1904 – President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed strict neutrality for the U.S. in the Russo-Japanese War.
1904 – Marines landed at Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
1922 – US “intervention army” left Honduras.
1922 – BGen John H. Russell was appointed U.S. High Commissioner and personal representative of the President to the government of Haiti. This nine-year assignment placed this future Commandant in supreme command of both the occupying American force and the Haitian Gendarmerie.
1939 – A Lockheed P-38 Lightning flies from California to New York in 7 hours 2 minutes.
1942 – German battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, as well as the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, escape from the French port of Brest and make a mad dash up the English Channel to safety in German waters. The Gneisenau and Scharnhorst had been anchored at Brest since March 1941. The Prinz Eugen had been tied to the French port since the Bismarck sortie in May 1941, when it and the battleship Bismarck made their own mad dash through the Atlantic and the Denmark Strait to elude Royal Navy gunfire. All three were subject to periodic bombing raids–and damage–by the British, as the Brits attempted to ensure that the German warships never left the French coast. But despite the careful watch of British subs and aircraft, German Vice Admiral Otto Ciliax launched Operation Cerberus to lead the ships out of the French port. The Germans, who had controlled and occupied France since June 1940, drew British fire deliberately, and the Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, and Prinz Eugen used the resulting skirmish as a defensive smoke screen. Six German destroyers and 21 torpedo boats accompanied the ships for protection as they moved north late on the night of February 11. In the morning, German planes provided air cover as well; ace pilot Adolf Galland led 250 other fighters in an unusually well coordinated joint effort of the German navy and Luftwaffe. The British Royal Air Force also coordinated its attack with the Royal Navy Swordfish squadron, but a late start–the RAF did not realize until the afternoon of February 12 that the German squadron had pushed out to sea–and bad weather hindered their effort. All three German warships made it to a German port on February 13, although the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst had been damaged by British mines along the way. The British lost 40 aircraft and six Navy Swordfish in the confrontation, while the Germans lost a torpedo boat and 17 aircraft. The “Channel Dash,” as it came to be called, was extremely embarrassing to the British, as it happened right under their noses. They would get revenge of a sort, though: British warships sunk the Scharnhorst in December 1944 as the German ship attempted to attack a Russian convoy. The Gneisenau was destroyed in a bombing raid while still in port undergoing repairs, and the Prinz Eugen survived the war, but was taken over by the U.S. Navy at war’s end.
1943 – General Eisenhower was selected to command the allied armies in Europe.
1944 – At the Anzio beachhead, German forces capture “The Factory” from the British 1st Division. Meanwhile forces of the US 5th Army continue to engage German defenders around Cassino. The US 34th Division makes an unsuccessful attempt to approach the Cassino monastery from the north.
1945 – A week of intensive bargaining by the leaders of the three major Allied powers ends in Yalta, a Soviet resort town on the Black Sea. It was the second conference of the “Big Three” Allied leaders–U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin–and the war had progressed mightily since their last meeting, which had taken place in Tehran in late 1943. What was then called the Crimea conference was held at the old summer palace of Czar Nicholas II on the outskirts of Yalta, now a city in the independent Ukraine. With victory over Germany three months away, Churchill and Stalin were more intent on dividing Europe into zones of political influence than in addressing military considerations. Germany would be divided into four zones of occupation administered by the three major powers and France and was to be thoroughly demilitarized and its war criminals brought to trial. The Soviets were to administer those European countries they liberated but promised to hold free elections. The British and Americans would oversee the transition to democracy in countries such as Italy, Austria, and Greece. Final plans were made for the establishment of the United Nations, and a charter conference was scheduled to begin in San Francisco in April. A frail President Roosevelt, two months from his death, concentrated his efforts on gaining Soviet support for the U.S. war effort against Japan. The secret U.S. atomic bomb project had not yet tested a weapon, and it was estimated that an amphibious attack against Japan could cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. After being assured of an occupation zone in Korea, and possession of Sakhalin Island and other territories historically disputed between Russia and Japan, Stalin agreed to enter the Pacific War within two to three months of Germany’s surrender. Most of the Yalta accords remained secret until after World War II, and the items that were revealed, such as Allied plans for Germany and the United Nations, were generally applauded. Roosevelt returned to the United States exhausted, and when he went to address the U.S. Congress on Yalta he was no longer strong enough to stand with the support of braces. In that speech, he called the conference “a turning point, I hope, in our history, and therefore in the history of the world.” He would not live long enough, however, to see the iron curtain drop along the lines of division laid out at Yalta. In April, he traveled to his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, to rest and on April 12 died of a cerebral hemorrhage. On July 16, the United States successfully tested an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. On August 6, it dropped one of these deadly weapons on Hiroshima, Japan. Two days later, true to its pledge at Yalta, the Soviet Union declared war against Japan. The next day, the United States dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and the Soviets launched a massive offensive against the Japanese in Manchuria. On August 15, the combination of the U.S. atomic attacks and the Soviet offensive forced a Japanese surrender. At the end of the month, U.S. troops landed in Japan unopposed. When the full text of the Yalta agreements were released in the years following World War II, many criticized Roosevelt and Churchill for delivering Eastern Europe and North Korea into communist domination by conceding too much to Stalin at Yalta. The Soviets never allowed free elections in postwar Eastern Europe, and communist North Korea was sharply divided from its southern neighbor. Eastern Europe, liberated and occupied by the Red Army, would have become Soviet satellites regardless of what had happened at Yalta. Because of the atomic bomb, however, Soviet assistance was not needed to defeat the Japanese. Without the Soviet invasion of the Japanese Empire in the last days of World War II, North Korea and various other Japanese-held territories that fell under Soviet control undoubtedly would have come under the sway of the United States. At Yalta, however, Roosevelt had no guarantee that the atomic bomb would work, and so he sought Soviet assistance in what was predicted to be the costly task of subduing Japan. Stalin, more willing than Roosevelt to sacrifice troops in the hope of territorial gains, happily accommodated his American ally, and by the end of the war had considerably increased Soviet influence in East Asia.
