1904 – Marines from USS Dixie arrive in Panama.
1916 – Three armored Japanese cruisers are ordered to guard the Suez Canal.1920 – The last of the U.S. troops depart France.
1925 – In Italy, Mussolini announced that he would take dictatorial powers.
1933 – The Japanese take Shuangyashan, China, killing 500 Chinese.
1940 – British warships detain the American SS Mormacsun.
1940 – President Roosevelt requests $1.8 billion for national defense in his annual budget request to Congress.
1942 – Chiang Kai-shek is named Commander in Chief of all Allied forces in China.
1943 – A US B-17 bomber was downed over France following a bombing run over a German submarine base in southern France. John Roten, navigator, was the only survivor. Roten spent 28 months as a POW.
1944 – CDR Frank Erickson flies plasma in a Coast Guard HNS-1 helicopter from Brooklyn to a hospital in Sandy Hook, NJ in the first recorded mission of mercy conducted by a rotary wing aircraft.
1944 – Top Marine ace MAJ Boyington captured after shooting down 28 aircraft.
1944 – Fighting in the Borgen Bay area of New Britain continues but US forces are still unable to bring up armor.
1945 – In preparation for planned assaults against Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and mainland Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur is placed in command of all U.S. ground forces and Adm. Chester Nimitz is placed in command of all U.S. naval forces. This effectively ended the concept of unified commands, in which one man oversaw more than one service from more than one country in a distinct region. Douglas MacArthur’s career was one of striking achievement. His performance during World War I combat in France won him decorations for valor and earned him the distinction of becoming the youngest general in the Army at the time. He retired from the Army in 1934, but was then appointed head of the Philippine Army by its president (the Philippines had U.S. Commonwealth status at the time). When World War II erupted, MacArthur was called back to active service as commanding general of the U.S. Army in the Far East. He was convinced he could defeat Japan if Japan invaded the Philippines. In the long term he was correct, but in the short term the United States suffered disastrous defeats at Bataan and Corregidor. By the time U.S. forces were compelled to surrender, he had already shipped out on orders from President Roosevelt. As he left, he uttered his immortal line: “I shall return.” Refusing to admit defeat, MacArthur took supreme command of a unified force in the Southwest Pacific, capturing New Guinea from the Japanese with an innovative “leap frog” strategy. True to his word, MacArthur returned to the Philippines in October 1944. With the help of the U.S. Navy, which destroyed the Japanese fleet and left the Japanese garrisons on the islands without reinforcements, the Army defeated the Japanese resistance. In January 1945, he was given control of all American land forces in the Pacific; by March, MacArthur was able to hand control of the Philippine capital back to its president. Admiral Nimitz, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, fought in World War I as chief of staff to the commander of the Atlantic submarine force, an experience that forever convinced him of the efficacy of submarine warfare. Upon America’s entry into World War II, Nimitz was made commander in chief of the unified Pacific Fleet (Ocean Area), putting him in control of both air and sea forces. He oversaw American victories at Midway and the Battle of the Coral Sea, and directed further victories at the Solomon Islands, the Gilbert Islands, the Philippines, and finally, as commander of all naval forces in the Pacific, in Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Both MacArthur and Nimitz had the honor of accepting the formal Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri.
1945 – Third Fleet carriers begin a 2 day attack against Formosa destroying 100 aircraft with loss of only 22 aircraft. VMF-124 and VMF-213 from the USS Essex struck Formosa and the Ryukyu Islands in the first Marine land strike off a carrier.
1945 – In the Ardennes the fighting continues. There are desperate German attacks on the narrow corridor leading to Bastogne which manage to upset the timetable of the US attacks a little but achieve nothing else. Forces from the US Third and now also the First Armies are attacking toward Houffaliza from the south and north. In Alsace the German attacks and the American retreat continue. The US VI Corps is being pressed particularly hard around Bitche. Farther south there is also fighting near Strasbourg.
1947 – Proceedings of the U.S. Congress are televised for the first time.
1951 – As massive numbers of Chinese troops crossed the frozen Han River east and west of Seoul, Eighth Army began evacuating the South Korean capital. The ROK government began moving to Pusan. In one of the largest FEAF Bomber Command air raids, more than sixty B-29s dropped 650 tons of incendiary bombs on Pyongyang. UN forces burned nearly 500,000 gallons of fuel and 23,000 gallons of napalm at Kimpo in preparation for abandoning the base to the advancing enemy. Far East Air Forces flew 958 combat sorties, a one-day record.1958 – The Air Force forms two squadrons of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) armed with medium-range ballistic missiles.
