TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
29 December
◆1778 British troops, attempting a new strategy to defeat the colonials in America, captured Savannah, the capital of Georgia.
◆1808 Andrew Johnson, the 17th president of the United States who succeeded Lincoln (1865-1869), was born in a 2-room shack in Raleigh, N.C. [Waxhaw, South Carolina]
◆1812 USS Constitution (Captain William Bainbridge) captures HMS Java off Brazil after a three hour battle.
◆1813 The British burned Buffalo, N.Y., during the War of 1812.
◆1845 Six months after the congress of the Republic of Texas accepts U.S. annexation of the territory, Texas is admitted into the United States as the 28th state.★
◆1862 Union General William T. Sherman is thwarted in his attempt to capture Vicksburg, Mississippi, when he orders a frontal assault on entrenched Rebels.
◆1879 Billy Mitchell, aviation hero Gen (WW I), was born.
◆1890 In the tragic final chapter of America's long war against the Plains Indians, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.★
◆1891 Edison patented the "transmission of signals electrically" (radio).
◆1931 The identification of heavy water was publicly announced by H.C. Urey.
◆1934 Japan renounced the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and the London Naval Treaty of 1930.
◆1940 In one of his famous "fireside chat" broadcasts President Roosevelt describes how he wishes the United States to become the "arsenal of democracy" and to give full aid to Britain regardless of threats from other countries.’
◆1943 USS Silversides (SS-236) sinks three Japanese ships and damages a fourth off Palau.
◆1944 There is a lull in the fighting in the Ardennes as Allied forces buildup their forces for further counterattacks.
◆1948 Tito declared Yugoslavia would follow its own Communist line.
◆1950 The Associated Press named General of the Army Douglas MacArthur the outstanding newsmaker of 1950.
◆1950 Time magazine selected "GI Joe" as the Man of the Year.
◆1962 Saigon announces that 4,077 strategic hamlets have been completed out of a projected total of 11,182. The figures also stated that 39 percent of the South Vietnamese population was housed in the hamlets. U.S. officials considered these figures questionable. The strategic hamlet program was started in 1962 and was modeled on a successful British counterinsurgency program used in Malaya from 1948 to 1960. The program aimed to bring the South Vietnamese peasants together in fortified strategic hamlets to provide security from Viet Cong attacks. Although much time and money was put into the program, it had several basic weaknesses. There was much animosity toward the program on the part of the South Vietnamese peasants, who were forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands. Also, the security afforded by the hamlets was inadequate and actually provided lucrative targets for the Viet Cong. Finally, the entire project was poorly managed. After the assassination of the program's sponsor, President Ngo Dinh Diem, in November 1963, the program fell into disfavor and was abandoned.