https://thisdayinusmilhist.wordpress.com/2014/03/01/march-1/1 March
1642 – Georgeana, Massachusetts, now York, Maine, became the first American city to incorporate. First settled in 1624, the plantation was originally called Agamenticus, the Abenaki term for the York River. In 1638, settlers changed the name to Bristol after Bristol, England, from which they had immigrated. Envisioning a great city arising from the wilderness, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, lord proprietor of Maine under the Plymouth patent, named the capital of his province Gorgeana.
1713 – The siege and destruction of Fort Neoheroka begins during the Tuscarora War in North Carolina. The fort was besieged and ultimately attacked by a colonial force consisting of an army from the neighboring Province of South Carolina, under the command of Colonel James Moore and made up mainly of Indians including Yamasee, Apalachee, Catawba, Cherokee, and many others. The siege lasted for more than three weeks, to around March 22. Hundreds of men, women and children were burned to death in a fire that destroyed the fort. Approximately 170 more were killed outside the fort while approximately 400 were taken to South Carolina where they were sold into slavery. The defeat of the Tuscaroras, once the most powerful indigenous nation in the North Carolina Territory, opened up North Carolina’s interior to further expansion by European settlers. The supremacy of the Tuscaroras in the state was broken forever. Most moved north to live among the Iroquois.
1776 – French minister Charles Gravier advised his Spanish counterpart to support the American rebels against the English.
1780 – Pennsylvania became the first U.S. state to abolish slavery (for new-borns only). It was followed by Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784, New York in 1785, and New Jersey in 1786. Massachusetts abolished slavery through a judicial decision in 1783.
1781 – The Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation.
1790 – Congress authorized the first U.S. census. The Connecticut Compromise was a proposal for two houses in the legislature-one based on equal representation for each state, the other for population-based representation-that resolved the dispute between large and small states at the Constitutional Convention. Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman’s proposal led to the first nationwide census in 1790. The population was determined to be 3,929,625, which included 697,624 slaves and 59,557 free blacks. The most populous state was Virginia, with 747,610 people and the most populous city was Philadelphia with 42,444 inhabitants.
1792 – US Presidential Succession Act was passed.
1803 – Ohio is admitted as the 17th U.S. state. The name “Ohio” originated from Iroquois word ohi-yo’, meaning “great river” or “large creek”. The state was originally partitioned from the Northwest Territory. Although there are conflicting narratives regarding the origin of the nickname, Ohio is historically known as the “Buckeye State” (relating to the Ohio buckeye tree) and Ohioans are also known as “Buckeyes”.
1836 – A convention of delegates from 57 Texas communities convenes in Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texas, to deliberate independence from Mexico.
1845 – President Tyler signed a congressional resolution to annex the Republic of Texas.
1862 – U.S.S. Tyler, Lieutenant Gwin, and U.S.S. Lexington, Lieutenant Shirk, engaged Confederate forces preparing to strongly fortify Shiloh (Pittsburg Landing), Tennessee. Under cover of the gunboats’ cannon, a landing party of sailors and Army sharpshooters was put ashore from armed boats to determine Confederate strength in the area. Flag Officer Foote commended Gwin for his successful “amphibious” attack where several sailors met their death along with their Army comrades. At the same time he added: “But I must give a general order that no commander will land men to make an attack on shore. Our gunboats are to be used as forts, and as they have no more men than are necessary to man the guns, and as the Army must do the shore work, and as the enemy want nothing better than to entice our men on shore and overpower them with superior numbers, the commanders must not operate on shore, but confine themselves to their vessels.”
