TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
12 October
◆539 BCE Babylon falls to Cyrus of Persia.
◆1459 Battle of Ludford Bridge: King Henry VI defeats Richard of York.
◆1492 Christopher Columbus sited land, an island of the Bahamas which he named San Salvador, but which was called Guanahani by the local Taino people.
◆1722 Isfahan falls to Mir Mahmoud of Afghanistan, after a 7 month siege.
◆1776 British Brigade began guarding Throgs Necks Road in Bronx.
◆1798 Ali Pasha of Albania takes Preveza, massacring the men and enlsaving the women and children.
◆1860 British & French troops capture Peking.
◆1861 Skirmish at Bayless Cross Roads, La.
◆1861 Skirmish at Cameron, Mo.
◆1861 Skirmish at Upton Hill, Ky.
◆1861 The Confederate ironclad Manassas attacked the northern ship Richmond on the Mississippi River.
◆1862 J.E.B. Stuart completed his "2nd ride around McClellan." Following the September 17, 1862, Battle of Sharpsburg in Maryland, Gen. Robert E. Lee's battered Confederate Army of Northern Virginia slipped back across the Potomac River and set up camp in the valleys of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains while it tried to reorganize and revitalize.★
◆1862 There was a skirmish at Monocacy, Maryland.
◆1870 Gen. Robert E. Lee died in Lexington, Va., at 63. General Robert Edward Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, dies peacefully at his home in Lexington, Virginia. He was 63 years old.★
◆1872 Apache (Chiricahua) leader Cochise signed a peace treaty with General O.O. Howard in Arizona Territory.
◆1892 The American Pledge of Allegiance was 1st recited in public schools to commemorate Columbus Day. Francis Bellamy, a magazine editor of Rome, NY, wrote the "Pledge of Allegiance."
◆1914 USS Jupiter (AC-3) is first Navy ship to complete transit of Panama Canal.
◆1914 First Battle of Ypres begins.
◆1917 The 1st Marine Aviation Squadron and 1st Marine Aeronautic Company formed at Philadelphia.
◆1942 During World War II, President Roosevelt delivered one of his so-called "fireside chats" in which he recommended drafting 18- and 19-year-old men. 1942 - US Navy defeated Japanese in WW II Battle of Cape Esperance.
◆1942 During World War II, Attorney General Francis Biddle announced that Italian nationals in the United States would no longer be considered enemy aliens.
◆1943 The U.S. Fifth Army began preparation for an assault crossing of the Volturno River in Italy.
◆1944 Aircraft from Carrier Task Force 38 attack Formosa.
◆1946 Joseph W. Stilwell, US general in China, died. Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell, the man who commanded the U.S. and Chinese Nationalist resistance to Japanese incursions into China and Burma, dies today at age 63.★
◆1950 The battleship USS Missouri bombarded Chongjin.
◆1950 The USS Pirate and USS Pledge were both destroyed by mines. The Pirate sank in four minutes with six killed and 43 wounded. The Pledge suffered seven killed in action and 36 wounded.
◆1950 FEAF Combat Cargo Command began an airlift of ROK military supplies to Wonsan, which ROK forces had captured two days earlier. It also began transporting 600 tons of bridge sections to Kimpo airfield.
◆1953 US and Greece signed a peace treaty that included US bases.
◆1957 RADM Dufek arrives at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica to command Operation Deep Freeze III during the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58.
◆1960 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev disrupted a U.N. General Assembly session by pounding his desk with a shoe during a dispute.
◆1964 The Soviet Union launched a Voskhod space capsule with a three-man crew on the first manned mission involving more than one crew member.
◆1965 End of Project Sealab II where teams of naval divers and scientists spent 15 days in Sealab moored 205 feet below surface near La Jolla, California.
◆1965 First group of men commissioned into Navy Nurse Corps report for one month indoctrination to Naval Service; LTJG Jerry McClelland, ENS Charles Franklin, ENS Israel Miller, ENS Richard Gierman and ENS George Silver.
◆1966 Operation "Teton," RVN.
◆1970 President Richard Nixon announced the pullout of 40,000 more American troops in Vietnam by Christmas.
◆1983 Granada's Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard, a hardline Marxist, leads a coup that ousts Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. Bishop and most of his cabinet will be executed a week later. The U.S. is concerned by increasingly close ties between Granada and Cuba as well as the construction of a 10,000-foot runway that could be used by Soviet and Cuban military and cargo aircraft.
◆2000 A US Navy destroyer, the USS Cole, refueling in Yemen suffered an enormous explosion in a terrorist attack. Initial reports had at least 6 sailors killed with 11 missing.★
◆2001 The US indicated it would aid Uzbekistan if it were attacked.