TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
17 April
◆43 BCE Phyrric senatorial victory over Marc Antony at Mutina (Modena).
◆1413 Venetians defeat the Hungarians in Friulia.
◆1492 A contract was signed by Christopher Columbus and a representative of Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, giving Columbus a commission to seek a westward ocean passage to find the Indies.
◆1524 Giovanni da Verrazano, Florentine navigator, explored from Cape Fear to Newfoundland and discovered New York Bay and the Hudson River of present-day New York harbor.
◆1625 Franco-Piedmontese forces capture Gavi from the Spanish-Genoese.
◆1778 Sloop-of-war Ranger captures a British brig.
◆1790 Benjamin Franklin dies in Philadelphia at age 84.★
◆1793 Battle of Warsaw: Russians crush Polish insurgents.
◆1805 The Revenue cutter Louisiana engaged two pirates that had been fitted out at New Orleans. Twenty shots were exchanged but the pirate vessels escaped.
◆1808 The Bayonne Decree by Napoleon I of France ordered the seizure of U.S. ships on the pretext that they were in violation of the U. S. Embargo Act (22 December 1807), resulting in over ten million dollars in United States goods and ships being confiscated.
◆1824 Russia abandoned all North American claims south of 54' 40'.
◆1848 Battle of Visco: Austrians defeat Italian Nationalists.
◆1861 The Virginia State Convention voted to secede from the Union. Virginia became the eighth state to secede from the Union.
◆1861 U.S.S. Powhatan, Lieutenant D. D. Porter, arrived off Pensacola.
◆1863 Gunboats under Rear Admiral Porter engaged and ran past the Confederate batteries at Vicksburg shepherding Army transports to New Carthage below the Southern citadel.
◆1864 General Grant banned the trading of prisoners.
◆1864 BATTLE OF PLYMOUTH.
◆1864 There was a bread revolt in Savannah, Georgia.
◆1865 Mary Surratt was arrested as a conspirator in the Lincoln assassination.
◆1865 The Confederate ironclad Jackson (previously Muscogee) was destroyed at Columbus, Georgia, after Union Army forces overran Southern defenses at the city in an attack that began the preceeding night.
◆1894 Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev born.
◆1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki: Sino-Japanese War ends (1894-1895), China loses Formosa.
◆1907 The Ellis Island immigration center in New York Harbor processed a record 11,747 immigrants, part of a record 1,004,756 for the year. Between 1820 and 1970, the year 1907 saw the largest number of immigrants to the U.S., 1,285,349. Between 1905 and 1915, the annual immigration numbers topped 1 million six times.
◆1943 The US 8th Air Force carries out a daylight bombing raid on aircraft factories in Bremen. Of 115 B-17 bombers employed, 16 are lost on the mission.
◆1943 Admiral Yamamoto flew from Truk to Rabaul.
◆1944 US B-17 and B-24 bombers attack Sofia, Bulgaria.
◆1944 US B-17 and B-24 bombers attack Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
◆1945 U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Boris T. Pash commandeers over half a ton of uranium at Strassfut, Germany, in an effort to prevent the Russians from developing an A-bomb.
◆1945 There are American landings in the Moro Gulf at Cotabatu. The assault units are from US 24th Infantry Division from US 10th Corps (General Sibert). Admiral Noble commands 3 cruisers and a destroyer force in support. The American forces which landed at Zamboanga early in March have already cleared a large part of the southwest of the island, but the majority of the Japanese 35th Army (General Suzuki) remains intact. There is no initial opposition to the new landings.
◆1951 Operation DAUNTLESS continued to advance against weakened communist resistance in the 24th and 25th Infantry Division zones. A company of the 24th Infantry Division's 6th Tank Battalion moved up Route 3 to within seven miles of Kumhwa without contact.
◆1961 THE BAY OF PIGS: The invasion begins when a CIA-financed and -trained group of Cuban refugees lands in Cuba and attempts to topple the communist government of Fidel Castro.★
◆1970 With the world anxiously watching, Apollo 13, a U.S. lunar spacecraft that suffered a severe malfunction on its journey to the moon, safely returns to Earth.
◆1975 THE KILLING FIELDS: The Khmer Rouge troops capture Phnom Penh and government forces surrender.
◆1983 Mark W. Clark (87), US general (WW II), died.
◆1986 IBM produced its 1st megabit-chip.
◆1998 The space shuttle Columbia blasted off with 7 astronauts and a menagerie of creatures to test the effects of space travel on the nervous system.
◆1999 The US launched the 505-foot Navy destroyer Winston S. Churchill at the Bath Iron Works in Maine.
◆1999 NATO forces launched the 25th night of bombing against Yugoslavia in the strongest attacks thus far. Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's commander, warned Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to change his policies in Kosovo or see his military machine destroyed.
◆1999 Iraq, US fighter planes bombed anti-aircraft sites in northern no-fly zone.
◆2000 The Clinton administration approved the sale of upgraded missiles and a long-range radar system for Taiwan but not 4 hi-tech destroyers.
◆2001 US envoys arrived in China to resolved issues of the US spy plane collision with a Chinese jet.
◆2001 In Mississippi voters decided to keep the Confederate emblem on the state flag by a margin of 65 to 35%.
◆2003 OIF in its 30th day.★
◆2004 Battle of Husybah, Iraq.