TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
10 April
◆1241 Battle of the Sajo River, Day 1: The Hungarians hold the Mongols.
◆1534 Khair Ed-Din "Barbarossa" & his Turkish corsairs sack Fondi, and begin a march on Itri.
◆1741 Battle of Mollwitz: Prussians defeat the Austrians.★
◆1790 U.S. patent system was established.
◆1794 Matthew Calbraith Perry, the American Navy Commodore who opened Japan, was born.★
◆1806 Leonidas Polk (d.1864), bishop, Lt Gen (Confederate Army), was born.★
◆1815 Austria declares war on King Giacchino Murat of Naples.
◆1827 Lewis Wallace (d.1905), soldier, lawyer, New Mexico governor who promised Billy the Kid amnesty, diplomat and author (Ben Hur), was born. “As a rule, there is no surer way to the dislike of men than to behave well where they have behaved badly.”
◆1848 Battle of Castelnuovo: Austrians defeat Italian Nationalists.
◆1862 Union forces began the bombardment of Fort Pulaski in Georgia along the Tybee River.
◆1863 Rebel Gen. Earl Van Dorn attacked at Franklin, Tenn.
◆1863 An expedition led by Lieutenant Commander Selfridge of U.S.S. Conestoga cut across Beulah Bend, Mississippi, and destroyed guerrilla stations that had harassed Union shipping on the river.
◆1865 At Appomattox Court, Va, General Robert E. Lee issued Gen Order #9, his last orders to the Army of Northern Virginia. Seneca Indian Ely Parker was at his general’s side at Appomattox. “After four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard-fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to the result from no distrust of them…I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen…I bid you an affectionate farewell.”
◆1868 British defeat King Theodorus of Abyssinia at Magdala.
◆1877 Federal troops were withdrawn from Columbia, SC.
◆1880 War of the Pacific: Chilean fleet blockades Callao, Peru.
◆1912 The first wireless transmission was received on an airplane.
◆1918 Near Toul, in eastern France, the 104th Infantry begins four days determined defense against a German assault, to become the first American regiment to be awarded the Croix de guerre.
◆1930 The first synthetic rubber is produced.
◆1940 First Battle of Narvik: Royal Navy destroyers defeat German destroyers, two of which are lost.
◆1941 U.S. troops occupied Greenland to prevent Nazi infiltration.
◆1941 USS Niblack, while rescuing survivors of torpedoed ship, depth charged German submarine; first action of WWII between U.S. and German navies.
◆1941 Axis troops capture Cyrenaica, invest Tobruk, initiating an unsuccessful seven month siege.
◆1942 About 12,000 Japanese land on Cebu. The small number of American defenders retreat inland.
◆1942 The day after the surrender of the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese, the 75,000 Filipino and American troops captured on the Bataan Peninsula begin a forced march to a prison camp near Cabanatuan. During this infamous trek, known as the “Bataan Death March,” the prisoners were forced to march 85 miles in six days, with only one meal of rice during the entire journey. By the end of the march, which was punctuated with atrocities committed by the Japanese guards, hundreds of Americans and many more Filipinos had died. The day after Japan bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invasion of the Philippines began. Within a month, the Japanese had captured Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and the U.S. and Filipino defenders of Luzon were forced to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula. For the next three months, the combined U.S.-Filipino army, under the command of U.S. General Jonathan Wainwright, held out impressively despite a lack of naval and air support. Finally, on April 7, with his army crippled by starvation and disease, Wainwright began withdrawing as many troops as possible to the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay. However, two days later, 75,000 Allied troops were trapped by the Japanese and forced to surrender. The next day, the Bataan Death March began. Of those who survived to reach the Japanese prison camp near Cabanatuan, few lived to celebrate U.S. General Douglas MacArthur’s liberation of Luzon in 1945. In the Philippines, homage is paid to the victims of the Bataan Death March every April on Bataan Day, a national holiday that sees large groups of Filipinos solemnly rewalking parts of the death route.
◆1944 German submarines U-515 and U-68 are sunk by elements of US Task Group 21.12 which includes the carrier Guadalcanal.
◆1945 On Okinawa, after a massive preparatory barrage, the US 96th Infantry Division seizes part of Kakazu Ridge.
◆1945 The Allies liberated their first Nazi concentration camp, Buchenwald, north of Weimar, Germany.
◆1945 On Luzon, the advance of US 14th Corps reaches Lamon Bay and the coastal town of Mauban is captured.
◆1945 Hanover falls to the US 13th Corps (part of US 9th Army). US 3rd Army advances toward Erfurt and US 7th Army advances toward Nuremberg.
◆1945 German Me 262 jet fighters shot down ten U.S. bombers near Berlin.
◆1951 The Defense Department issued an order effective May 1 lowering the induction standards for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. The plan called for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps to receive draftees for the first time since World War II.★
◆1957 Suez canal reopened for all traffic.
◆1963 The USS Thresher nuclear-powered submarine failed to surface 220 miles east of Boston, Mass., in a disaster that claimed 129 lives.
◆1966 River Patrol Boats of River Patrol Force commenced operations on inland waters of South Vietnam.★
◆1968 President Johnson replaced General Westmoreland with General Creighton Abrams in Vietnam.
◆1972 The United States and the Soviet Union joined some 70 nations in signing an agreement banning biological warfare: The Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention. A defector in 1990 revealed that the Soviet biological weapons program was twice the size of the highest US intelligence estimates. The convention banned the development, production, and stockpiling of bacteriological and toxic weapons.★
◆1972 Although the U.S. command refuses to confirm publicly the location of targets, U.S. B-52 bombers reportedly begin bombing North Vietnam for the first time since November 1967. The bombers struck in the vicinity of Vinh, 145 miles north of the Demilitarized Zone. It was later acknowledged publicly that target priority during these attacks had been given to SAM-2 missile sites, which had made raids over North Vietnam increasingly hazardous. U.S. officials called Hanoi’s SAM-2 defenses “the most sophisticated air defenses in the history of air warfare.” These defenses consisted of advanced radar and lethally accurate air defense missiles.
◆1984 US Senate condemned the CIA mining of Nicaraguan harbors.
◆1994 Two U.S. F-16 fighters bombed Bosnian Serb targets in Gorazde, which was under heavy attack. This was NATO’s first-ever attack on ground positions. A second air strike took place the following day.★
◆1999 The US announced that 82 more warplanes were being shipped to join the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia. It was reported that half Yugoslavia’s most modern planes had been destroyed.★
◆1999 US F-16s struck southern Iraqi radar and antiaircraft sites after the fighters were fired upon.
◆1999 Bad weather hampered NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, but the allies warned Slobodan Milosevic the lull wouldn’t last. The Pentagon, meanwhile, announced that 82 U.S. planes would join the force conducting airstrikes over Yugoslavia.
◆2002 In Russia the FSB, successor to the KGB, accused the CIA of trying to steal military secrets. US diplomat Yunju Kensinger and David Patterson were identified as agents posing as US Embassy officials.
◆2003 In the 23rd day of Operation Iraqi Freedom US and Kurdish troops seized oil-rich Kirkuk without a fight and held a second city within their grasp as opposition forces crumbled in northern Iraq. Looting in Baghdad prompted orders for US Marines to crack down on thieves. Over 40 suicide vests were found in a Baghdad school. Looting in Kirkuk stripped the North Oil Co. facilities and pumping of 850,000 barrels a day ceased