1864 – President Lincoln nominates Ulysses S. Grant for the newly revived rank of lieutenant general. At the time, George Washington was the only other man to have held that rank. Winfield Scott also attained the title but by brevet only; he did not actually command with it. The promotion carried Grant to the supreme command of Union forces and capped one of the most remarkable success stories of the war. Born in Ohio in 1822, Grant attended West Point and graduated in 1843, 21st in a class of 39. He served in the Mexican War in 1847 to 1848 and on the frontier in the 1850s. During this time, Grant acquired experience in logistics and the supply of troops, developing skills that later made him a success during the Civil War. He also developed a reputation as a heavy drinker, and he denied charges of drunkenness throughout the war. When the Civil War erupted, Grant was not in the service and was working as a clerk in his father’s store in Galena, Illinois. Grant reenlisted after Fort Sumter fell in April 1861; his first assignment was to raise troops in Illinois. In June, the governor appointed him colonel of the 21st Illinois. After leading his regiment to protect a railroad in Missouri, Grant was promoted to brigadier general on July 31, 1861. In early 1862, Grant won the first major Union victories of the war when he captured Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. For the next two years he was the most successful general in the army. His campaign to capture Vicksburg was one of the most efficient offensives of the war, and the Yankees captured the Mississippi River and most of Tennessee under his leadership. Lincoln replaced Henry Halleck as the commander of all Union armies when he elevated Grant to the rank of lieutenant general. Unlike Halleck, Grant did not serve from behind a desk; he took the field with the largest Federal force, the Army of the Potomac, as he moved against Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Virginia.
1867 – Nebraska becomes the 37th U.S. state; Lancaster, Nebraska is renamed Lincoln and becomes the state capital. Nebraska gets its name from the archaic Otoe words Ñí Brásge, pronounced [ɲĩbɾasꜜkɛ] (contemporary Otoe Ñí Bráhge), or the Omaha Ní Btháska, pronounced [nĩbɫᶞasꜜka], meaning “flat water”, after the Platte River that flows through the state.
1873 – E. Remington and Sons in Ilion, New York begins production of the first practical typewriter.
1875 – Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which was invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1883.
1876 – Nuova Ottavia, an Italian Ship, grounded off the Jones Hill North Carolina Life-Saving Station. The rescue attempt by the crew of that Life-Saving station resulted in the loss of seven surfmen, the first deaths in the line of duty since the service started with paid crews in 1870. Among the dead was African-American Surfman, Lewis White.
1893 – The US Diplomatic Appropriation Act authorized the rank of ambassador.
1893 – Electrical engineer Nikola Tesla gives the first public demonstration of radio in St. Louis, Missouri.
1912 – Albert Berry makes the first parachute jump from an airplane at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. Berry jumped from a Benoist pusher biplane from 1,500 feet (457 m) and landed successfully. The pilot was Tony Jannus. The 36 foot (11 m) diameter parachute was contained in a metal canister attached to the underside of the plane – when Berry dropped from the plane his weight pulled the parachute from the canister. Rather than being attached to the parachute by a harness Berry was seated on a trapeze bar. According to Berry he dropped 500 feet (152 m) before the parachute opened.
1913 – The US Federal income tax took effect (16th amendment). 1916 – Germany began attacking ships in the Atlantic.
1917 – The U.S. government releases the unencrypted text of the Zimmermann Telegram to the public.
1927 – A system of broadcasting weather reports by radio on four lightships on the Pacific Coast was put into effect.
1936 – The Hoover Dam is completed.
1941 – “Captain America” first appeared in a comic book.
1941 – Nazi extermination camps begin full operation. These include Auschwitz, Bamberg, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Chelmno, Jena, Sobibor and Treblinka. Over 2.600.000 Polish Jews are among those killed during the course of the war. Over 12.000 people would be killed daily at Auschwitz alone. By 1945 nearly 6 million Jews and more than 3 million Communists, gypsies, socialists and other dissidents will be exterminated.
1941 – The US Navy forms a Support Force for the Atlantic Fleet. The main part of this unit is made up from three destroyer squadrons of 27 ships.
1941 – Nashville radio station W47NV begins transmitting. The station was the first in the country to receive a license for FM radio transmission: All previous commercial stations transmitted via AM, which was more prone to static and interference. The station started its FM broadcast with a commercial for Nashville’s Standard Candy Company.
1942 – American military authorities, angered over the destruction at Pearl Harbor, order Rear Adm. Husband E. Kimmel and Maj. Gen. Walter Short, the top Navy and Army officers in Hawaii at the time, court-martialled. When cooler heads prevail, the Army and Navy create Boards of Inquiry to examine the case.
1942 – U-656 becomes the first German submarine of World War II to be sunk by Naval air (VP-82). The attack was carried out by Ensign William Tepuni piloting a Hudson bomber with Patrol Squadron 82 (VP-82). Two weeks later VP-82 pilot, Chief Aviation Machinist’s Mate Donald Mason, sank U-503 southeast of the Virgin Rocks.
