TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
2 June
◆1774 The Quartering Act, requiring American colonists to allow British soldiers into their houses, was reenacted.
◆1815 Philip Kearny, one of the most promising generals in the Union army, is born in New York City.
◆1823 Arikara Indians attack William Ashley and his band of fur traders, igniting the most important of the early 19th century battles between Indians and mountain men. Two years before, William Ashley and his partner Andrew Henry had started the business that would eventually become the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. In 1822, Ashley advertised for "enterprising young men" to join him in an ambitious fur trapping expedition up the Missouri River into the Yellowstone country of present-day Montana. Many who signed on would later become celebrated mountain men, including Jim Bridger, the Sublette brothers, Jed Smith, and Edward Rose. For the first few years, though, Ashley and his men were greenhorns who learned to survive in the wilderness through hard experience. In the spring of 1823, Ashley led a force of about 70 men up the Missouri to begin a summer of trapping along the Yellowstone. On May 30, they reached the territory of the Arikara Indians near the present-day border between North and South Dakota. The Arikara were no friends to the fur trappers. Generally, they resented the Anglo trappers' attempts to undercut the Indians' central role as fur suppliers. More specifically, the Arikara were upset that several weeks earlier a group of trappers had rescued several Sioux warriors that the Arikara had been hunting. On the morning of this day in 1823, a force of about 600 Arikara Indians attacked Ashley's small band of trappers. Ashley later reported that the majority of the Indians were, "armed with London Fuzils [muskets] that carry a ball with great accuracy, and force, and which they use with as much expertness as any men I ever saw handle arms." Those lacking guns attacked with bows and arrows and war axes. The fierce Arikara warriors overwhelmed Ashley's small band of mountain men, killing 12 and wounding many more. The survivors fled downstream; luckily, the Arikara did not pursue them. After the mountain men had regrouped, Ashley dispatched a messenger to St. Louis asking for military assistance. Colonel Henry Leavenworth immediately assembled a force of about 200 men and started up the river, gathering additional fighters along the way, including about 700 Sioux Indians. By the time Leavenworth's army reached Ashley in early August, that number had grown to at least 1,100 men. The subsequent skirmishes, later somewhat ostentatiously referred to as the Arikara Campaign, proved indecisive. Despite his overwhelming superiority in numbers and armaments, Leavenworth failed to engage the Indians. Following a few minor encounters, the Arikara quietly withdrew under the cover of night and disappeared. Everyone knew, however, that the Indians would return after the soldiers had departed. Since Leavenworth failed to seriously damage the Arikara fighting ability, the Upper Missouri River route continued to be too dangerous for the trappers for several years to come. Desperate to keep his fledgling business alive, Ashley decided he had no choice but to abandon the traditional river routes and go overland. The next year, Ashley's trappers headed west on horses rather than in boats. Ironically, this desperate gambit revolutionized the fur trade by vastly increasing the mobility of the fur trappers and opening up whole new regions of the American West. Three years later, Ashley retired from the fur trade a wealthy man.
◆1864 This was day 2 in the Battle of Cold Harbor, Va.
◆1864 - Landing party from U.S.S. Cowslip, Acting Ensign Canfield, captured five sloops and one steam boiler, destroyed six large boats, four salt works, and three flat boats during a raid up Biloxi Bay, Mississippi.
◆1865 In an event that is generally regarded as marking the end of the Civil War, Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, signs the surrender terms offered by Union negotiators.
◆1866 Renegade Irish Fenians surrendered to US forces.
◆1875 Alexander Graham Bell made his first complex sound transmission.
◆1918 At dawn on this date, the crack German 28th Division attacked along the axis of the Paris-Metz road hitting the American 2d Division, including the 4th Marine Brigade. The Marines opened with deadly rifle fire and helped hand the German troops a setback which set the stage for the Marine victory at Belleau Wood which would soon follow, although at great cost.
◆1924 With Congress' passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, the government of the United States confers citizenship on all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the country. 1930 - Charles Conrad (d.1999), astronaut, was born in Philadelphia. He walked on the moon during the Apollo XII mission in 1969.
