TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
30 January
◆1467 Battle of Velke Kostolany: Mathias Corvinus defeats Bratríci.
◆1643 Battle of Adwalton Moor: Royalists defeat the Parliamentarians.
◆1661 Oliver Cromwell, dead since 1658, is exhumed and ceremonially executed in punishment for the death of Charles I.
◆1781 Articles of Confederation go into effect, establishing a perpetual union of "The United States ofAmerica."
◆1806 Prussia takes possession of Hanover.
◆1862 U.S.S. Monitor, the Union's first sea-going ironclad vessel, launched at Greenpoint, New York.★
◆1882 Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States (1933 -1945), was born in Hyde Park, N.Y. He led the country out of the Great Depression and through most of World War II.
◆1912 Barbara Tuchman, U.S. historian best remembered for her book "The Guns of August," was born.
◆1931 The United States awarded civil government to the Virgin Islands.
◆1933 German President Paul von Hindenburg made Adolf Hitler chancellor. After World War I, Germany fell into disarray and looked for a leader to strengthen it again. Hitler had emerged after joining the Nazi Party in 1919 and taking it over in 1921. In 1932 Hitler ran against von Hindenburg and lost - -but not by a wide margin. The Nazis won 230 seats in the German parliament and continued to gain influence, stifling democracy and communism by force and by making laws against them. After Hindenburg's death in 1934, Hitler proclaimed himself Der Führer of the Third Reich and continued as Germany's leader through World War II. Gen. Kurt von Hammerstein -Equord tried to block the appointment of Hitler as chancellor but was overruled by Pres. Hindenburg.
◆1942 USS Wakefield, the former passenger liner SS Manhattan converted to a troop transport and manned by a Coast Guard crew, transported 20,000 British troops to Singapore. Having disembarked all 20,000 troops, she was bombed by Japanese aircraft while still in port. Five of her Coast Guard crew were killed, the first Coast Guard casualties of World War II. After quick temporary repairs, she evacuated 500 women and children to Bombay before the port fell to the Japanese.
◆1942 The last pre-war automobiles produced by Chevrolet and DeSoto rolled off the assembly lines today. Wartime restrictions had shut down the commercial automobile industry almost completely, and auto manufacturers were racing to retool their factories for production of military gear.
◆1943 On Guadalcanal American forces continue to advance against Japanese resistance. There is heavy fighting along the River Bonegi.
◆1944 At Anzio the Allied offensive begins.★
◆1944 US Task Force 58 continues the bombardment of Kwajalein, Roi, Namur and Eniwetok. There are 7 battleships involved and 400 bombing sorties are flown.
◆1945 US Army Rangers and Filipino guerrillas executed a flawless rescue of 486 POWs from Camp Cabanatuan north of Manila.
◆1945 A US battalion is landed to take Gamble Island in Subic Bay. To the north, US 11th Corps begins to advance inland quickly and takes Olongapo on Luzon.
◆1945 The Allies launched a drive on the Siegfried line in Germany.
◆1948 Orville Wright (b.1871), US aviation pioneer, died.
◆1951 Ferdinand Porsche died, German tank designer, at 75.
◆1952 Operation HIGHBOY, an attack by self-propelled 155mm howitzers with direct fire on enemy bunkers and fortifications located on steep slopes, met with limited success.
◆1953 President Dwight Eisenhower announced that he would pull the Seventh Fleet out of Formosa to permit the Nationalists to attack Communist China.
◆1953 U.S. Air Force Captain Benjamin L. Fithian, and his "backseater" Lieutenant Sam Lyons, 319th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, achieved the first F-94 aerial victory when they destroyed a Lavochkin La-9, a "Bedcheck Charlie," which was the nickname given to small communist aircraft that regularly harassed U.N. troops after midnight. The two men made the kill at night using only their fire control radar, a combat first in its own right.
◆1953 Lieutenant Raymond J. Kinsey, 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing, shot down the first communist bomber in more than a year, a twin engine TU-2.
◆1958 Ernst H. Heinkel, German aircraft designer, at 70.
◆1964 The United States launched Ranger 6 from Cape Canaveral. It was an unmanned spacecraft carrying six television cameras that was to crash -land on the moon.
◆1968 In coordinated attacks all across South Vietnam, communist forces launch their largest offensive of the Vietnam War against South Vietnamese and U.S. troops.★
◆1971 Operation Dewey Canyon II begins as the initial phase of Lam Son 719, the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos that would commence on February 8.★