1957 – The International Control Commission reports that neither North Vietnam nor South Vietnam have been fulfilling their obligations under the 1954 Geneva Agreements.
1959 – Fidel Castro takes command of the Cuban army.
1959 – President Eisenhower signs a special proclamation admitting the territory of Alaska into the Union as the 49th and largest state. The European discovery of Alaska came in 1741, when a Russian expedition led by Danish navigator Vitus Bering sighted the Alaskan mainland. Russian hunters were soon making incursions into Alaska, and the native Aleut population suffered greatly after being exposed to foreign diseases. In 1784, Grigory Shelikhov established the first permanent Russian colony in Alaska on Kodiak Island. In the early 19th century, Russian settlements spread down the west coast of North America, with the southernmost fort located near Bodega Bay in California. Russian activity in the New World declined in the 1820s, and the British and Americans were granted trading rights in Alaska after a few minor diplomatic conflicts. In the 1860s, a nearly bankrupt Russia decided to offer Alaska for sale to the United States, which earlier had expressed interest in such a purchase. On March 30, 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward signed a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska for $7.2 million. Despite the bargain price of roughly two cents an acre, the Alaskan purchase was ridiculed in Congress and in the press as “Seward’s folly,” “Seward’s icebox,” and President Andrew Johnson’s “polar bear garden.” Nevertheless, the Senate ratified purchase of the tremendous landmass, one-fifth the size of the rest of the United States. Despite a slow start in settlement by Americans from the continental United States, the discovery of gold in 1898 brought a rapid influx of people to the territory. Alaska, rich in natural resources, has been contributing to American prosperity ever since.
1961 – The United States severs diplomatic relations with Cuba over the latter’s nationalization of American assets.
1961 – A core explosion and meltdown at the SL-1, a government-run reactor near Idaho Falls, Idaho, kills three workers.
1966 – Cambodia warns the United Nations of retaliation unless the United States and South Vietnam end intrusions.
1967 – Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, dies of cancer in a Dallas hospital. The Texas Court of Appeals had recently overturned his death sentence for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald and was scheduled to grant him a new trial. On November 24, 1963, two days after Kennedy’s assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was brought to the basement of the Dallas police headquarters on his way to a more secure county jail. A crowd of police and press with live television cameras rolling gathered to witness his departure. As Oswald came into the room, Jack Ruby emerged from the crowd and fatally wounded him with a single shot from a concealed .38 revolver. Ruby, who was immediately detained, claimed he was distraught over the president’s assassination. Some called him a hero, but he was nonetheless charged with first-degree murder. Jack Ruby, originally known as Jacob Rubenstein, operated strip joints and dance halls in Dallas and had minor connections to organized crime. He also had a relationship with a number of Dallas policemen, which amounted to various favors in exchange for leniency in their monitoring of his establishments. He features prominently in Kennedy assassination theories, and many believe he killed Oswald to keep him from revealing a larger conspiracy. In his trial, Ruby denied the charge, maintaining that he was acting out of patriotism. In March 1964, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. The official Warren Commission report of 1964 concluded that neither Oswald nor Ruby were part of a larger conspiracy, either domestic or international, to assassinate President Kennedy. Despite its seemingly firm conclusions, the report failed to silence conspiracy theories surrounding the event, and in 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in a preliminary report that Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy” that may have involved multiple shooters and organized crime. The committee’s findings, as with the findings of the Warren Commission, continue to be widely disputed.
1978 – North Vietnamese troops reportedly occupy 400 square miles in Cambodia. North Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops were using Laos and Cambodia as staging areas for attacks against allied forces.
1986 – President Ronald Reagan orders economic sanctions against Libya in retaliation for its involvement in terrorist attacks in Rome and Vienna.
1990 – Ousted Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces, 10 days after taking refuge in the Vatican’s diplomatic mission. He is flown to Florida and arraigned on drug-trafficking charges.
1991 – The 102nd Congress convened, plunging immediately into acrimonious debate over the Persian Gulf crisis. President Bush proposed direct talks between Secretary of State James A. Baker the Third and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz.
1993 – In Moscow, Russia, George Bush and Boris Yeltsin sign the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).
1999 – The Mars Polar Lander is launched. Also known as the Mars Surveyor ’98 Lander, was a 290-kilogram robotic spacecraft lander to study the soil and climate of Planum Australe, a region near the south pole on Mars. It formed part of the Mars Surveyor ’98 mission. On December 3, 1999, however, after the descent phase was expected to be complete, the lander failed to reestablish communication with Earth. It was determined that the most likely cause of the mishap was premature termination of the engine firing prior to the lander touching the surface, causing it to strike the planet at a high velocity.
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