1942 – Baseball decided that players in military can’t play when on furlough.
1942 – The remainder of Doorman’s naval squadron withdraws from Java fighting rear guard actions in the Sunda Strait. The force loses three cruisers and four destroyers. Japanese forces land with little or no opposition on Java at Kragan, Merak and Eretenwetan.
1942 – The “Flying Tigers” volunteer air force under the command of Claire Chennault, move to an RAF bomber base after their exceptional air defense of Rangoon.
1944 – On Los Negros, US forces eliminate some small Japanese forces that infiltrated their lines during the night.
1945 – President Roosevelt, back from the Yalta Conference, proclaimed the meeting a success when he addressed a joint session of Congress.
1945 – Munchen-Gladbach and Neuss fall to the US 9th Army, which is now advancing rapidly toward the Rhine. The attacks of US 1st Army toward Cologne are continuing as are the efforts of US 3rd Army near the River Kyll and south of Trier.
1945 – On Iwo Jima, forces of US 5th Amphibious Corps now hold both the first and second of the island’s airfields and have a foothold at the southern end of the third. There is intensive fighting all along the line.
1945 – Japanese resistance in Manila is confined to a few blocks in the administrative area of the city. Nearer the landing area at Lingayen Gulf there are renewed efforts by US 1st Corps in the direction of Baguio and north along the coast.
1945 – Part of US Task Force 58 conducts air strikes on targets on Okinawa and nearby shipping. Two small Japanese warships are sunk.
1950 – Klaus Fuchs was sentenced in London to 14 years for atomic espionage. Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (29 December 1911 – 28 January 1988) was a German-born British theoretical physicist and atomic spy who in 1950 was convicted of supplying information from the American, British and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after the Second World War. While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons and later the early models of the hydrogen bomb. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Fuchs attended the University of Leipzig, where his father was a professor of theology, and became involved in student politics, joining the student branch of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, the SPD’s paramilitary organisation. He was expelled from the SPD in 1932, and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He went into hiding after the Reichstag fire, and fled to England, where he received his PhD from the University of Bristol under the supervision of Nevill Mott, and his DSc from the University of Edinburgh, where he worked as an assistant to Max Born. After the Second World War broke out in Europe, he was interned on the Isle of Man, and later in Canada. After he returned to Britain in 1941, he became an assistant to Rudolf Peierls, working on “Tube Alloys” – the British atomic bomb project. He began passing information on the project to the Soviet Union through Ruth Kuczynski, codenamed “Sonia”, a German communist and a major in Soviet Military Intelligence who had worked with Richard Sorge’s spy ring in the Far East. In 1943, Fuchs and Peierls went to Columbia University, in New York City, to work on the Manhattan Project. In August 1944 Fuchs joined the Theoretical Physics Division at the Los Alamos Laboratory, working under Hans Bethe. His chief area of expertise was the problem of implosion (mechanical process), necessary for the development of the plutonium bomb. After the war he worked at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell as the head of the Theoretical Physics Division. In January 1950, Fuchs confessed that he was a spy. He was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment and stripped of his British citizenship. He was released in 1959, after serving nine years and emigrated to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), where he was elected to the Academy of Sciences and the SED central committee. He was later appointed deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf, where he served until he retired in 1979.
1951 – U.N. forces opened a major attack on the central front west of Hoengsong.
1953 – Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke and collapses; he dies four days later.
1954 – The US performed an atmospheric nuclear test at Bikini Island. The No. 5 Fukuryu-maru was trolling for tuna off the Bikini atoll in the Pacific. 11 crew members died in the half-century since the exposure, at least six of them from liver cancer. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 66 nuclear tests at Bikini as part of “Operation Crossroads.” In 1955 the US gave Japan $2 million in compensation.
1954 – Ted Williams fractures collarbone in 1st game of spring training after flying 39 combat missions without injury in Korean War.
1954 – In the U.S. Capitol, four members of an extremist Puerto Rican nationalist group fire more than 30 shots at the floor of the House of Representatives from a visitors’ gallery, injuring five U.S. representatives. Alvin Bentley of Michigan, George Fallon of Maryland, Ben Jensen of Iowa, Clifford Davis of Tennessee, and Kenneth Roberts of Alabama all eventually recovered from their gunshot wounds and returned to their seats in Congress. Three of the Puerto Rican terrorists were detained immediately after the shooting, and the fourth was captured later. The group was protesting the new constitution of Puerto Rico, which granted the U.S. Congress ultimate authority over the commonwealth’s affairs.
