TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
20 August
◆480 BCE "Go, tell the Spartans, we lie here in obedience to their orders." [Trad].
◆480 BCE Naval Battle of Artemesium: Greek fleet evades the Persians [Trad].
◆636 Battle of the Yarmuk: After six days of fighting Arab forces inflict a devastating defeat on the Byzantines.
◆917 Battle of Anchialus: Simeon the Great of the Bulgars defeats the Byzantines.
◆1119 Battle of Bremule/Brenneville: Henry I of England defeats Louis IV of France.
◆1494 Columbus returned to Hispaniola. He had confirmed that Jamaica was an island and failed to find a mainland.
◆1499 Second Naval Battle of Sapienza: Turks & Venetians clash.
◆1619 The 1st African slaves arrived to North America aboard a Dutch privateer. It docked in Jamestown, Virginia, with twenty human captives among its cargo.
◆1648 Battle of Lens: The Great Conde feigns retreat to rout a larger Austrian force.
◆1673 The Texel: Dutch fleet defeats an Anglo-French attempt to invade the Netherlands.
◆1781 George Washington began to move his troops south to fight Cornwallis.
◆1785 Oliver Hazard Perry, US Naval hero ("We have met the enemy"), was born in Rhode Island.
◆1794 American General "Mad Anthony" Wayne defeated the Ohio Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in the Northwest territory, ending Indian resistance in the area.
◆1833 Future 23rd President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, is born on this day. He was the grandson of former 9th President (and Guard general) William H. Harrison, who died one month into his term in 1841.
◆1847 General Winfield Scott won the battle of Churubusco on his drive to Mexico City. The Mexican War gave future civil war generals their first taste of combat.
◆1864 The 8th and last day of battle at Deep Bottom Run, Va., left about 3900 casualties.
◆1865 Pres. Johnson proclaimed an end to the "insurrection" in Texas.
◆1866 President Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War over, even though the fighting had stopped months earlier.
◆1908 The American Great White Fleet arrived in Sydney, Australia, to a warm welcome.
◆1910 The first shot fired from an airplane was during a test flight over Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay.
◆1914 Battle of Gumbinnen: Russians defeat Germans in East Prussia.
◆1914 German troops massacre 211 Belgian civilians at Andenne.
◆1915 Italy declares war on Turkey.
◆1918 Britain opens offensive on Western Front.
◆1920 Pioneering American radio station 8MK in Detroit (later WWJ) began daily broadcasting.
◆1940 Radar was used for the first time, by the British during the Battle of Britain.
◆1941 Adolf Hitler authorized the development of the V-2 missile.
◆1942 Plutonium was first weighed. Glenn T. Seaborg was a co-discoverer of Plutonium.
◆1942 On Guadalcanal, the first aircraft, 31 Marine (MAG-23) fighters from the escort carrier USS Long Island are flown into Henderson Field Air Strip.
◆1942 Searchlights crossing the sky cease to be a fixture of Hollywood premieres as of this day in 1942. In an attempt to avoid attack and surveillance by enemy forces in World War II, the entire West Coast was required to dim its lights at night. During the war, movie studies were also limited in the amount of cloth they could use in costumes, the quantity of new construction they could devote to sets, and the amount of film stock they could purchase.
◆1944 During the night, the last elements of German 5th Panzer and 7th Armies to escape the Falaise pocket filter through Allied line around Chambois and St. Lambert. Some 70-80 miles to the east, the US 3rd Army captures crossings over the Seine River at Mantes Grassicourt, 30 miles west of Paris. To the southwest of Paris, the US 20th Corps (also part of US 3rd Army) enters Fontainbleau.
◆1944 Americans announce that Japanese resistance on Biak Island has ended. The Japanese have suffered 4700 killed and 220 captured. US casualties are listed at 2550.
◆1946 World War II civilian truck restrictions were lifted in the U.S. Truck restrictions were only the beginning of special regulations during the war. Civilian auto production virtually ceased after the attack on Pearl Harbor as the U.S. automotive industry turned to war production, and gas rationing began in 1942.
◆1948 The United States ordered the expulsion of the Soviet Consul General in New York, Jacob Lomakin, accusing him of attempting to return two consular employees to the Soviet Union against their will.
◆1950 General MacArthur repeated his July 4th warning to North Korean leader Kim Il Sung concerning the treatment of prisoners of war as a result of the Hill 303 (Waegwan) murder of 36 American soldiers.
◆1952 In interservice air operation at Chang Pyong-ni, Korea, U.S. Navy, Marine and Air Force aircraft destroy 80 percent of assigned area.
◆1953 The Soviet Union publicly acknowledged it had tested a hydrogen bomb.
◆1966 Operation "Allegheny" in Quang Nam, RVN. (Concluded 29 August)
◆1968 In the face of rising anti-Soviet protests in Czechoslovakia, Soviet troops (backed by troops from other Warsaw Pact nations) intervene to crush the protest. The brutal Soviet action shocked the West and dealt a devastating blow to U.S.-Soviet relations.★
◆1975 Viking 1, an unmanned U.S. planetary probe, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to Mars.★
◆1977 The United States launched Voyager 2, an unmanned spacecraft carrying a 12-inch copper phonograph record containing greetings in dozens of languages, samples of music and sounds of nature.
◆1982 During the Lebanese Civil War, a multinational force including 800 U.S. Marines lands in Beirut to oversee the Palestinian withdrawal from Lebanon.
◆1987 A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., rejected Lt. Col. Oliver North's argument that the independent counsel investigating the Iran-Contra affair was operating under an invalid Justice Department regulation.
◆1990 For the first time since Iraq began detaining foreigners, President Bush publicly referred to the detainees as hostages, and demanded their release. Iraq moved Western hostages to military installations (human shields).
◆1997 NATO troops in Bosnia seized truckloads of weapons from police stations in Banja Luka. They moved to force out officers loyal to Karadzic.
◆1998 Pres. Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan13 days after the deadly embassy bombings in East Africa. About 50 missiles were fired at the camp of Osama Bin Laden and some 25 missiles against a suspected chemical plant in Khartoum. The plant in Sudan was suspected of producing the chemical EMPTA, one of the ingredients in VX nerve gas, but also an ingredient in fungicides and anti-microbial agents.