TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
28 March
◆845 The Vikings sack Paris.★
◆1461 Battle of Dintingdale: Lord Fauconberg defeats Lord Clifford.
◆1461 Battle of Ferrybridge: King Edward IV defeats the Dukes of Somerset & Rivers.
◆1776 Juan Bautista de Anza, one of the great western pathfinders of the 18th century, arrives at the future site of San Francisco with 247 colonists.★
◆1800 Essex becomes first U.S. Navy vessel to pass Cape of Good Hope.
◆1814 HMS Phoebe and Cherub capture USS Essex off Valparaiso, Chile. Before capture, Essex had captured 24 British prizes during the War of 1812. Two-thirds of Essex’s crew is killed but 13-year old Midshipman David Farragut survives.
◆1818 Wade Hampton, Confederate general in the American Civil War, is born in Charleston, South Carolina.
◆1845 Mexico dropped diplomatic relations with US.
◆1846 US troops commanded by General Zachary Taylor move onto the left bank of the Rio Grande River, considered Mexican territory.
◆1848 USS Supply reaches the Bay of Acre, anchoring under Mount Carmel near the village of Haifa, during expedition to explore the Dead Sea and the River Jordan.
◆1862 Union forces stop the Confederate invasion of New Mexico territory when they turn the Rebels back at Glorieta Pass.
◆1863 U.S.S. Diana attacked by Confederate sharpshooters and fieldpieces.★
◆1864 A gunfight erupted in Charleston, Illinois between Union soldiers and Civil War opponents known as ‘Copperheads.’★
◆1870 129 Marines seized and destroyed illicit distilleries in “Irishtown” (Brooklyn), New York.
◆1885 The Salvation Army was officially organized in the U.S.
◆1918 Marines were placed under the command of French Marshall Foch in WW I.
◆1930 Turkey renames Constantinople as Istanbul, Angora as Ankara.
◆1933 German Reichstag conferred dictatorial powers on Hitler.
◆1935 Goddard used gyroscopes to control a rocket.
◆1939 Franco captures Madrid; Spanish Civil War ends.
◆1940 Sumner Welles, Under-Secretary of State, reports to Roosevelt about his mission to the belligerent countries in Europe.
◆1942 A British ship, the HMS Campbeltown, a Lend-Lease American destroyer, which was specifically rammed into a German occupied dry-dock in France, exploded, knocking the area out of action for the German battleship Tirpitz.★
◆1945 Stalin receives a personal telegram from General Eisenhower (Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force) giving details of his order of battle and saying that he intends to send the main weight of his advance across southern Germany and Austria.
◆1945 Marburg is taken by US 3rd Corps (part of US 1st Army) which has made a rapid advance from the Remagen bridgehead.
◆1945 US naval forces, including TF58 and TF52, continue air strikes on Okinawa while TF54 continues bombarding the island. Japanese Kamikaze and submarine attacks continue.
◆1953 The Chinese agreed to the exchange of sick and wounded prisoners proposed by U.N. Forces Commander General Mark Clark and further proposed that prisoners unwilling to be repatriated be transferred to a neutral state.
◆1953 U.S. Air Force Colonel James K. Johnson, 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing, became the 29th ace of the Korean War.
◆1962 The U.S. Air Force announced research into the use of lasers to intercept missiles and satellites.
◆1968 The U.S. lost its first aircraft in Vietnam. An F-111 vanished in a combat mission over North Vietnam. Republic Aircraft’s F-105 Thunderchief, better known as the ‘Thud,’ was the Air Force’s war-horse in Vietnam. [to be researched]
◆1969 Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States and one of the most highly regarded American generals of World War II, dies in Washington, D.C., at the age of 78.★
◆1979 At 4 a.m. the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close.
◆1986 The U.S. Senate passed a $100 million aid package for the Nicaraguan contras.
◆1993 The last A-6E Intruder departed from Marine Corps service.★
◆1998 It was reported that the US government conducted a series of “sub-critical” underground explosions involving radioactive plutonium in a sealed chamber 960 feet below ground at the Los Alamos National Lab.
◆1999 NATO broadened its attacks on Yugoslavia to target Serb military forces in Kosovo in the fifth straight night of airstrikes. UN officials reported that some 500,000 ethnic Albanians had fled Kosovo. NATO officials raised the possibility of using ground troops in Yugoslavia as low-level strikes against tanks began. It was feared that anger over the war would spill over to Bosnia.
◆2003 In the 10th day of Operation Iraqi Freedom the biggest bombs dropped on Baghdad so far, two 4,700-pound “bunker busters,” struck a communications tower.★