TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
24 April
◆1184 BCE The Greeks take Troy [Traditional].
◆1524 Hapsburg Imperial troops capture Milan from the French.
◆1547 Battle of Muhlberg: Imperialists defeat the Schamlkaldic Leagu.
◆1757 Battle of Reichenberg: Prussians defeat the Austrians.
◆1769 Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington born.
◆1778 US Ranger Captain John Paul Jones captured the British ship Drake.
◆1865 C.S.S. Webb, Lieutenant Read, dashed from the Red River under forced draft and entered the Mississippi at 8:30 at night in a heroic last-ditch effort to escape to sea.
◆1877 Federal troops were ordered out of New Orleans, ending the North's post-Civil War rule in the South.
◆1884 USS Thetis, Bear, and Alert sailed from New York to search for Greeley expedition lost in Arctic.
◆1898 Spain declared war on the United States after rejecting America's ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba.
◆1898 US fleet under commodore Dewey steamed from Hong Kong to Philippines.
◆1917 Destroyer squadron departs Boston for European service
◆1923 Colonel Jacob Schick patented Schick razors.
◆1941 Roosevelt formally orders US warships to report the movements of German warships west of Iceland. This is happening unofficially already. The information is usually passed one way or another to the British.
◆1944 The first B-29 arrived in China, over the Hump of the Himalayas.
◆1944 The US 8th Air Force raids factories and airfields in Friedrichshafen, near Munich. A total of 55 planes are lost, including 14 which land or crash in Switzerland. During the night, 250 RAF Lancaster bombers scatter "Flying Meteor" methane-petrol incendiary bombs over Munich causing devastation in the area between Central Station and the Isar River.
◆1944 American forces reach Lake Sentani near Hollandia, New Guinea. To the east, Australian forces advancing from the Huon Peninsula capture Madang.
◆1945 Dessau on the Elbe River is taken by US 1st Army.
◆1945 Units of both US 5th Army and British 8th Army begin to cross the Po River at several points near Ferrara and to the west. Ferrara is captured. On the west coast, La Spezia falls to the US 92nd Division. German forces are incapable of stopping the Allied advance.
◆1945 On Okinawa, Japanese forces defending the Shuri Line, in the south, begin tactical withdrawals.
◆1948 The Berlin airlift began to relieve the surrounded city.
◆1951 U.S. Air Force Captain Joseph C. McConnell, 51st Fighter-Interceptor Wing, qualified as the sixth "double ace" (10 kills) of the war.
◆1959 Organization of American States asks U.S. to establish naval patrols off east coast of Panama to prevent invasion of Cuban forces
◆1962 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology achieved the first satellite relay of a television signal, between Camp Parks, Ca., and Westford, Mass.
◆1962 Marine helicopters (Shufly) supported the 21st Army of the Republic of Vietnam Division during Operation Nightingale near Can Tho.
◆1969 US B-52's dropped 3,000 ton bombs at Cambodian boundary.
◆1971 North Vietnamese troops hit Allied installations throughout South Vietnam.
◆1974 Naval forces begin minesweeping operations in the Suez Canal Zone.
◆1980 FAILURE AT DESERT ONE: An ill-fated military operation to rescue the 52 American hostages held in Tehran ends with eight U.S. servicemen dead and no hostages rescued.
◆1981 The IBM Personal Computer was introduced. It used software from a corporation called Microsoft.
◆1990 West and East Germany agreed to merge currency and economies on July 1.
◆1994 Bosnian Serbs, threatened with NATO air strikes, grudgingly gave up their three-week assault on Gorazde, burning houses and blowing up a water treatment plant as they withdrew.
◆1997 The US ratified the chemical weapons ban.