1913 – The US Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, requiring direct election of senators.
1914 – U.S. and Colombia signed a treaty concerning Panama Canal Zone.
1918 – The US First Aero Squadron was assigned to the Western Front for the first time on observation duty.
1918 – Actors Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin sell war bonds on the streets of New York City’s financial district.
1925 – First planned night landings on a carrier, USS Langley, by VF-1.
1935 – The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was approved by Congress. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression of the 1930s when almost 25 percent of Americans were unemployed. The WPA created low-paying federal jobs intended to provide immediate relief. The WPA put 8.5 million jobless to work on make-work projects as diverse as constructing highways, bridges and public buildings to arts programs like the Federal Writers’ Project.
1942 – Overwhelmed by numbers and short of food and equipment, the American and Filipino forces remaining on the Bataan peninsula are ordered to destroy their equipment prior to a surrender.
1943 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in an attempt to check inflation, freezes wages and prices, prohibits workers from changing jobs unless the war effort would be aided thereby, and bars rate increases by common carriers and public utilities.
1945 – On Okinawa, the forces of US 3rd Amphibious Corps, attacking northward on the island, have cut the neck of the Motobu Peninsula and US 6th Marine Division begins operations to clear it of Japanese forces. At sea, there are less intense Kamikaze attacks.
1945 – The US forces on Negros are reinforced by the landing of a second regiment, in the northwest of the island, near Bacolod.
1945 – US 7th Army units capture Schweinfurt. Other Allied armies farther north also advance.
1946 – The League of Nations assembled in Geneva for the last time.
1950 – A US Navy privateer airplane flew from Wiesbaden, West Germany, to spy over the Soviet Union with 10 people on board. Soviet reconnaissance spotted the plane over Latvia and shot it down.
1951 – 1st of 4 detonations, Operation Greenhouse nuclear test.
1952 – President Truman, to avert a strike, ordered the Army to seize the nation’s steel mills after companies rejected Wage Stabilization Board recommendations. Truman’s attempt to take over the US steel industry was later denied by the Supreme Court and the mills were shut down by strikers for 8 weeks.
1959 – A team of computer manufacturers, users, and university people led by Navy LTCDR Grace Hopper meets to discuss the creation of a new programming language that would be called COBOL (an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language).
1962 – Bay of Pigs invaders got thirty years imprisonment in Cuba.
1964 – Gemini 1 launched. Gemini 1 was the first unmanned test flight of the Gemini spacecraft in NASA’s Gemini program. Its main objectives were to test the structural integrity of the new spacecraft and modified Titan II ICBM. It was also the first test of the new tracking and communication systems for the Gemini program and provided training for the ground support crews for the first manned missions. The spacecraft stayed attached to the second stage of the rocket. The mission lasted for three orbits while test data were taken, but the spacecraft stayed in orbit for almost 64 orbits until the orbit decayed due to atmospheric drag. The spacecraft was not intended to be recovered; in fact, holes were drilled through its heat shield to ensure it would not survive re-entry.
1965 – The US flies 63 sorties against Vietcong concentrations in Kontum Province.
1968 – 42 US and 37 ARVN battalions begin the largest offensive to date in Vietnam in an operation that will last nearly two months. Operation Toan Thang (Complete Victory) is designed to destroy the Vietcong and NVA forces operating in the Capital Military District.
1968 – Operation Burlington Trail begins, by the 198th Infantry Brigade in Quang Tri Province. By 11 November this operation will claim 1931 enemy casualties.
1969 – Five waves of US B-52s raid suspected enemy camps near the Cambodian border.
1972 – North Vietnamese 2nd Division troops drive out of Laos and Cambodia to open a third front of their offensive in the Central Highlands, attacking at Kontum and Pleiku in attempt to cut South Vietnam in two. If successful, this would give North Vietnam control of the northern half of South Vietnam. The three-front attack was part of the North Vietnamese Nguyen Hue Offensive (later known as the “Easter Offensive”), which had been launched on March 30. The offensive was a massive invasion by North Vietnamese forces designed to strike the knockout blow that would win the war for the communists. The attacking force included 14 infantry divisions and 26 separate regiments, with more than 120,000 troops and approximately 1,200 tanks and other armored vehicles. North Vietnam had a number of objectives in launching the offensive: impressing the communist world and its own people with its determination; capitalizing on U.S. antiwar sentiment and possibly hurting President Richard Nixon’s chances for re-election; proving that “Vietnamization” was a failure; damaging the South Vietnamese forces and government stability; gaining as much territory as possible before a possible truce; and accelerating negotiations on their own terms. Initially, the South Vietnamese defenders in each case were almost overwhelmed, particularly in the northernmost provinces, where they abandoned their positions in Quang Tri and fled south in the face of the enemy onslaught. At Kontum and An Loc, the South Vietnamese were more successful in defending against the North Vietnamese attacks. Although the defenders suffered heavy casualties, they managed to hold out with the aid of U.S. advisors and American airpower. Fighting continued all over South Vietnam into the summer months, but eventually the South Vietnamese forces prevailed against the invaders, even retaking Quang Tri in September. With the communist invasion blunted, President Nixon declared that the South Vietnamese victory proved the viability of his Vietnamization program, instituted in 1969 to increase the combat capability of the South Vietnamese armed forces.
