TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
5 May
◆614 Persians take Jerusalem with great slaughter.
◆1010 Battle of Ringmere: The Danes defeat Ulfkell Snilling of Norfolk.
◆1405 Battle of Pwllmelyn: English defeat Owen Glendower & the Welch.
◆1494 During his second voyage to the Western Hemisphere, Christopher Columbus first sighted Jamaica and commented on the daily rains. Columbus landed on the island of Jamaica, which he names Santa Gloria.
◆1814 British attack Ft Ontario, Oswego, NY.
◆1821 Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on St. Helena Island.
◆1861 CSA troops abandon Alexandria, VA.
◆1862 Battle of Williamsburg commenced as part of the Peninsular Campaign. Confederate Captain Charles Bruce kept his father apprised of conditions during the crucial Peninsula campaign.
◆1862 Battle of Pueblo: Mexicans defeat French (Cinco de Mayo).
◆1863 Hooker begins to retreat from the Battle of Chancellorsville
◆1864 Atlanta Campaign: 5 days fighting began at Rocky Face Ridge.
◆1864 While Rear Admiral Porter's fleet awaited the opportunity to pass over the Red River rapids, the ships below Alexandria were incessantly attacked by Confederate forces.
◆1864 BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS (Day 2).
◆1864 By this point in the US Civil War, the most of the uniformed volunteers (forerunners of today’s National Guard) who had rushed to the colors at the start of the war were either dead, were so badly wounded and/or sick as to be sent home or had deserted.
◆1864 C.S.S. Albemarle, Commander Cooke, with Bombshell, Lieutenant Albert G. Hudgins, and Cotton Plant in company, steamed into Albemarle Sound and engaged Union naval forces in fierce action off the mouth of the Roanoke River.
◆1866 Guano War: Spanish fleet bombards Callao, Peru.
◆1877 Nearly a year after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull and a band of followers cross into Canada hoping to find safe haven from the U.S. Army.
◆1908 Great White Fleet arrived in SF.
◆1912 The Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda began publishing.
◆1916 U.S. marines invaded the Dominican Republic.
◆1920 US Pres. Wilson made the Communist Labor Party illegal.
◆1942 Japanese forces enter China, via the Burma Road. General Stillwell, in command of the Chinese troops decides after intelligence on the true Japanese positions to withdraw his troops towards India, not China.
◆1942 Japanese troops land on Corregidor. Fierce fighting by the remaining American troops under General Wainwright results, but the Japanese maintain a beach head.
◆1942 Japanese Admiral Takagi's carriers enter the Coral Sea. American Admiral Fletcher's TF17 is there refueling, but the Japanese do not find it.
◆1945 JAPANESE BALLOON BOMBS EXPLODE IN THE U.S.
◆1945 On Okinawa, Japanese counterattacks continue with minor successes.
◆1945 The War Department announces that about 400,000 troops will remain in Germany to form the US occupation force and 2,000,000 men will be discharged from the armed services, leaving 6,000,000 soldiers serving in the war against Japan.
◆1945 German Army Group G surrenders to US forces after negotiations are concluded at Haar in Bavaria. In Denmark, fighting breaks out in Copenhagen but is brought to an end when British units arrive by air in the evening.
◆1948 VF-17A becomes first carrier qualified jet squadron (USS Saipan).
◆1950 Congress approved the Uniform Code of Military Justice for the "government of the armed forces of the United States."
◆1953 The battleship USS New Jersey, the cruiser USS Bremerton, and the destroyers USS Twining and Colohan destroyed troop shelters, caves, concrete ammunition bunkers and an observation post.
◆1954 Paraguay: Military coup by General Alfredo Stroessner.
◆1955 The US detonated a 29-kiloton nuclear device in Nevada. “Apple 2” was the 2nd of 40 tests of Operation Cue, meant to study the effects of a nuclear explosion on a typical American community.
◆1955 The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) becomes a sovereign state when the United States, France, and Great Britain end their military occupation, which had begun in 1945.
◆1961 From Cape Canaveral, Florida, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. is launched into space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, becoming the first American astronaut to travel into space.
◆1965 1st large-scale US Army ground units arrived in South Vietnam.
◆1968 U.S. Air Force planes hit Nhi Ha, South Vietnam in support of attacking infantrymen.
◆1970 In Cambodia, a U.S. force captures Snoul, 20 miles from the tip of the "Fishhook" area (across the border from South Vietnam, 70 miles from Saigon).
◆1993 Phase II, dubbed Operation Continue Hope, of the US intervention in Somalia begins, now under UN auspices.
◆1999 NATO strategists were reported to have a plan to send 60,000 ground troops into Kosovo around July to take the province from retreating Serbs. Their original plan called for 28,000 soldiers to supervise an interim peace settlement.
◆2004 Coalition forces raided buildings used by a militia loyal to a radical Shiite cleric in two southern cities and clashed with militiamen elsewhere in fighting that killed 15 Iraqis.
◆2004 Nicaragua said its army had destroyed 333 surface-to-air missiles at the urging of the US and that the military planned to destroy another 333 SAM-7s in late July. More than 2,000 Russian-made SAM-7s, shoulder-fired missiles capable of taking down a plane, were left over from the 1980s Contra war.