special guest, after which the shipyard president and vice-president entertained him at a Hotel Chamberlin dinner.
Off the Virginia Capes, however, the Royal Navy fumed at the hospitality received by their detested quarry. The British embassy in Washington thundered in protest, too, demanding that the "pirate" vessel be turned away or interned.
Setting up a cordon off the coast, the British warships began exchanging such heated radio messages about their resolve to sink the Prinz Eitel that Haynes met with Adm. Frank E. Beatty of the Navy Yard to prepare for the worst.
Reports of British spies at work only fueled the tension, which flared still hotter after bomb threats.
Dispatching soldiers and Marines with heavy machine guns to the Prinz Eitel's pier, the two American commanders knew that — with the Atlantic Fleet still steaming off Cuba — they had no ships that could stop a British incursion.
And when news of the Prinz Eitel's growing readiness led to reports of a British cruiser slipping into the waters off Thimble Shoals, the guns at the fort prepared to open fire.
"Sudden orders from Fort Monroe for all the artillerymen to immediately report," the Daily Press reported, describing how six companies had been rousted from their theaters, clubs and homes.
"All guns are manned and searchlights play over the Roads and bay," another headline read, reported how the lights combined with signal rockets and aerial flares to be seen for miles.
"Old Point took on an aspect of warfare," the paper reported, describing how the crews of the big 10- and 12-inch coastal guns and smaller 3-inch rapid-fire guns peered out over the bay and channel with the "wildest excitement."
"The British had already shown their disdain for the rules of neutrality in other places. So it was a real threat," Quarstein said.
"But it would have taken them many more ships with much bigger guns to get past Fort Monroe."
Ticking clock
Fueled by daily headlines of Thierichens' intention to leave, the crisis wore on for two more weeks, still drawing spectators in droves.
More than 10,000 filled the river and shoreline on March 29, prompting the bemused captain to tip his cap to the admiring crowd. Then he opened his decks to 200 visitors, including six young women who insisted he pose for pictures.
"You may miss me at any time," he told reporters asking about his coal supply.
""Everybody wanted to know if this daring ship was going to be able to dash out and escape. Everybody was waiting to see if the British would break the neutrality rules and steam in to get it."

In the end, the question was decided by the Prinz Eitel's worn-out boilers and engines, which — without many more weeks of repairs — could not be relied upon to produce more than two-thirds of the ship's rated top speed of 18 knots.
So at 7 p.m. on April 7 — after four weeks of high drama — Thierichens delivered a message requesting internment just hours before his deadline to depart.
"I would like to have gone to sea myself. I would not hesitate to go. But I had to think first of my men," he explained.
"The number and force of the enemy's cruisers watching the entrance to the bay makes it impossible for the dash to the ocean to have any chance of success."
Second surprise
Two days after the Prinz Eitel was boarded by an American crew and towed to the Navy Yard, the Daily Press published a rare Monday extra edition.
"German Cruiser Kronprinz Wilhelm Seeks Haven at Newport News after Giving Slip to Allied Cruisers," the front-page read on April 12, after the giant four-stacker anchored in the spot once occupied by its sister.
Reported sunk a half-dozen times during a voyage of 255 days, the Kronprinz had lurked unseen off the Capes for nearly a week, then taken advantage of a lapse in the Royal Navy's vigilance after the Prinz Eitel's surrender.
Just over 25 tons of coal remained in the blacked-out ship's bunkers when it headed north under cover of darkness, then turned west at full steam toward the mouth of the bay.
"We got in without being seen by the enemy," Kapitanleutnant Thierfelder boasted on his arrival. "And we can get out the same way."
Surprised and embarrassed for a second time, Great Britain responded with angry protests, but the threat from its cruisers had been diminished by the Atlantic Fleet's return to Hampton Roads.
The Kronprinz also was in such bad shape that — despite its captain's promise to dash back to the Atlantic — the time needed for repairs seemed almost certain to push past the deadline for internment.
An alarming outbreak of beriberi played an increasingly important role, too, as the number of cases grew to more than 25 percent of the 500-man crew by April 15, the Daily Press reported.
So despite putting into Drydock No. 2 a few days later to have its battered hull plates tightened and its bottom scraped and painted, the ship followed its comrade's example and interned on April 26 — four days before its deadline.""It's hard for Americans to imagine today just how much these raiders captured the public imagination," "The jury was still out on whether we were going to side with the British. We weren't palsy with them the way we are now. And these ships had sailed around the world against the greatest navy on earth in such a daring way that everybody admired them."

Mark St. John Erickson