TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
21 July
◆387 BCE "Vae Victis!": Brennus' Gauls occupy Rome, following their victory on the Allia (18th) (or maybe 390).
◆1200 Battle of Monreale: Papal-Norman army defeats Marcovaldo di Anweiler.
◆1403 Battle of Shrewsbury: Henry IV defeats Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland.
◆1667 The Peace of Breda ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War and ceded Dutch New Amsterdam to the English. The South American country of Surinam, formerly Dutch Guiana, including the nutmeg island of Run was ceded by England to the Dutch in exchange.
◆1669 John Locke's Constitution of English colony Carolina was approved.
◆1798 Battle of the Pyramids: Bonaparte defeats the Mamlukes.
◆1823 After pirate attack, LT David G. Farragut leads landing party to destroy pirate stronghold in Cuba.
◆1832 the Battle of Wisconsin Heights that was fought during the Black Hawk War.
◆1861 The first major engagement of the main armies in the Civil War takes place along a muddy creek known as “Bull Run.”★
◆1898 Spain ceded Guam to US.
◆1918 The residents and coastguardsmen of Orleans, Massachusetts, were amazed to see the German U-boat, U-156, firing at an American tug and four barges just off shore.
◆1921 Gen. Billy Mitchell flew off with a payload of makeshift aerial bombs and sank the former German battle ship Ostfriesland off Hampton Roads, Virginia; the 1st time a battleship was ever sunk by an airplane.★
◆1930 The US Veterans Administration formed.
◆1941 Roosevelt asks Congress to extend the draft period from one year to 30 months and to make similar increases in the terms of service for the National Guard. There is considerable debate on the proposal.
◆1941 France accepted Japan's demand for military control of Indochina.
◆1941 Himmler ordered the building of the Majdanek concentration camp. The camp was built in eastern Poland as a principal site to exterminate Jews. It contained 7 gas chambers.
◆1942 President Roosevelt appointments Admiral Leahy as his personal Chief of Staff.
◆1943 The Allied advances continue. The British capture Gerbini, the Canadians take Leonforte and the Americans occupy Corleone and Castelvetrano.
◆1943 A small American force lands on Vella Lavella to determine whether significant forces can be landed there, by-passing the Japanese stronghold of Kolombangara. On New Georgia, Griswald plans an new offensive.
◆1944 Troops of the US 3rd Amphibious Corps (Geiger) land on Guam. The 3rd Marine Division (Turnage) establishes a beachhead at Asan, west of Agana.★
◆1944 Japanese forces launch further attacks over the Driniumor River, near Aitape. American forces hold the offensive.
◆1944 The French Expeditionary Corps (part of US 5th Army) is withdrawn from the line. It is being redeployed as part of the preparation for the Allied invasion of southern France.
◆1944 Von Kluge warned Hitler of the impending collapse of front in Normandy.
◆1945 American radio broadcasts call on Japan to surrender or face destruction.
◆1946 In first U.S. test of adaptability of jet aircraft to shipboard operations, XFD-1 Phantom makes landings and takeoffs without catapults from Franklin D. Roosevelt.
◆1949 The US Senate ratified the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 82-13.
◆1955 President Dwight D. Eisenhower presents his "Open Skies" plan at the 1955 Geneva summit meeting with representatives of France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The plan, though never accepted, laid the foundation for President Ronald Reagan's later policy of "trust, but verify" in relation to arms agreements with the Soviet Union.★
◆1955 First sub powered by liquid metal cooled reactor launched - Seawolf.
◆1961 Capt. Virgil "Gus" Grissom became the second American to rocket into a suborbital pattern around the Earth, flying on the Mercury 4 Liberty Bell 7. The Mercury capsule sank in the Atlantic, 302 miles from Cape Canaveral and Grissom was rescued by helicopter. The space capsule was recovered in 1999.
◆1966 Gemini X returned to Earth.
◆1972 Bloody Friday; the IRA sets off 20 bombs in Belfast kiling 9 and wounding 30.
◆1974 US House Judiciary approved 2 Articles of Impeachment against Pres. Nixon.
◆1980 Draft registration began in the United States for 19- and 20-year-old men.
◆1987 Navy escorts first Earnest Will Convoy in the Persian Gulf.
◆1997 The U.S.S. Constitution, aka Old Ironsides, which defended the United States during the War of 1812, set sail with 216 crew members under its own power for first time in 116 years, leaving its temporary anchorage at Marblehead, Mass., for a one-hour voyage marking its 200th anniversary.★
◆1998 The Pentagon said it found no evidence to support allegations in a CNN report that U.S. troops had used nerve gas against American defectors in Laos.
◆1998 Astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space, died in Monterey, Calif., at age 74.
◆2000 It was reported that computers at Los Alamos simulated a nuclear blast in 3 dimensions for the 1st time.
◆2003 About 1,000 soldiers of Afghanistan's new national army launched their first major operation, sweeping for insurgents in the east of the country.
◆2003 In Liberia mortar shells hit the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy in the Monrovia, injuring at least three people. Fighting in the Liberian capital of Monrovia left over 600 dead.