TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
16 July
◆1212 Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa; end of Muslim domination of Spain.
◆1429 Joan of Arc leads French army in Battle of Orleans. ★
◆1683 Turkish troops under Kara Mustafa attack Vienna.
◆1705 Battle of Cassano d'Adda: The French defeat the Imperialists.
◆1769 Father Juñpero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan missionary, founds the first Catholic mission in California on the site of present-day San Diego.
◆1779 American troops under General Anthony Wayne captured Stony Point, N.Y., with a loss to the British of more than 600 killed or captured. [see Jun 15]
◆1790 The District of Columbia was established as the seat of the United States government.
◆1798 US Public Health Service formed and a US Marine Hospital was authorized.
◆1862 David Glasgow Farragut, in recognition of his victory at New Orleans, promoted to Rear Admiral, the first officer to hold that rank in the history of the U.S. Navy. The measure passed by Congress which created the rank of Rear Admiral also revamped the existing rank structure to include Commodore and Lieutenant Commander and established the number of Rear Admirals at 9; Commodores, 18; Captains, 36; Commanders, 72; and the remainder through Ensign at 144 each. The act provided that ''The three senior rear admirals [Farragut, L. M. Goldsborough, and Du Pont] shall wear a square blue flag at the mainmast head; the next three at the foremast head, and all others at the mizzen.'' Rear Admirals were to rank with Major Generals in the Army.
◆1863 The draft riot enters its fourth day in New York City in response to the Enrollment Act.
◆1912 A Naval torpedo, launched from an airplane, was patented by Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske.
◆1915 First Navy ships, battleships Ohio, Missouri, and Wisconsin transit Panama Canal.
◆1920 Gen. Amos Fries was appointed 1st US army chemical warfare chief.
◆1927 Augusto Sandino began a 5-year war against the US occupation of Nicaragua.
◆1940 Hitler issues his Directive 16. It begins, "I have decided to begin to prepare for, and if necessary to carry out, an invasion of England." It goes on to explain the importance of the air battles for the achievement of this aim. At this stage in the planning the German army's views are dominant. They wish the Channel crossing to take place on a wide front with landings all along the south coast of Britain. They envisage that the force to be employed will be at least 25 and perhaps 40 divisions. They hope that the crossing can be protected by the Luftwaffe and mines on its flanks. This is not a very realistic plan.
◆1943 The US 3rd Division attacks Agrigento and Porto Empedocle.
◆1944 Forces of US 1st Army continue attacking near St. Lo.
◆1945 The United States conducts the first test of the atomic bomb at its research facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico.★
◆1945 Cruiser Indianapolis left San Francisco with an atom bomb.
◆1945 A force of 500 B-29 Superfortress bombers strike targets on Honshu and Kyushu. In total, over 1500 American planes attack raid various objectives on the Japanese home islands during the day.
◆1946 US court martial in Dachau condemned 46 SS to hang for the Malmedy massacre of disarmed GIs.
◆1950 U.S. Army Chaplain Herman G. Felhoelter became the first chaplain to earn an award for heroism and the first to lose his life in the Korean War. Voluntarily remaining behind with several critically wounded soldiers, he and his group was overwhelmed and killed by the communists. Chaplain Felhoelter was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
◆1953 The last U.N. counteroffensive of the war began.
◆1957 Marine Maj. John Glenn set a transcontinental speed record when he flew a jet from California to New York in 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds.1962 NASA civilian test pilot Joseph A Walker takes X-15 to 32,600 m.
◆1969 At 9:32 a.m. EDT, Apollo 11, the first U.S. lunar landing mission, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a historic journey to the surface of the moon.
◆1973 The Senate Armed Services Committee begins a probe into allegations that the U.S. Air Force made thousands of secret B-52 raids into Cambodia in 1969 and 1970 at a time when the United States recognized the neutrality of the Prince Norodom Sihanouk regime in Cambodia.★
◆1979 Saddam Hussein succeeded Premier al-Bakr and became president of Iraq and chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC). He established a multilayered security system with 3-5 secret police units. He later put his son Qusai in charge of his 10,000 member Special Guards.
◆1990 Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced that Moscow had agreed to drop its objection to a united Germany’s membership in NATO.