1955 – The second detonation in the Operation Teapot nuclear tests is conducted. Codenamed Tesla, predicted yield was 3.5-7 kt. The explosive used was Cyclotol 75/25. The nuclear system was a small diameter system only 10 inches wide and 39.5 inches long and weighed 785 lb. Actual yield was 7kt.
1958 – Doctors declared that President Eisenhower had fully recovered from his stroke.
1960 – The Beaufort (South Carolina) Auxiliary Air Station was redesignated a Marine Corps Air Station.
1962 – A US Army memorandum was put out titled “Possible Actions to Provoke, Harass or Disrupt Cuba.”
1962 – US-British nuclear test experiment took place in Nevada.
1965 – Ambassador Maxwell Taylor informs South Vietnamese Premier Phan Huy Quat that the United States is preparing to send 3,500 U.S. Marines to Vietnam to protect the U.S. airbase at Da Nang. Three days later, a formal request was submitted by the U.S. Embassy, asking the South Vietnamese government to “invite” the United States to send the Marines. Premier Quat, a mere figurehead, had to obtain approval from the real power, Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, chief of the Armed Forces Council. Thieu approved, but asked that the Marines be “brought ashore in the most inconspicuous way feasible.” Rumors of the imminent arrival of American troops soon circulated in Saigon, but there was no official word from either government until March 6 when the Johnson administration publicly confirmed that it would be sending the Marines to South Vietnam.
1966 – The Ba’ath Party takes power in Syria.
1971 – A bomb explodes in the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., causing an estimated $300,000 in damage but hurting no one. A group calling itself the “Weather Underground” claimed credit for the bombing, which was done in protest of the ongoing U.S.-supported Laos invasion. The so-called Weathermen were a radical faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); the Weathermen advocated violent means to transform American society. The philosophical foundations of the Weathermen were Marxist in nature; they believed that militant struggle was the key to striking out against the state to build a revolutionary consciousness among the young, particularly the white working class. Their primary tools to achieving these ends were arson and bombing. Among the other targets of Weathermen bombings were the Long Island Court House, the New York Police Department headquarters, the Pentagon, and the State Department.
1973 – Black September storms the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, resulting in the assassination of three Western hostages. Carried out by the Black September Organization in 1973, the attack on the Saudi embassy in Khartoum was a terrorist attack which took ten diplomats hostage. After President Richard Nixon stated that he refused to negotiate with terrorists, and insisted that “no concessions” would be made, the three Western hostages were killed. The hostages: Cleo A. Noel, Jr., US Ambassador to Sudan; Sheikh Abdullah al Malhouk, Saudi Arabian Ambassador to Sudan Wife of Sheikh Abdullah al Malhouk; Malhouk’s four children; George Curtis Moore, US Deputy Chief of Mission to Sudan; Guy Eid, Belgian Chargé d’affaires to Sudan; Adli al Nasser, Jordanian Chargé d’affaires to Sudan. The gunmen demanded the release of numerous Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, as well as the release of members of the Baader-Meinhof Group, and the release of Sirhan Sirhan. However, they revised their demands and insisted that ninety Arab militants being held by the Jordanian government must be freed within 24 hours or the hostages would be killed. After twelve hours, the gunmen stated that they had killed Noel, Moore and Eid, the three Western diplomats in their custody. They demanded a plane to take them and their hostages to the United States, which was rejected by both the Sudanese and American governments. The Sudanese government continued to negotiate with the militants, and after three days the gunmen released the remaining hostages and surrendered to Sudanese authorities. In the aftermath it was found that the three deceased diplomats had been taken to the basement and killed.
1974 – Seven people, including former Nixon White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, former Attorney General John Mitchell and former assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, were indicted on charges of conspiring to obstruct justice in connection with the Watergate break-in. They were convicted the following January, although Mardian’s conviction was later reversed.
1977 – US extended territorial waters to 200 miles.
1984 – NASA launched Landsat-D Prime (Landsat 5) to map the Earth.
1985 – The Pentagon accepted the theory that an atomic war would block the sun, causing a “nuclear winter”.
