TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
6 March
◆1204 King Philip II of France captures Chateau Gaillard, on the lower Seine, from the English after a six month winter siege.
◆1645 Battle of Jankau: Swedes defeat the Imperialists.
◆1779 Antoine-Henri Jomini was born; soldier, military thinker ("The Art of War"), died 1869.
◆1521 Magellan discovered Guam.
◆1747 Casimir Pulaski, American Revolutionary War general, is born.★
◆1779 The US Congress declared that only the federal government, and not individual states, had the power to determine the legality of captures on the high seas. This was the basis for the 1st test case of the US Constitution in 1808.
◆1822 USS Enterprise captures four pirate ships in Gulf of Mexico.
◆1831 Philip Henry Sheridan, Union Army General and hero of the Battle of Cedar Creek, was born.
◆1831 Edgar Allan Poe failed out of West Point. He was discharged from West Point for “gross neglect of duty.” His parade uniform was supposedly incorrect.
◆1836 The Alamo fell after fighting for 13 days. ★
◆1861 Provisionary Confederate Congress established Confederate Army. Confederate Congress calls for 100,000 volunteers - a month before Ft. Sumter.
◆1862 USS Monitor departed New York for Hampton Roads, VA.
◆1865 The last Confederate victory of the Civil War occurred at Natural Bridge crossing near Tallahassee, Fla., when the forces of Union Gen’l. John Newton were routed by entrenched southerners.
◆1913 First Balkan War: The Greeks capture Iannina from the Turks.
◆1918 US naval boat “Cyclops” disappeared in “Bermuda Triangle.”
◆1932 Marine Band leader John Philip Sousa died at age 79 in Reading, Pennsylvania.
◆1933 Poland occupies Danzig.
◆1943 Japanese aircraft raid the Russell Islands.
◆1943 Three American cruisers and seven destroyers bombard Japanese airfields at Munda and Vila. Little damage is done. Two Japanese destroyers, however, are sunk in an encounter engagement.
◆1944 US heavy bombers raid Berlin for the first time. A force of 660 bombers is sent and 69 are lost.
◆1944 On New Britain, the US 1st Marine Division is sent to land on the east side of Willaumez Peninsula with the objective of capturing Talasea. Japanese resistance is weak but the terrain is difficult, so the advance inland is slow.
◆1945 The US 9th Army has reached the Rhine all along its front. To the south, US 1st Army is fighting in Cologne and driving toward Remagen farther south — the US 9th Armored Division leads the advance. Farther south, units of US 3rd Army are making a rapid advance toward the Rhine at Koblenz.
◆1962 US promised Thailand assistance against “communist” aggression.
◆1965 The White House confirms reports that, at the request of South Vietnam, the United States is sending two battalions of U.S. Marines for security work at the Da Nang air base, which will hopefully free South Vietnamese troops for combat.
◆1966 Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets" hits #1 (On the charts 13 weeks).
◆1967 Lyndon B. Johnson announced his plan to establish a draft lottery.
◆1967 Stalin's daughter Svetlana Allilujeva seeks political asylum in US.
◆1967 Muhammad Ali was ordered by selective service to be inducted.
◆1971 Operation Lam Son 719 continues as reinforced South Vietnamese forces push into Tchepone, a major enemy supply center located on Route 9 in Laos.★
◆1990 SR-71 sets a transcontinental record, 2,404 miles in 1:08:17.
◆1991 Following Iraq’s capitulation in the Persian Gulf conflict, President Bush told a cheering joint session of Congress that “aggression is defeated. The war is over.”
◆1998 It was reported that Panama hired a Canadian Indian tribe, the Tsuu T’ina, to clean out unexploded bombs and shells from an area of Empire Range, which US military forces abandoned.
◆2003 The US military announces that US-British warplanes have fired at a mobile surface-to-air missile system and an anti-aircraft artillery site in southern Iraq in response to hostile fire.