1975 – After a weeklong mission to South Vietnam, Gen. Frederick Weyand, U.S. Army Chief of Staff and former Vietnam commander, reports to Congress that South Vietnam cannot survive without additional military aid. Questioned again later by reporters who asked if South Vietnam could survive with additional aid, Weyand replied there was “a chance.” Weyand had been sent to Saigon by President Gerald Ford to assess the South Vietnamese forces and their chances for survival against the attacking North Vietnamese. The South Vietnamese were on the verge of collapse. The most recent assaults had begun in December 1974 when the North Vietnamese launched a major attack against the lightly defended province of Phuoc Long–located north of Saigon along the Cambodian border–and overran the provincial capital at Phuoc Binh on January 6, 1975. Despite previous presidential promises to aid South Vietnam in such a situation, the United States did nothing. By this time, Nixon had resigned from office and his successor, Gerald Ford, was unable to convince a hostile Congress to make good on Nixon’s earlier promises to Saigon. The situation emboldened the North Vietnamese, who launched a new campaign in March 1975, in which the South Vietnamese forces fell back in total disarray. Once again, the United States did nothing. The South Vietnamese abandoned Pleiku and Kontum in the Highlands with very little fighting. Then Quang Tri, Hue, and Da Nang fell to the communist onslaught. The North Vietnamese continued to attack south along the coast toward Saigon, defeating the South Vietnamese forces at each encounter. As Weyand reported to Congress, the South Vietnamese were battling three North Vietnamese divisions at Xuan Loc, the last defense line before Saigon. Indeed, it became the last battle in the defense of the Republic of South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese forces managed to hold out against the attackers until they ran out of tactical air support and weapons, finally abandoning Xuan Loc to the communists on April 21. Saigon fell to the communists on April 30.
1981 – General of the Army Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group who ensured Allied victory over Germany, dies. Born on February 12, 1893, Bradley was a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (Dwight Eisenhower was a classmate). During the opening days of World War II, he commanded the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was later placed at the head of the II Corps for the North African campaign, proving instrumental in the fall of Tunisia and the surrender of over 250,000 Axis soldiers. He led forces in the invasion and capture of Sicily and joined his troops in the Normandy invasion, which culminated in the symbolic liberation of Paris by Bradley’s troops. He was promoted to commander of the U.S. 12th Army Group, the largest force ever placed under an American group commander, and led successful operations in France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. After the war, Bradley was chosen as the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ultimately promoted to the position of General of the Army in 1950. In 1951, he published his reminiscences of the war in A Soldier’s Story. He retired in 1953.
1994 – Smoking was banned in Pentagon and all US military bases.
1994 – Kofi Annan was the head of UN Peacekeeping operations when the commander of UN forces in Rwanda warned that the Kigali government was planning to slaughter Tutsis. Annan’s office ordered Gen’l. Romeo Dallaire of Canada not to protect the informant or to confiscate arms stockpiles. Annan later claimed that he lacked the military might and political backing to stop the slaughter of more than 500,000 people.
1995 – Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, in an interview with AP Network News and “Newsweek” magazine to promote his memoirs, called America’s Vietnam War policy “terribly wrong.”
1997 – The Columbia space shuttle landed with its mission shortened by 12 days due to a faulty fuel cell [a defective generator].
1998 – In Bosnia NATO forces arrested Miroslav Kvocka and Mladen Radic, both whom were charged for war crimes at the Omarska camp near Prijedor where scores of Muslim and Croat prisoners were killed in 1992.
1999 – At a White House news conference, President Clinton said NATO could still win in Kosovo by air power alone, and he expressed hope for an early release of three American POW’s.
1999 – NATO bombing in Yugoslavia blocked freighter and barge traffic on the Danube.
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