TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
20 December
◆1606 Virginia Company settlers left London to establish Jamestown.
◆1803 U.S. and French governments put the finishing touches on a little land transaction known as the Louisiana Purchase.
◆1803 Without a shot fired, the French hand over New Orleans and Lower Louisiana to the United States.
◆1812 Sacagawea, Shoshone interpreter for Lewis & Clark, died.
◆1822 Congress authorizes the 14-ship West Indies Squadron to suppress piracy in the Caribbean.
◆1860 South Carolina officially leaves the United States when a convention ratifies an article of secession. South Carolina, the first state to secede, was followed within a few weeks by six other states, who collectively formed the Confederate States of America. When hostilities erupted in April 1861, four more states joined the Confederacy.
◆1861 Transports were loaded with 8,000 troops in England. They were setting sail for Canada so that troops would be available if the "Trent Affair" was not settled without war.
◆1862 Confederate General Earl Van Dorn thwarts Union General Ulysses S. Grant's first attempt to capture Vicksburg, Mississippi, when Van Dorn attacks Grant's supplies at Holly Springs, Mississippi.★
◆1864 Confederate forces evacuated Savannah, Ga., as Union Gen. William T. Sherman continued his "March to the Sea."
◆1879 Thomas A. Edison privately demonstrated his incandescent light at Menlo Park, N.J.
◆1892 Alexander Brown and George Stillman of Syracuse, New York, patented an inflatable automobile tire.
◆1924 Adolf Hitler was released from prison after serving less than one year of a five year sentence for treason.
◆1939 The American cruiser USS Tuscalossa arrives in New York with 579 survivors from the scuttled German liner Columbus. They disembark on Ellis Island.
◆1941 The Flying Tigers, American pilots in China, entered combat against the Japanese over Kunming.
◆1941 Admiral Ernest J. King designated Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet in charge of all operating naval fleets and coastal frontier forces, reporting directly to the President.
◆1941 Japanese troops landed on Mindanao.
◆1943 Allied aircraft drop about 2000 tons of bombs on Frankfurt, Mannheim and other cities in southern Germany. There are also raids on the V-1 ramps in France.
◆1944 The Women's Air Force Service Pilots were deactivated. Before deactivation 1,074 WASPs logged 60 million miles flying for the U.S. Army Air Forces.
◆1944 The 5th Panzer Army continues to advance to the south against forces of US 12th Army Group, but American defenders of the road junctions of St. Vith and Bastogne continue to hold their positions. Allied sources allege that in the area of Monschau the Germans have been shooting American prisoners with machineguns. Meanwhile, the US 3rd Army reports attacking from the Saarlautern bridgehead and having cleared 40 pillboxes and fortified houses.
◆1945 Tire rationing in the U.S. ended on this day as World War II wound to a close, and widespread shortages in the States began to ease.
◆1946 The morning after Viet Minh forces under Ho Chi Minh launched a night revolt in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, French colonial troops crack down on the communist rebels.
◆1948 U.S. Supreme Court announced that it had no jurisdiction to hear the appeals of Japanese war criminals sentenced by the International Military Tribunal.
◆1950 The 1st Marine Division was active against enemy guerillas in Masan-Pohang-Sondong-Ansong areas. Enemy pressure lessened as Marines forced the 10th North Korean Division to abandon guerilla activity and withdraw northward.
◆1957 Elvis Presley was given a draft notice to join US Army for National Service.
◆1960 North Vietnam announces the formation of the National Front for the Liberation of the South at a conference held "somewhere in the South."
◆1963 More than two years after the Berlin Wall was constructed by East Germany to prevent its citizens from fleeing its communist regime, nearly 4,000 West Berliners are allowed to cross into East Berlin to visit relatives.
◆1967 Some 474,300 US soldiers were stationed in Vietnam.
◆1974 Clearance of Suez Canal for mines and unexploded ordnance completed by Joint Task Force.
◆1989 Operation Just Cause: The United States invades Panama in an attempt to overthrow military dictator Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges and was accused of suppressing democracy in Panama and endangering U.S. nationals.★
◆1995 During a brief military ceremony in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, French General Bernard Janvier, head of the United Nations peacekeeping force, formally transfers military authority in Bosnia to U.S. Admiral Leighton Smith, commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Southern Europe.
◆2001 In Afghanistan the first international peacekeeping forces arrived from Britain as the U.N. Security Council authorized a multinational force for Afghanistan.
◆2002 U.S. jets fired on two Iraqi air defense sites in the southern no-fly zone after an Iraqi jet entered the restricted air space.