1916 – General Pershing and his army routed Pancho Villa’s army in Mexico.
1917 – The United States takes possession of the Danish West Indies after paying $25 million to Denmark, and renames the territory the United States Virgin Islands.
1918 – Daylight Savings Time went into effect throughout the U.S. for the first time.
1933 – Congress authorized the Civilian Conservation Corps in an attempt to relieve rampant unemployment. The US unemployment rate had reached 25%. In its nine years of existence, the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps had a total of 2.9 million men aged 18 to 25 enrolled. The program was designed to provide jobs for young men in the national forests, conservation programs and national road construction. Enacted as one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s first New Deal programs, it lasted until World War II. At its high point in September 1935, the CCC had 2,514 work camps across the U.S. with 502,000 men enrolled.
1943 – An American battalion occupies positions around Morobe at the mouth of the Waria River.
1945 – The U.S. and Britain barred a Soviet supported provisional regime in Warsaw from entering the U.N. meeting in San Francisco.
1945 – US naval forces, including Task Force 58 and TF52, continue air strikes on Okinawa while TF54 continues bombarding the island. Japanese Kamikaze and submarine attacks continue.
1945 – A defecting German pilot delivers a Messerschmitt Me 262A-1, the world’s first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft, to the Americans, the first to fall into Allied hands.
1948 - Congress passed a $6.2 billion foreign aid bill, the Marshall Aid Act, to rehabilitate war-torn Europe.
1951 – Operation RIPPER was officially terminated as Eighth Army fought its way back to the 38th parallel.
1951 – Remington Rand delivers the first UNIVAC I computer to the United States Census Bureau.
1952 – The Kimpo Provisional Regiment was organized by and within the U.S. 1st Marine Division for the defense of the Kimpo peninsula.1958 – US Navy formed the atomic sub division.
1958 – Moscow declared a halt on all atomic tests and asked other nations to follow.
1965 - US ordered the 1st combat troops to Vietnam.
1965 – Responding to questions from reporters about the situation in Vietnam, President Johnson says, “I know of no far-reaching strategy that is being suggested or promulgated.” Early in the month, Johnson had sent 3,500 Marines to Da Nang to secure the U.S. airbase there. These troops were ostensibly there only for defensive purposes, but Johnson, despite his protestations to the contrary, was already considering giving the authorization for the U.S. troops to go from defensive to offensive tactics. This was a sensitive area, since such an authorization could (and did) lead to escalation in the war and a subsequent increase in the American commitment to it.
1967 – President Lyndon Johnson signed the Consular Treaty, the first bi-lateral pact with the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution.
1968 – In a televised speech to the nation, President Lyndon B. Johnson announces a partial halt of bombing missions over North Vietnam and proposes peace talks. He said he had ordered “unilaterally” a halt to air and naval bombardments of North Vietnam “except in the area north of the Demilitarized Zone, where the continuing enemy build-up directly threatens Allied forward positions.” He also stated that he was sending 13,500 more troops to Vietnam and would request further defense expenditures–$2.5 billion in fiscal year 1968 and $2.6 billion in fiscal year 1969–to finance recent troop build-ups, re-equip the South Vietnamese Army, and meet “responsibilities in Korea.” In closing, Johnson shocked the nation with an announcement that all but conceded that his own presidency had become another wartime casualty: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
1970 – The U.S. forces in Vietnam downed a MIG-21, the first since September 1968.
1970 – Explorer 1, the first US satellite, launched in 1958, re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere after 12 years in orbit.
1971 – Poseidon (C-3) missile becomes operational when USS James Madison began her 3rd patrol carrying 16 tactical Poseidon missiles.
