TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
14 March
◆1314 The Scots liberate Edinburgh Castle from the English.★
◆1369 Battle of Montiel: Henry "the Bastard" defeats his half-brother Pedro "the Cruel" of Castille.★
◆1503 Cesare Borgia investes Ceri, aided by Leonardo's siege engines & Machiavelli's advice.
◆1590 Battle of Ivry: King Henri IV of France defeats the Catholic League.
◆1629 A Royal charter was granted to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
◆1644 England granted a patent for Providence Plantations (Rhode Island).
◆1653 Naval Battle off Livorno: Dutch fleet under Johan van Galen defeats the English.
◆1743 The first recorded town meeting in America was held at Faneuil Hall in Boston.
◆1776 The Continental Congress recommends a policy of disarming all loyalist American colonists.
◆1780 The Spanish governor of Louisiana, Galvez, captures the port of Mobile.
◆1792 Battle of Cape Noli: Anglo-Neapolitan fleet defeats French (began 3/13).
◆1799 Cardinal Ruffo's Calabrian insurgents liberate Catanzaro from the French amid great slaughter.
◆1812 The US issues the first War Bonds.
◆1836 Battle of Refugio: Mexicans capture Texian force.
◆1862 Battle of New Bern, NC.★
◆1863 Confederate troops launched a surprise night attack against Fort Anderson on the Neuse River, North Carolina.
◆1863 Rear Admiral Farragut with his squadron of seven ships attacked the strong Confederate works at Port Hudson, attempting to effect passage.
◆1879 Albert Einstein was born, greatest scientist of the twentieth century, d. 1955.
◆1883 Karl Marx died, who inspired the greatest exploitation of the masses, b. 1818.
◆1905 The first Marine military attaché was appointed to Legation at Peking, China.
◆1939 As a result of appeasement at the Munich peace conference, the Republic of Czechoslovakia was dissolved and the Sudetenland ceded to Germany, opening the way for complete Nazi occupation, as Hungary, Romania, & Poland rush to share the spoils.
◆1942 Large numbers of American troops arrive in Australia.
◆1945 The US 12th Corps (part of US 3rd Army) launches attacks southeast over the Moselle River, near Koblenz, and US 20th Corps expands its attacks from between Trier and Saarburg. To the north, US 1st Army continues to expand the Remagen bridgehead despite German counterattacks.
◆1947 The U.S. signed a 99-year lease on naval bases in the Philippines.
◆1947 Ensign John W. Lee becomes first African American officer commissioned in regular Navy. He was assigned to USS Kearsage.
◆1951 As U.N forces planned to retake Seoul from the enemy, patrols from both the U.S. Army’s 3rd Division and ROK 1st Division crossed the Han River to assess the situation.
◆1964 Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Lee Harvey Oswald–the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy–is found guilty of the “murder with malice” of Oswald and sentenced to die in the electric chair.
◆1965 Twenty-four South Vietnamese Air Force planes, led by Vice-Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky and supported by U.S. jets, bomb the barracks and depots on Con Co (“Tiger”) Island, 20 miles off the coast of North Vietnam.★
◆1966 Establishment of River Squadron Five in Vietnam.★
◆1968 CBS TV suspended Radio Free Europe free advertising because RFE didn’t make it clear it was sponsored by the CIA.
◆1995 American astronaut Norman Thagard became the first American to enter space aboard a Russian rocket as he and two cosmonauts blasted off aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, headed for the Mir space station.
◆1996 The US approved arms and equipment for Bosnia. It was the same day that the UN embargo on small arms for the region was lifted. In the following weeks M-16 rifles, machine guns, field phone systems, and military radio equipment arrived in Bosnia.
◆1997 In Albania chaos and anarchy spread and some 23 people were reported killed across the country. The US and Italy were airlifting citizens out of the country.
◆1997 Operation Gulf Shield begins. This operation is a counterpart to the counter narcotics operation Frontier Shield.
◆2003 Christopher Boyce, whose Cold War spying was immortalized on film in “The Falcon and the Snowman,” was released from a halfway house in San Francisco after about a quarter-century in prison.
◆2003 American defense officials say a long-range B1-B bomber has been used for the first time against Iraqi targets in the no-fly zone in southern Iraq.
◆2004 In southeastern Afghanistan U.S.-led troops surprised eight enemy fighters in a cave complex, prompting a gun battle, which left 3 militiamen killed and 5 others wounded.
◆2005 The US government in Operation Community Shield announced the arrests in 7 cities of 103 members of MS-13, Mara Salvatrucha, a street gang rooted in Central America.