1945 – Elements of the US 8th Corps (part of US 3rd Army) capture the important road junction at Prum.
1945 – American USAAF B-24 and B-29 bombers raid Iwo Jima in preparation for the landings later in the month. They drop a daily average of 450 tons of bombs over the course of 15 days (6800 tons).
1951 – U.N. forces pushed north across the 38th parallel once again. Forty-five years after shipping out to fight in Korea, Col. Harry Summers, Jr., got new insight into what the war had been all about.
1951 – General MacArthur informed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “It is evident that the enemy has lost his chance for achieving a decisive military decision in Korea.” This statement came on the eve of the Chinese fourth phase offensive.
1951 – The Chinese fourth-phase offensive was launched against X Corps in central Korea along the Hoengsong-Wonju axis. The U.S. 2nd and 7th Infantry Divisions and the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team suffered 2,018 casualties during the Battle of Hoengsong. The largest single loss of U.S. soldiers happened when 530 men of the 15th and 503rd Field Artillery Battalions were completely overrun.
1952 – Captain Margaret G. Blake, the first Army nurse in Korea to earn the Bronze Star Medal, and one of the very few in any service to return voluntarily to Korea, finished her second tour of duty.
1953 – President Eisenhower refused a clemency appeal for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
1962 – Nine U.S. and South Vietnamese crewmen are killed in a SC-47 crash about 70 miles north of Saigon. The aircraft was part of Operation Farm Gate, a mission that had initially been designed to provide advisory support in assisting the South Vietnamese Air Force to increase its capability. In December, President John F. Kennedy expanded the Farm Gate mission to include limited combat missions by the U.S. Air Force pilots in support of South Vietnamese ground forces–the downed aircraft was part of this expanded effort. By late 1962, communist activity and combat intensity had increased so much that President Kennedy ordered a further expansion of Farm Gate. In early 1963, additional aircraft arrived and new detachments were established at Pleiku and Soc Trang. Farm Gate was upgraded in early 1964 and then again in October 1965 when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara approved the replacement of South Vietnamese markings on Farm Gate aircraft with regular U.S. Air Force markings. By this point in the war, the Farm Gate squadrons were flying 80 percent of all missions in support of the South Vietnamese army. With the build up of U.S. combat forces in South Vietnam and the increase in an U.S. Air Force presence there, the role of the Farm Gate program gradually decreased in significance. The Farm Gate squadrons were moved to Thailand in 1967, and from there they launched missions against the North Vietnamese in Laos.
1964 – Cambodian Prince Sihanouk blamed the U.S. for a South Vietnamese air raid on a village in his country.
1965 – Pres. Lyndon Johnson ordered air strikes against targets in North Vietnam, in retaliation for guerrilla attacks on the American military in South Vietnam. The American “Rolling Thunder” bombing campaign intensified.
1971 – Eighty-seven countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union, sign the Seabed Arms Control Treaty outlawing nuclear weapons on the ocean floor in international waters.
1973 – Due to “Vietnamization” the post of Senior Coast Guard Officer, Vietnam was discontinued.
1973 – First release of American prisoners of war from Vietnam takes place.
1974 – Communist-led rebels showered artillery fire into a crowded area of Phnom Penh, killing 139 and injuring 46 others. As the war in Vietnam wound down with the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the war in neighboring Cambodia was going from bad to worse.
1979 – Followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power in Iran, nine days after the religious leader returned to his home country following 15 years of exile. Premier Bakhtiar resigned.
1991 – President Bush met with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin L. Powell, who had just returned from the Gulf region. Afterward, Bush said he would hold off on a ground war against Iraq for the time being, saying allied air strikes had been “very, very effective.”
1994 – The space shuttle “Discovery” returned from an eight-day mission.
1995 – The space shuttle Discovery landed at Cape Canaveral, Fla., ending a historic rendezvous mission with Russia’s Mir space station.
1997 – Space shuttle Discovery was launched on a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope.
1999 – US jets struck 7 Iraqi air defense sites.
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