1988 – President Reagan arrived in Brussels, Belgium, for the first NATO summit in six years.
1990 – The controversial Seabrook, N.H. nuclear power plant won federal permission to go on line after two decades of protests and legal struggles.
1991 – President Bush said “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all” following the allied victory in the Gulf War.
1991 – The US Embassy in Kuwait officially reopened.
1991 – US military specialists surveyed and then detonated a bunker at Kamisiyah, Iraq. The site had been declared a chemical weapons storage area by Iraq after the Gulf War. No trace of chemical agents were found before or after but US & UN inspections teams had earlier found nerve agent rockets and mustard gas shells in open pits at the site. It was later acknowledged by the Pentagon that more than 15,000 US troops may have been exposed to nerve gas due to the detonations. Defense Department logs of this period were later reported lost. In April 1997 the CIA acknowledged errors that led to the demolition.
1995 – Somalia militiamen loyal to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid seized control of the Mogadishu airport after peacekeepers withdrew.
1996 – President Clinton slapped economic sanctions on Colombia, concluding that Colombian authorities had not fully cooperated with the US war on drugs.
1998 – Iraqi officials and independent experts report that Iraq’s oil production system has fallen into such disrepair that Iraq cannot take full advantage of a recent United Nations Security Council resolution that more than doubled U.N.-authorized Iraqi oil sales to $5.26 billion every six months. Iraq says that, under current conditions, it can sell only $4 billion worth of oil over the next six months, unless it is allowed to purchase more equipment. Experts say that Iraq’s production system needs$800 million of repairs, and that these repairs could take a year or more to complete.
1999 – The 1997 Ottawa Treaty, banning the use, production, transfer and storage of land mines, went into effect. 133 countries honored the treaty but the US and China had not signed it. Participating nations agreed to destroy anti-personnel land mines within 4 years and to get them out of fields within 10.
1999 – US warplanes dropped over 30 laser-guided bombs on military targets in northern Iraq.
2000 – Hans Blix assumes the post of UNMOVIC Executive Chairman.
2001 – In Ecuador 7 foreign oil workers (a Chilean, an Argentine, a New Zealander and four Americans), kidnapped last October, were released following a $13 million ransom.
2002 – Operation Anaconda begins in which the United States military and CIA Paramilitary Officers, working with allied Afghan military forces, and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and non-NATO forces attempted to destroy al-Qaeda and Taliban forces. The operation took place in the Shahi-Kot Valley and Arma Mountains southeast of Zormat. This operation was the first large-scale battle in the United States War in Afghanistan since the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001. This was the first operation in the Afghanistan theater to involve a large number of U.S. conventional (i.e. non-Special Operations Forces) forces participating in direct combat activities. From this date to March 16, 2002 1,700 airlifted U.S. troops and 1,000 pro-government Afghan militia battled between 300 to 1,000 al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters to obtain control of the valley. The Taliban and al-Qaida forces fired mortars and heavy machine guns from entrenched positions in the caves and ridges of the mountainous terrain at U.S. forces attempting to secure the area. Afghan Taliban commander Maulavi Saifur Rehman Mansoor later led Taliban reinforcements to join the battle. U.S. forces had estimated the strength of the rebels in the Shahi-Kot Valley at 150 to 200, but later information suggested the actual strength was of 500 to 1,000 fighters.
2002 – Pres. Bush approved plans to send some 100 US troops to Yemen to help train the nation’s military to fight terrorists.
2002 – The space shuttle Columbia with 7 astronauts blasted into orbit on an 11-day mission that included work on the Hubble Space Telescope.
2002 – NASA scientists said that vast ice fields had been detected under the surface of Mars with a gamma ray spectrometer on the Odyssey orbiter.
2003 – The US designated 3 rebel groups in Chechnya as terrorist organizations linked to al-Qaeda and imposed a freeze on their US assets.
2003 – Arab leaders held a summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. The UAE became the 1st Arab country to call for Saddam Hussein to step down.
2003 – Iraq destroyed 4 of over 100 Al Samoud 2 missiles and agreed with the UN on a timetable to dismantle the rest of the missile program.
2003 – In Pakistan a joint raid outside Islamabad by CIA and Pakistani agents led to the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, along with 2 others. Documents and computer files later revealed that the al Qaeda biochemical weapons program was well advanced.
