TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
9 March
◆49 BCE Caesar besieges Brindisi, held by Pompey.
◆1230 Battle of Klokotnitsa: Tsar Ivan Asen II of the Bulgars defeats Komnenos Doukas, Despot of Epirus.
◆1451 Amerigo Vespucci, who America is named after, Italian navigator, was born.
◆1461 Revolt at Genoa expels a French garrison.
◆1728 During the course of the Anglo-Spanish War, a military force of English settlers from the South Carolina colony conducts an expedition deep into Spanish controlled Florida to destroy a Yamassee Indian village close to the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine.
◆1741 British invest Cartagena de las Indias.
◆1781 The siege of Pensacola Florida begins.★
◆1793 Jean Pierre Blanchard made the first balloon flight in North America. President George Washington watched aeronaut Jean Pierre Blanchard make the first aerial voyage in the New World.
◆1798 Dr. George Balfour became 1st naval surgeon in the US Navy.
◆1814 Battle of Laon, Day 1: Napoleon v. the Russo-Prussians.
◆1820 Congress passed the Land Act, paving the way for westward expansion.
◆1839 Felix Huston Robertson (d.1928), Brig General (Confederate Army), was born.
◆1847 During the Mexican-American War, U.S. forces under General Winfield Scott invade Mexico three miles south of Vera Cruz. ★
◆1861 First hostile act of the Civil War occurred when Star of the West fires on Sumter, S.C.
◆1862 Engagement lasting four hours took Place between U.S.S. Monitor, Lieutenant Worden, and C.S.S. Virginia, Lieutenant Jones, mostly at close range in Hampton Roads. ★
◆1862 Naval force under Commander Godon, consisting of U.S.S. Mohican, Pocahontas, and Potomska, took possession of St. Simon’s and Jekyl Islands and landed at Brunswick, Georgia. All locations were found to be abandoned in keeping with the general Confederate withdrawal from the sea¬coast and coastal islands.
◆1862 Landing party from U.S.S. Anacostia and Yankee of the Potomac Flotilla, Lieutenant Wyman, destroyed abandoned Confederate batteries at Cockpit Point and Evansport, Virginia, and found C.S.S. Page blown up.
◆1863 U.S. Grant was appointed commander-in-chief of the Union forces.
◆1864 President Abraham Lincoln officially commissioned Ulysses S. Grant the first lieutenant general in the U.S. Army since George Washington. After leading Union victories in the West in 1862-63, Lincoln gave Grant supreme command of the Union forces with the revived rank of lieutenant general.
◆1893 President Cleveland withdraws the Hawaiian Annexation Treaty pending an investigation of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in January.
◆1898 Congress unanimously appropriates $50,000,000 “for national defense and each and every purpose connected therewith.” The Navy is already well prepared, but the Army is scandalously disorganized.1911 Battle of Tacuarí: Manuel Atanasio Cabañas' Royalist Paraguayan troops defeat Argentine Revolutionaries under Manuel Belgrano.
◆1914 Test of wind tunnel at Washington Navy Yard.
◆1916 Germany declares war on Portugal.
◆1916 In the early morning of March 9, 1917, several hundred Mexican guerrillas under the command of Francisco “Pancho” Villa cross the U.S.-Mexican border and attack the small border town of Columbus, New Mexico. ★
◆1942 Admiral Ghormley is relieved by Admiral Hard Stark as commander US naval forces in European waters.
◆1943 New Guinea: Japanese aircraft conduct a major raid on Wau.
◆1944 On Bougainville, Japanese counter attacks on the US 37th Division fail to make substantial gains. The American airfields at Piva and Torokina are shelled.
◆1944 The first American planes begin operating from Momote airfield in the Admiralty Islands.
◆1945 U.S. warplanes launch a new bombing offensive against Japan, dropping 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo.★
◆1945 Bonn and Godesberg are captured by units of US 1st Army while others continue to expand the bridgehead over the Rhine River, at Remagen, where Erpel is captured. Farther south, toward Koblenz, US 3rd Army units reach the Rhine at Andernach.
◆1945 Indochina: Japanese attack French garrisons, massacring thousands.
◆1953 U.S. vs. Reynolds was a landmark ruling that formally established the government’s “state secrets” privilege. Privilege that has enabled federal agencies to conceal certain conduct, withhold documents and block litigation where such actions might reveal the “sources and methods” of US intelligence.
◆1953 Responding to press reports that U.S. pilots routinely pursued communist jets across the Manchurian border, Commander in Chief Far East asserted that UN pilots broke off engagements at the Yalu River boundary, enabling many damaged MiGs to escape, although some border violations might have occurred in the heat of combat. Informing the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that air operations in Korea were conducted strictly within limitations established by appropriate authority, he also directed Far East Air Forces to comply with directives concerning violation of the Manchurian border.
◆1954 CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow critically reviewed Wisconsin Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-Communism campaign on “See It Now.”
◆1954 Senate Republicans level criticism at fellow Republican Joseph McCarthy and take action to limit his power.
◆1962 US “advisors” in South-Vietnam joined the fight.
◆1964 A group of 5 Lakota (Sioux) Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island in a peaceful protest. They declared that it should be a Native American cultural center and university.
◆1967 Svetlana Alliluyeva (Allilueva), Josef Stalin’s daughter defected to the U.S.★
◆1968 General William Westmoreland asked for 206,000 more troops in Vietnam.
◆1970 The U.S. Marines turn over control of the five northernmost provinces in South Vietnam to the U.S. Army.The Marines had been responsible for this area since they first arrived in South Vietnam in 1965. The change in responsibility for this area was part of President Richard Nixon’s initiative to reduce U.S. troop levels as the South Vietnamese accepted more responsibility for the fighting. After the departure of the 3rd Marine Division from Vietnam in late 1969, the 1st Marine Division was the only marine division left operating in South Vietnam.
◆1974 Last Japanese soldier, a guerrilla operating in Philippines, surrendered, 29 years after World War II ended.★
◆1976 The first female cadets were accepted to West Point Military Academy.