1972 – After firing more than 5,000 rockets, artillery, and mortar shells on 12 South Vietnamese positions just below the Demilitarized Zone, the North Vietnamese Army launches ground assaults against South Vietnamese positions in Quang Tri Province. The attacks were thrown back, with 87 North Vietnamese killed. South Vietnamese fire bases Fuller, Mai Loc, Holcomb, Pioneer, and two smaller bases near the Demilitarized Zone were abandoned as the North Vietnamese pushed the defenders back toward their rear bases. At the same time, attacks against three bases west of Saigon forced the South Vietnamese to abandon six outposts along the Cambodian border. These were a continuation of the opening attacks of the North Vietnamese Nguyen Hue Offensive, a major coordinated communist offensive initiated on March 30. Committing almost their entire army to the offensive, the North Vietnamese launched a massive three-pronged attack. In the initial attack, four North Vietnamese divisions attacked directly across the Demilitarized Zone into Quang Tri province. Following the assault in Quang Tri province, the North Vietnamese launched two more major attacks: at An Loc in Binh Long Province, 60 miles north of Saigon, and at Kontum in the Central Highlands. With the three attacks, the North Vietnamese had committed 500 tanks and 150,000 regular troops (as well as thousands of Viet Cong) supported by heavy rocket and artillery fire. After initial successes, especially against the newly formed South Vietnamese 3rd Division in Quang Tri, the North Vietnamese attack was stopped cold by the combination of defending South Vietnamese divisions (along with their U.S. advisers) and massive American airpower. Estimates placed the North Vietnamese losses at more than 100,000 and at least one-half of their tanks and large caliber artillery.
1980 – Iranian officials say American hostages may be handed over to government by militants holding U.S. embassy, as militant leaders meet with President Bani-Sadr
1991 – The Warsaw Pact spent the last day of its existence as a military alliance.
1992 – The U.N. Security Council voted to ban flights and arms sales to Libya, branding it a terrorist state for shielding six men accused of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 and a French airliner.
1992 – USS Missouri (BB-63), the last active American battleship is decommissioned. USS Missouri (BB-63) (“Mighty Mo” or “Big Mo”) is a United States Navy Iowa-class battleship and was the third ship of the U.S. Navy to be named in honor of the US state of Missouri. Missouri was the last battleship commissioned by the United States and was the site of the surrender of the Empire of Japan which ended World War II. Missouri was ordered in 1940 and commissioned in June 1944. In the Pacific Theater of World War II she fought in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and shelled the Japanese home islands, and she fought in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. She was decommissioned in 1955 into the United States Navy reserve fleets (the “Mothball Fleet”), but reactivated and modernized in 1984 as part of the 600-ship Navy plan, and provided fire support during Operation Desert Storm in January/February 1991. Missouri received a total of 11 battle stars for service in World War II, Korea, and the Persian Gulf, and was finally decommissioned on 31 March 1992, but remained on the Naval Vessel Register until her name was struck in January 1995. In 1998, she was donated to the USS Missouri Memorial Association and became a museum ship at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
1993 – The U.N. Security Council increased international pressure on Bosnian Serbs, authorizing NATO warplanes to shoot down aircraft that violated a ban on flights over Bosnia.
1995 – President Clinton briefly visited Haiti, where he declared the U.S. mission to restore democracy there a “remarkable success.”
1995 – Coast Guard Communication Area Master Station Atlantic sent a final message by Morse Code and then signed off, officially ending more than 100 years of telegraph communication.
1998 – The UN Security Council imposed a new arms embargo on Yugoslavia to press Milosevic to grant ethnic Albanians concessions in Kosovo.
1999 – Three peacekeeping US soldiers were captured by Serb forces near the Yugoslav-Macedonia border. Sgt. James Stone (25), Spec. Steven Gonzales (21) and Sgt. Andrew Ramirez (24) were shown on Serbian TV and were released more than a month later. Azen Syla, founder of the KLA, said that his guerrilla supply lines from Albania were cut off when the bombing began. Yugoslav soldiers herded ethnic Albanians onto trains bound for the Macedonian border as NATO bombing continued for the 8th day.
1999 – NATO bombs destroyed the Sloboda household utilities plant in Cacak, Serbia. It had employed some 5,000 people. Allied leaders said they would bomb government buildings in Belgrade.
1999 – On Serbian TV Ibrahim Rugova appealed for an end to NATO bombings. He had recently been quoted by a German magazine that chaos would result if NATO does not send in ground troops immediately. Serbs put Rugova under house arrest and ordered him to appear on TV.
https://thisdayinusmilhist.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/march-31/