2003 – The Turkish parliament votes narrowly against allowing 62,000 US forces to use Turkey as a platform for a possible invasion of Iraq from the north.
2003 – Administrative control of the Coast Guard, Customs Service, and the United States Secret Service transferred to the newly created Department of Homeland Security.
2004 – US officials said the United States has turned over seven Russian citizens who were being held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
2004 – In Haiti rebels rolled into the capital and were met by hundreds of residents dancing in the streets and cheering the ouster of Pres. Jean-Bertrand Aristide. U.S. Marines and French troops moved to take control of the impoverished country as Aristide arrived in South Africa. There were reports of reprisal killings.
2004 – Jean-Bertrand Aristide from the Central African Republic said in a telephone interview that he was “forced to leave” Haiti by U.S. military forces.
2004 – Iraqi politicians agreed on an interim constitution with 2 official languages, a wide ranging bill of rights and a single chief executive, bridging a gulf between members over the role of Islam in the future government.
2007 – The United States formally charges David Hicks with aiding the Taliban. David Matthew Hicks (born 7 August 1975) is an Australian who was convicted by the United States Guantanamo military commission under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, on charges of providing material support for terrorism. Hicks was detained by the United States in Guantanamo Bay detention camp from 2001 until 2007 following earlier para-military training at Al Farouq training camp in Afghanistan during 2001. He was the first person tried under the new law for military commissions.
2013 – Budget sequestration comes into effect today in the United States Government. The budget sequestration in 2013 refers to the automatic spending cuts to United States federal government spending in particular categories of outlays that were initially set to begin on January 1, 2013, as an austerity fiscal policy as a result of Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), and were postponed by two months by the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 until March 1 when this law went into effect. The reductions in spending authority are approximately $85.4 billion (versus $42 billion in actual cash outlays) during fiscal year 2013, with similar cuts for years 2014 through 2021. However, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the total federal outlays will continue to increase even with the sequester by an average of $238.6 billion per year during the next decade, although at a somewhat lesser rate. The cuts are split evenly (by dollar amounts, not by percentages) between the defense and non-defense categories. Some major programs like Social Security, Medicaid, federal pensions and veteran’s benefits are exempt. By a special provision in the BCA, Medicare spending will be reduced by a fixed 2% per year versus the other, domestic percents planned for the sequester. Federal pay rates (including military) are unaffected but the sequestration did result in involuntary unpaid time off, also known as furloughs. The sequester lowers spending by a total of approximately $1.1 trillion versus pre-sequester levels over the approximately 8 year period from 2013 to 2021. It lowers non-defense discretionary spending (i.e., certain domestic programs) by a range of 7.8% (in 2013) to 5.5% (in 2021) versus pre-sequester amounts, a total of $294 billion. Defense spending would likewise be lowered by 10% (in 2013) to 8.5% (in 2021), a total of $454 billion. Savings in non-defense mandatory spending would total $170 billion, while interest would be lowered by $169 billion.
2013 – The SpaceX Falcon 9 supply rocket launches from Cape Canaveral SLC-40 as scheduled, but encounters problems once in orbit.
2013 – Boston Dynamics upgrades the prototype United States Army robot BigDog with an arm strong enough to hurl cinderblocks.
Congressional Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day
*BRUCE, DANIEL D.
Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Marine Corps, Headquarters and Service Company, 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division. Place and date: Fire Support Base Tomahawk, Quang Nam Province, Republic of Vietnam, 1 March 1969. Entered service at: Chicago, 111. Born: 18 May 1950, Michigan City, Ind. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving as a mortar man with Headquarters and Service Company 3d Battalion, against the enemy. Early in the morning Pfc. Bruce was on watch in his night defensive position at fire support base tomahawk when he heard movements ahead of him. An enemy explosive charge was thrown toward his position and he reacted instantly, catching the device and shouting to alert his companions. Realizing the danger to the adjacent position with its 2 occupants, Pfc. Bruce held the device to his body and attempted to carry it from the vicinity of the entrenched marines. As he moved away, the charge detonated and he absorbed the full force of the explosion. Pfc. Bruce’s indomitable courage, inspiring valor and selfless devotion to duty saved the lives of 3 of his fellow marines and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the U.S. Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country.