◆1941 First aircraft escort vessel, USS Long Island (ACG-1), commissioned, then reclassified as an auxiliary aircraft carrier (AVC-1) on 20 August and finally reclassified as an escort carrier (CVE-1) in July 1943.
◆1942 The US carriers from Pearl Harbor join northeast of Midway. In total, the American force has approximately 250 planes, equal to the number in the approaching Japanese force.
◆1942 Japanese Admiral Katuta's light carrier force attacks Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians as a diversion. The Americans, aware of the Japanese plans for the invasion of Midway do not react as predicted.
◆1943 99th Pursuit Squadron flew its first combat mission over Italy.
◆1944 As the forces of German Army Group C (Kesselring) fall back, the Allied armies advance along the entire front. The forces of the US 5th Army reach Route 6 at Valmontone, which is captured, as well as making progress in the Alban Hills.
◆1944 Fighting continues on Biak Island. American forces aim to capture the airfields in the center of the island. These airfields have been used as the base for Japanese attacks on Wadke.
◆1944 American bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force launch Operation Frantic, a series of bombing raids over Central Europe, alighting from airbases in southern Italy, but landing at airbases in Poltava, in the Soviet Union, in what is called "shuttle bombing." The Fifteenth U.S. Air Force was created solely to cripple Germany's war economy. Operating out of Italy, and commanded by General Carl Spaatz, a World War I fighter pilot, the Fifteenth was recruited by a desperate Joseph Stalin to help the Red Army in its campaign in Romania. In exchange for the Fifteenth's assistance, Stalin allowed the American bombers to land at airbases within the Soviet Union as they carried out Operation Frantic, a plan to devastate German industrial regions in occupied Silesia, Hungary, and Romania. Given that such bombing patterns would have made return flights to Foggia and other parts of southern Italy, the Fifteenth's launching points, impossible because of refueling problems, the "shuttle" to Poltava was the solution that made Frantic a reality. Before it was shortened to Frantic, the operation was dubbed Operation Frantic Joe-a commentary on Joe Stalin's original urgent appeal for help. It was changed to avoid offending the Soviet premier. Also on this day in 1944, the date for D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy, was fixed for June 5. Originally June 4, it was acknowledged by Allied strategists that bad weather would make keeping to any one day problematic. German General Karl von Rundstedt, intercepting an Allied radio signal relating the June 4 date, was convinced that four consecutive days of good weather was necessary for the successful prosecution of the invasion. There was no such pattern of good weather in sight. The general became convinced that D-Day would not come off within the first week of June at all.
◆1945 On Luzon, the US 43rd Division (US 11th Corps) completes mopping up operations in the Ipoh area.
◆1945 On Okinawa, mopping up continues as the US 6th Marine Division prepares to land two regiments on the Oroku peninsula.
◆1945 US Task Force 38 raids airfields used by Japanese Kamikaze forces. Such raids compel the Japanese to continue operations from bases farther north.
◆1966 The U.S. space probe Surveyor 1 landed on the moon in Oceanus Procellarum and began transmitting detailed photographs of the lunar surface.
◆1969 Australian aircraft carrier Melbourne sliced the destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in half off the shore of South Vietnam. 74 people were killed.
◆1975 Vice President Nelson Rockefeller said his commission had found no widespread pattern of illegal activities at the Central Intelligence Agency.
◆1979 NASA launched its S-198 space vehicle.
◆1986 For the first time, the public could watch the proceedings of the U.S. Senate on television as a six-week experiment of televised sessions began.
◆1989 10,000 Chinese soldiers were blocked by 100,000 citizens protecting students demonstrating for democracy in Tiananmen Square, Beijing
◆1995 A US Air Force F-16C was shot down by a Bosnian Serb surface-to-air missile while on a NATO air patrol in northern Bosnia; the pilot, Captain Scott F. O’Grady, was rescued six days later.
◆2003 North Korea said it has nuclear arms.
◆2004 U.S. and Afghan troops backed by American warplanes fought Taliban militants in the mountains of southern Afghanistan, killing 17 insurgents and arresting eight.