TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
30 July
◆634 Arabs defeat Byzantines at Agnadain, Palestine.
◆1291 Egyptian Mamlukes take Haifa.
◆1588 Battle of Gravelines: Indecisive clash that decides the fate of the Spanish Armada.
◆1609 Samuel de Champlain uses a musket to help the Huron defeat the Iroquois, initiating a 150-year Franco-Iroquois war.
◆1638 Battle of Wittenweir: French defeat the Imperialists.
◆1733 Society of Freemasons opened their first American lodge in Boston.
◆1839 Slave rebels took over the slave ship Amistad.
◆1863 The Shoshone chief Pocatello signs the Treaty of Box Elder, bringing peace to the emigrant trails of southern Idaho and northern Utah.
◆1864 BATTLE OF THE CRATER: The Union's ingenious attempt to break the Confederate lines at Petersburg by blowing up a tunnel that had been dug under the Rebel trenches fails. Although the explosion created a gap in the Confederate defenses, a poorly planned Yankee attack wasted the effort and the result was an eight-month continuation of the siege.★
◆1864 Confederate troops attack Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. The town was burned by Union forces under McCausland.
◆1864 Boat crew commanded by Lieutenant J.C. Watson made daylight reconnaissances of the Mobile Bay channel. Watson and his men, towed into the bay by the small tug Cowslip, sounded the outer channel and marked the outside limits of the Confederate torpedo fields with buoys for the coming attack on the defenses of the bay.
◆1864 Landing party from U.S.S. Potomska, Acting Lieutenant Robert P. Swann, destroyed two large Confederate salt works near the Back River, Georgia. Returning to Potomska, Swann and his men were taken under fire by Confederates and a sharp battle ensued. 'Our arms," Swann re-ported, "the Spencer rifles, saved us all from destruction, as the rapidity with which we fired caused the enemy to lie low, and their firing was after the first volley very wild. . . . We fought them three-quarters of an hour, some of the time up to our knees in mud, trying to land and capture them, and some of the time in the water with the boats for a breastwork." Finally able to regain the Potomska, Swann's party received a commendation from Rear Admiral Dahlgren for the bravery and skill they had demonstrated on the expedition.
◆1916 German saboteurs blew up a munitions pier on Black Tom Island, Jersey City, NJ. 7 people were killed. Damages totaled about $20-25 million. After much legal maneuvering a commission in 1939 ruled that Germany was guilty of sabotaging Black Tom and another plant in Kingsland, NJ, and awarded $50 million to the claimants. In 1953 the new Federal Republic of Germany began making payments. The last payment was made in 1979.
◆1918 Units of First Marine Aviation Force arrive at Brest, France.
◆1928 George Eastman showed the 1st color motion pictures in the US.
◆1941 Japanese aircraft bomb USS Tutuila (PR-4) at Chungking, China; First Navy ship damaged by Axis during World War II. Japan apologizes for the incident but it does nothing to ease the strained relations between the US and Japan.
◆1942 President Roosevelt signed a bill creating a women's auxiliary agency in the Navy known as "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service" or WAVES for short.
◆1942 The US passenger-freighter Robert E. Lee with 268 passengers was sunk by the German U-166 submarine. 15 crew members and 10 passengers died. In 2001 wreckage of the U-166 was found in the Gulf of Mexico and it appeared that it was sunk by Coast Guard PC-566 right after the attack. U-166 had 52 crew members.
◆1943 US forces are engaged on the outskirts of Santo Stefano and Troina.
◆1944 The US 6th Division (Sibert) lands unopposed on the islands of Amsterdam and Middleburg, off Cape Sansapor. Task Force 78 (Admiral Berkey) provides naval support.
◆1944 Advancing elements of US 1st Army seize Granville and enter Avranches, capturing bridges over the See River. The left flank is counterattacked by German forces of the 2nd Parachute Corps at Percy and Villedieu.
◆1944 On Tinian, the main town of Tinian is captured by American forces. The southern half of Guam has been secured by US troops.
◆1945 British and American carrier aircraft continue attacks. Kobe, Kure and Honshu are bombed. Several of the remaining large ships in the Japanese navy have been hit and badly damaged in the last week, including 3 battleships and 4 aircraft carriers.
◆1950 The U.S. 2nd Infantry Division from Fort Lewis, Wash., began debarking at Pusan.
◆1952 The largest single target bomber strike of the war occurred when 63 B-29s attacked the industrial complex near Sinuiju.
◆1956 US motto "In God We Trust" was authorized.
◆1964 At about midnight, six "Swifts," special torpedo boats used by the South Vietnamese for covert raids, attack the islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu in the Tonkin Gulf.
◆1966 US airplanes bombed the demilitarized zone in Vietnam.
◆1967 General William Westmoreland claimed that he was winning the war in Vietnam but needed more men.
◆1971 US Apollo 15 with astronauts Scott and Irwin landed at Mare Imbrium on the Moon.
◆1989 In Lebanon, the pro-Iranian group Organization for the Oppressed on Earth threatened to kill an American hostage, Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins, unless Israel released Sheik Abdul-Karim Obeid, a cleric seized by Israeli commandos.
◆1991 U.N. weapons inspectors report to the United Nation Security Council that Iraq has attempted to conceal aspects of its nuclear weapons program by destroying or burying essential equipment. The inspectors also reported identifying four times as many chemical weapons as Iraq had reported to be in its possession.
◆1994 The first U.S. troops landed in the Rwandan capital of Kigali to secure the airport for an expanded international aid effort.
◆2001 Intel rolled out its new Pentium III-M processor based on .13 micron chip technology.
◆2004 In Iraq fierce overnight fighting between U.S. Marines backed by fighter aircraft and insurgents using small arms and mortars killed 13 insurgents in Fallujah overnight.