TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
30 August
◆1645 Dutch & Indians signed peace treaty in New Amsterdam (NY).
◆1682 William Penn left England to sail to New World. He took along an insurance policy.
◆1748 British begin two month siege of Pondicherry (fails).
◆1757 Battle of Gross Jägersdorf: Russians defeat the Prussians, but retreat anyway.
◆1780 General Benedict Arnold betrayed the US when he promised secretly to surrender the fort at West Point to the British army. Arnold whose name has become synonymous with traitor fled to England after the botched conspiracy. His co-conspirator, British spy Major John Andre, was hanged.
◆1781 The French fleet of 24 ships under Comte de Grasse arrived in the Chesapeake Bay to aid the American Revolution. The fleet defeated British under Admiral Graves at battle of Chesapeake Capes.
◆1813 Marines aboard the USS President helped capture the HMS brig Shannon.
◆1813 Creek Indians massacred over 500 whites at Fort Mims Alabama.
◆1813 Battle of Kulm: Russo-Prussians defeat the French.
◆1842 Battle of Ghoaine: British defeat the Afghans.
◆1862 Union forces were decisively defeated by the Confederates at the Second Battle of Bull Run in Manassas, Va.★
◆1862 Confederates under Edmund Kirby Smith rout a Union army at Richmond, Kentucky, in one of the most lopsided engagements of the Civil War.★
◆1879 John Bell Hood, confederate general (lost Atlanta, along with arm and leg), died at 48 of Yellow Fever in a New Orleans epidemic.
◆1880 Diablo, a chief of the Cibecue Apache, is killed during a battle with a competing band of Indians.★
◆1913 Navy tests Sperry gyroscopic stabilizer (automatic pilot).
◆1929 Near New London, CT, 26 officers and men test Momsen lung to exit submerged USS S-4.
◆1941 Nazis begin Siege of Leningrad.
◆1942 Egypt: Rommel inititiates the Battle of Alam Halfa, loses by Sept. 5.
◆1942 At Guadalcanal, the American forces receive 18 more fighters and 12 dive bombers.
◆1944 The US 12th Army Group and the British 21st Army Group continue to advance.
◆1945 American and British forces land in the Tokyo area. The US 11th Airborne Division flies in to Atsugi airfield, while the US 4th Marine Regiment of the US 6th Marine Division lands in the naval base at Yokosuka. Meanwhile, the American cruiser USS San Juan starts to evacuate Allied prisoners of war detained in the Japanese home islands.
◆1945 Gen. Douglas MacArthur lands in Japan to oversee the formal surrender ceremony and to organize the postwar Japanese government.
◆1945 A proclamation to the German people is signed today formally announcing the establishment of the Allied Control Council and its assumption of supreme authority in Germany.
◆1950 The USAF organized Detachment F of the 3rd Rescue Squadron in Korea and equipped it with Sikorsky H-5 helicopters.
◆1950 The U.S. 1st Cavalry Division relieved the ROK 1st Division on the Naktong River front.
◆1950 The 3rd Infantry Division (minus the 65th Infantry Regiment) sailed from San Francisco for Japan.
◆1952 Captain Leonard W. Lilley of the 4th Fighter Interceptor Wing scored his first aerial victory. He went on to become an F-86 Sabre ace.
◆1961 Two Cuban frigates fire on a Naval Reserve aircraft on a training mission over international waters.
◆1987 A redesigned space shuttle booster, created in the wake of the Challenger disaster, roared into life in its first full-scale test-firing near Brigham City, Utah.
◆1993 50 Rangers stage a raid in search of Mohammad Farrah Aidid, Warlord in Somalia.
◆1994 Lockheed and Martin Marietta inked the paperwork on a merger that created one of the world's largest aerospace/defense companies. The newly formed Lockheed Martin Corporation had a taste for mergers, and continued to acquire other companies, including Loral and Unisys Defense.
◆1995 Bosnian Serbs gave Serbian Pres. Slobodan Milosevic authority to negotiate for them. The West pounded the Bosnian Serbs with artillery and air attacks in hopes of bludgeoning them into serious peace talks.