TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
26 May
◆1249 Battle of Fossalta: The Bolognese capture Enzio.
◆1402 Battle of Casalecchio: the Visconti defeat the Bentivogli of Bologna.
◆1637 MYSTIC RIVER MASSACRE.
◆1642 Battle of Honnecourt: Spanish defeat the French.
◆1694 Battle of Ter: The Spanish defeat the French.
◆1736 In northwestern Mississippi, British and Chickasaw Indians defeated a combined force of French soldiers and Chocktaw Indians at the Battle of Ackia, thus opening the region to English settlement.
◆1805 Lewis and Clark first saw the Rocky Mountains.
◆1819 The first steam-propelled vessel to attempt a trans-Atlantic crossing, the 350-ton Savannah, departed from Savannah, Ga., May 26 and arrived in Liverpool, England, Jun 20.
◆1835 Edward Porter Alexander born, Brig Gen, C.S.A., artilleryman, d. 1910.
◆1853 Major Jacob Zeilin (in charge of Marines) arrived with Commodore Matthew C. Perry's squadron at Okinawa.
◆1859 Captain James Simpson and his party, looking for the shortest route across Nevada, crossed the Hickison Summit into Big Smoky Valley. Their path was later followed by the Pony Express (1860) and the Overland Mail and Stage (1861).
◆1861 Union blockaded New Orleans, LA., and Mobile, AL.
◆1864 There was a skirmish along the Totopotomoy Creek, Virginia.
◆1864 A joint Army-Navy expedition advanced up the Ashepoo and South Edisto Rivers, South Carolina, with the object of cutting the Charleston and Savannah Railroad.
◆1864 The unsuccessful Red River campaign having drawn to a close, General Banks' army on 20 May crossed the Atchafalaya River near Simmesport, Louisiana, protected by Rear Admiral Porter's fleet. Porter, whose health was beginning to fail after many months of arduous duty on the western waters, arrived at his headquarters at Cairo, Illinois.
◆1865 Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of the Confederate Trans-Mississippi division, is the last general of the Confederate Army to surrender.
◆1907 John Wayne born ("Sands of Iwo Jima," “Green Berets”), d. 1979.
◆1941 A British Catalina aircraft, piloted by a US Navy officer, finds Bismark only 700 miles from Brest and it is clear that the aircraft of the Ark Royal (of Force H) offer the best chance of slowing the German ship so that she can be caught.
◆1941 HMS 'Ark Royal' aircraft damage battleship 'Bismarck'.
◆1944 USS England sinks fifth Japanese submarine in one week.
◆1942 Japanese Admiral Nagumo's 1st Carrier Fleet sails for Midway. His task force contains the carriers Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu with two battleships, cruisers and destroyers as escort.
◆1942 US Task Force 16, with the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Hornet, returns to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese believe that these ships are still active in the South Pacific.
◆1944 Allied advances continue despite German resistance. The British 10th Corps (McCreery) captures Roccasecca; the Canadian 1st Corps takes San Giovanni and reaches the Liri River; the US 2nd Corps reaches Priverno. The US 6th Corps, at Anzio, progresses toward Lanuvio; US 3rd Division takes Artena, but German defenses prevent it from advancing to Valmontone. The US 1st Armored Division proves too weak to mount a rapid drive towards Velletri.
◆1944 An American destroyer force bombards Mili Island.
◆1945 On Okinawa, American bombers and artillery attack Japanese troops withdrawing from the Shuri Line. Soldiers of California’s 184th Infantry, assigned to the Regular Army’s 7th Infantry Division, succeed in reducing several Japanese strong points as American forces drive deeper into the island’s defenses. The 184th was one of 18 Guard infantry regiments separated from it peacetime parent division, in this case the 40th Infantry Division, by the restructuring of all infantry divisions into smaller organizations in 1942.
◆1945 Some 464 American B-29 Superfortress bombers fire-bombed Tokyo with about 4000 tons of incendiaries.
◆1945 The Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) is transferred from Rheims to Frankfurt-am-Main.
◆1946 A patent was filed in the U.S. for the H-bomb.
◆1951 U.N. Forces drove the communists' back across the 38th parallel on most of the Korean battlefields.
◆1952 Tests from 26-29 May demonstrate feasibility of the angled-deck concept conducted on simulated angled deck on USS Midway.
◆1956 Aircraft carrier "Bennington" burned off RI, killing 103.
◆1961 A USAF bomber flew the Atlantic in a record of just over three hours.
◆1969 The Apollo 10 astronauts returned to Earth after a successful eight-day dress rehearsal for the first manned moon landing.
◆1969 Operation Pipestone Canyon began when the 1st Battalion, 26th Marines and 3d Battalion, 5th Marines began sweeps in the Dodge City/Go Noi areas southwest of Da Nang. It terminated at the end of June with 610 enemy killed in action at a cost of 34 Marines killed.
◆1971 In Cambodia, an estimated 1,000 North Vietnamese capture the strategic rubber plantation town of Snoul, driving out 2,000 South Vietnamese as U.S. air strikes support the Allied forces.
◆1972 President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev signed in Moscow an arms reduction agreement that became known as SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks).
◆1995 Serbs bombarded Serajevo. On Jun 6 NATO launched 2 air raids against an ammunition dump in Serb-held central Bosnia.
◆1999 NATO military commanders won political approval to strike at the civilian telephone and computer networks of Yugoslavia. Warplanes carried out a record 650 sorties with 284 bombing attacks.
◆1999 Serbian military fired over 30 missiles at NATO warplanes which had begun flying at lower altitudes to strike tanks, artillery and ground troops.