TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
11 October
◆1427 Battle of Maclodio: Carmagnola's Venetians defeat the Milanese under Carlo Malatesta.
◆1726 Benjamin Franklin returned to Philadelphia from England.
◆1776 The first naval battle of Lake Champlain was fought during the American Revolution.
◆1779 Polish nobleman General Casimir Pulaski was killed while fighting for American independence during the Revolutionary War Battle of Savannah, Ga.★
◆1797 Battle of Camperdown: Royal Navy defeats the Dutch.
◆1811 Battle of Arroyo dos Molinos: Lord Hill's Anglo-Spanish forces rout the French.
◆1824 Marquis de Lafayette visits the Washington Navy Yard during his yearlong tour of America. He returned to the yard the next day, October 12, to continue his visit.
◆1862 The Confederate Congress in Richmond passed a draft law allowing anyone owning 20 or more slaves to be exempt from military service. This law confirmed many southerners opinion that they were in a ‘rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.’
◆1862 J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry sacks Chambersburg, Pa.★
◆1863 Skirmish at Rheatown, Henderson's Mill, Tennessee.
◆1879 The first annual conference of the National Guard Association is held. The Association, which continues in operation today, acts as a political interest group representing Guard concerns with members of Congress. Federal law prohibits members of the armed forces on active duty from ‘lobbying’ Congress so the Association, which is composed of active and retired Guard officers, performs this function.
◆1915 Bulgarians initiate an offensive against Serbia.
◆1939 Albert Einstein wrote his famous letter to FDR about the potential of the atomic bomb. Einstein, a long time pacifist, was concerned that the Nazis would get the bomb first. In the letter, Einstein argued the scientific feasibility of atomic weapons, and urged the need for development of a US atomic program. The physicists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller, who were profoundly disturbed by the lack of American atomic action, had enlisted the aid of the Nobel prize-winner Einstein in the summer of 1939, hoping that a letter from such a renowned scientist would persuade Roosevelt into action.
◆1942 The Battle of Cape Esperance in the Solomon Islands, U.S. cruisers and destroyers decisively defeated a Japanese task force in a night surface encounter sinking two Japanese ships while losing only USS Duncan (DD-485).
◆1945 Negotiations between Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and Communist leader Mao Tse-tung broke down. Nationalist and Communist troops were soon engaged in a civil war.
◆1950 Task Force 77 Aircraft destroy North Korean vessels off Songjin and Wonsan and north of Hungham.
◆1951 A Marine battalion was flown by transport helicopters to a frontline combat position for the first time, when HMR-161 lifted the 3d Battalion, 7th Marines, and its equipment, during Operation Bumblebee, northeast of Yanggu, Korea. This is the first battalion sized combat helolift.
◆1952 Two USAF 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing F-86 Sabre jet pilots shot down enemy aircraft. It was future ace Captain Clyde A. Curtin's first aerial victory of the war. Captain Clifford Jolley chalked up his seventh and final enemy aircraft kill. Four other MiGs were destroyed in a series of battles over northwest Korea.
◆1958 The lunar probe Pioneer 1 was launched; it failed to go as far as planned, fell back to Earth, and burned up in the atmosphere.
◆1963 Navy medical team from Norfolk, VA begins massive inoculation program to safeguard against outbreak of typhoid in the wake of Hurricane Flora.
◆1966 U.S. Forces launched Operation Robin, in Hoa Province south of Saigon in South Vietnam, to provide road security between villages.
◆1967 Operation Coronado VI began in Rung Sat Zone. The Mobile Riverine Force, 9th Inf Div conducted this operation to provide security of the Long Tau Channel.
◆1968 Apollo 7, The first manned Apollo mission, was launched from Cape Kennedy with astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Fulton Eisele and R. Walter Cunningham aboard. It made 163 orbits. The mission lasted 10 days and 20 hours. Recovery was by HS-5 helicopters from USS Essex (CVS-9).
◆1972 A French mission in Vietnam was destroyed by a U.S. bombing raid.
◆1984 Space shuttle Challenger astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space.
◆1993 Yasser Arafat won endorsement for his peace accord with Israel from the Palestine Central Council.
◆1994 U.S. troops in Haiti took over the National Palace.
◆1994 Iraqi troops began moving north, away from the Kuwaiti border.
◆1995 In Bosnia a cease-fire was declared.
◆1996 In Angola the UN extended the 7,200 peacekeeping mission for 2 months. The Security Council threatened sanctions against UNITA which has delayed integrating 26,000 fighters into the national army and interfered with UN activities.
◆1998 In Afghanistan the Taliban battled opposition forces for the 2nd day in the northeast Takhar province.
◆1998 In Bosnia forensic experts began exhuming 274 bodies in the village of Donja Glumina. They were believed to be Bosnian Muslims killed in Srebrenica by Serbs in Jul 1995.
◆1999 In Chechnya more people fled Russian attacks and Moscow demanded that Islamic militants be handed over before any peace settlement.
◆2001 In Macedonia police found a cache of arms in an area held by ethnic Albanian rebels.