TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
12 April
◆1204 Fourth Crusaders capture Constantinople, amid great slaughter.★
◆1394 Turkish Sultan Bayazid takes Thessaloniki.
◆1637 Shimabara Revolt begins in Japan.
◆1770 The British government moved to mollify outraged colonists by repealing almost all of the Townshend Acts.★
◆1776 Halifax resolution for independence was adopted by North Carolina.
◆1782 The British navy won its only naval engagement against the colonists in the American Revolution at the Battle of Les Saintes in the West Indies off Dominica. A British fleet beat the French.
◆1782 Battle of Providen: Indecisive Anglo-French naval clash off India.
◆1796 Battle of Montenotte: Bonaparte's French defeat the Austrians.
◆1808 Subsistence for Army officers fixed at 20 cents per ration.
◆1809 Battle of Oporto: The English defeat the French.
◆1811 First U.S. colonists on Pacific coast arrived at Cape Disappointment, Washington.
◆1844 Texas became a US territory.
◆1861 The American Civil War begins when Confederates fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.★
◆1861 Revenue cutter Harriet Lane fires first shot from a naval vessel in the Civil War across the bow of the merchant vessel Nashville when she attempted to enter Charleston Harbor.
◆1862 Union volunteers led by James J. Andrews stole a Confederate train near Marietta, Ga., but were later caught. This episode inspired the Buster Keaton comedy “The General.”
◆1864 Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Confederate raiders attack Fort Pillow, Tennessee.★
◆1865 The last major Confederate port city falls when Mobile, Alabama, surrenders to Union troops.
◆1869 North Carolina legislature passed an anti-Klan Law.
◆1900 An Act of Congress (31 Stat. L., 77, 80) extended the jurisdiction of the Lighthouse Service to the noncontiguous territory, of Puerto Rico and adjacent American waters.
◆1911 LT Theodore Ellyson qualifies as first naval aviator.
◆1916 American cavalrymen and Mexican bandit troops clashed at Parrel, Mexico.
◆1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge ended today.
◆1918 Marines of the 4th Brigade suffered their first gas attack on the night and early morning hours of 12-13 April when the Germans bombarded the 74th Company, 6th Marines near Verdun with mustard gas. Nine Marine officers and 305 enlisted Marines were gassed and evacuated, and 30 Marines died from the effects of the gas shells which hit in the middle of the reserve area cantonments in which they were sleeping.
◆1944 The U.S. Twentieth Air Force was activated to begin the strategic bombing of Japan.
◆1945 While on a vacation in Warm Springs, Georgia, President Roosevelt suffers a stroke and dies.★
◆1945 US 9th Army forces cross the Elbe River near Magdeburg, while in the rear of their advance, Brunswick falls. Troops of the US 3rd Army take Erfurt. In the south, French units (Part of US 7th Army) take Baden Baden. To the rear, the Ruhr pocket has been further reduced by the capture of Essen by American attacks.
◆1945 Japanese Kamikaze attacks achieve hits on several of the radar picket ships as well as 2 battleships and 8 other vessels.★
◆1951 The largest jet battle in the history of aviation was fought over Sinuiji when 115 F-84s and F-86s, escorting 32 B-29 Superfortresses, engaged 80 MiG-15s and destroyed 46 of them.★
◆1951 The 1st Marine Air Wing flew its first night close-air support mission of the war using intersecting searchlight beams to mark enemy targets.
◆1962 U.S. Navy demonstrates new landing craft with retractable hydrofoils, LCVP (H).
◆1966 1st B-52 bombing on North Vietnam took place.
◆1966 Multi-Bn operation NEVADA started south of Chu Lai, RVN.
◆1975 In Cambodia, the U.S. ambassador and his staff leave Phnom Penh when the U.S. Navy conducts its evacuation effort, Operation Eagle.★
◆1979 LT(jg) Beverly Kelley assumes command of the USCGC Cape Newagen, becoming the first woman to command a U.S. warship.
◆1981 The space shuttle Columbia is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, becoming the first reusable manned spacecraft to travel into space.
◆1983 Following the establishment of the U.S. Air Force as a separate service in 1947, the Army began to develop further its own aviation assets (light planes and rotary wing aircraft) in support of ground operations.★
◆1985 US Olympic Committee endorsed a boycott of Moscow games.
◆1991 Defense Secretary Dick Cheney announced plans to close 31 major US military bases, including Ford Ord in California and Fort Dix in New Jersey.
◆1991 Kurdish rebels reported the Iraqi army was attacking guerrillas in northern Iraq.
◆1993 Aircraft from USS Theodore Roosevelt and NATO forces begin enforcing the no-fly zone over the Bosnia in Operation Deny Flight; meanwhile, Bosnian Serbs bombarded the besieged eastern town of Srebrenica.
◆1999 NATO bombs destroyed the October 14 heavy machinery manufacturing plant in the Krusevac region of Serbia.
◆2001 Pres. Bush blamed the Chinese for the midair collision of the US spy plane and a Chinese jet and rebuffed demands to end reconnaissance flights off the coast of China. The 24 crew members of a U.S. spy plane arrived in Hawaii after being held for 11 days in China.