TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
16 December
◆1460 Battle of Worksop: The Lancastrians defeat Richard of York.
◆1689 English Parliament adopted a Bill of Rights after Glorious Revolution. The Bill of Rights included a right to bear arms.
◆1773 In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor.★
◆1821 LT Robert F. Stockton and Dr. Eli Ayers, a naval surgeon and member of American Colonizing Society, induce a local African king to sell territory for a colony which became the Republic of Liberia.
◆1826 In an act that foreshadowed the American rebellions to come, Benjamin Edwards rides into Mexican-controlled Nacogdoches, Texas, and proclaims himself the ruler of the Republic of Fredonia.
◆1863 Confederate President Jefferson Davis names General Joseph Johnston commander of the Army of Tennessee.
◆1897 The 1st submarine with an internal combustion engine was demonstrated.
◆1907 Great White Fleet departs Hampton Roads, VA to circumnavigate the world.
◆1915 Albert Einstein published his "General Theory of Relativity." In 2000 David Bodanis authored “E=MC²: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation.”
◆1941 USS Swordfish (SS-193) sinks Japanese cargo ship Atsutasan Maru.
◆1942 Pharmacist's Mate First Class Harry B. Roby, USNR, performs an appendectomy on Torpedoman First Class W. R. Jones on board USS Grayback (SS-208). It is the second appendectomy performed on board a submarine.
◆1942 Admiral Tanaka's supply run is attacked again, US dive bombers sink the destroyer Kagero off Guadalcanal. On land, US troops move on Mount Austen.
◆1944 With the Anglo-Americans closing in on Germany from the west and the Soviets approaching from the east, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler orders a massive attack against the western Allies by three German armies.★
◆1944 Japanese planes attack American shipping while US aircraft strike at air bases (in continuing operations by TF38). On Mindoro, the landing forces consolidates the beachhead and begins construction of an landing strip.
◆1950 The U.S. 24th Infantry Division received the Distinguished Unit Citation (now the Presidential Unit Citation) for "extraordinary heroism in combat against a numerically superior enemy." The division, commanded by Major General William F. Dean, by then a prisoner of war, was the first U.S. division to enter the Korean War.
◆1952 The U.S. Air Force's 3rd Bomb Wing completed its 25,000th sortie of the Korean War.
◆1953 Charles E. Yeager flew 2,575 kph in Bell X-1A.
◆1965 Gen. William Westmoreland, Commander of U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, sends a request for more troops. With nearly 200,000 U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam already, Westmoreland sent Defense Secretary Robert McNamara a message stating that he would need an additional 243,000 men by the end of 1966. Citing a rapidly deteriorating military situation in which the South Vietnamese were losing the equivalent of an infantry battalion (500 soldiers) a week in battle, Westmoreland predicted that he would need a total of 600,000 men by the end of 1967 to defeat the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. Although the high tide of U.S. troop strength in South Vietnam never reached the 600,000, there were more than 540,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam by 1969.
◆1997 A Pentagon-appointed panel concluded that the Army, Navy and Air Force should segregate male and female recruits in their earliest phases of basic training.
◆1998 In Operation Desert Fox, Navy cruise missiles attack Iraq. Pres. Clinton ordered a sustained series of missile strikes against Iraq forces in response to Saddam Hussein's continued defiance of UN weapons inspectors. Iraqi envoy Nizar Hamdoon accused UN weapons inspector Richard Butler of producing a biased report on weapons inspections. The strike came one before scheduled vote on Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives and days before the beginning of Ramadan. Some 200 missiles fell on Iraq in the first 24 hours of the attack and initial reports indicated two people killed and 30 injured. The House Republicans postponed impeachment by at least 24 hours.