TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
21 June
◆217 BCE Battle of Lake Trasimenus: Hannibal defeats Romans.*
◆1128 Battle of Hackespol: The French defeat the Alsatians.
◆1495 Battle of Seminara I: The French defeat the Neapolitans.
◆1655 Battle off the Dardanelles: Venetian fleet defeats the Turks.
◆1788 New Hampshire becomes the ninth and last necessary state to ratify the Constitution of the United States, thereby making the document the law of the land.
◆1813 Battle of Vitoria: Wellington ousts the French from Spain.
◆1824 Turks-Egyptians storm Psara, Greece, slay or enslave the inhabitants.
◆1860 The Signal Corps was authorized as a separate branch of the Army by act of Congress on March 3, 1863.*
◆1862 Union and Confederate forces skirmished at the Chickahominy Creek during the Peninsular Campaign.
◆1863 In the second day of fighting, Confederate cavalry failed to dislodge a Union force at the Battle of LaFourche Crossing in Louisiana.
◆1864 A joint Confederate Army-Navy long-range bombardment opened on the Union squadron in the James River at Trent's and Varina Reaches.
◆1876 Gen. Terry sends Custer's 7th Cavalry to scout the Little Bighorn River.
◆1898 Skirmish at Santiago, Cuba: US ships and Spanish batteries exchange fire.
◆1900 General Arthur MacArthur offered amnesty to Filipinos rebelling against American rule.
◆1900 After the Empress declared war on all foreign powers, the Boxers began a two-month assault on the legations in Beijing. An international force of Japanese, Russian, German, American, British, Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops put down the uprising by August 14.*
◆1916 The controversial U.S. military expedition against Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa brings the United States and Mexico closer to war when Mexican government troops attack U.S. Brigadier General John J. Pershing's force at Carrizal, Mexico.
◆1919 Scapa Flow: Germans scuttle over 400,000 tons of warships.
◆1921 U.S. Army Air Service pilots bombed the captured German battleship Ostfriesland to demonstrate the effectiveness of aerial bombing on warships.*
◆1942 Rommel takes Tobruk.
◆1943 On New Georgia, the 4th Marine Raider Battalion lands at Segi Point in the south. There is no Japanese garrison there.
◆1945 The Battle of Okinawa ended. Japanese forces on Okinawa surrendered to the Americans.The embattled destroyer USS Laffey survived horrific damage from attacks by 22 Japanese aircraft off Okinawa. American soldiers on Okinawa found the body of the Japanese commander, Lt. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, who had committed suicide.
◆1945 On Luzon, the last Japanese-held port, Aparri, falls to American forces. The American regimental task force make contact with Filipino guerrillas.
◆1953 The 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team arrived in Korea for its third and last tour of duty.
◆1963 The French government shocks its allies by announcing that it is withdrawing its navy from the North Atlantic fleet of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
◆1966 U.S. planes strike North Vietnamese petroleum-storage facilities in a series of devastating raids.
◆1969 Approximately 600 communist soldiers storm a U.S. base near Tay Ninh, 50 miles northwest of Saigon and 12 miles from the Cambodian border.
◆1996 Pentagon officials said American troops destroyed an Iraqi ammunition depot in March 1991 that may have contained chemical weapons.
◆1997 The U.N. demands Iraq allow inspection teams access to disputed sites.
◆1999 US warplanes bombed Iraqi air defense sites in the northern and southern no-fly zones.
◆1999 NATO finalized an agreement with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to demilitarize.