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March 17: This Day in U.S. Military History in the 1900s

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rangerrebew:
1910 - The Camp Fire Girls organization was formed in Lake Sebago, Maine. It was formally presented to the public exactly two years later.

1918 – The 5th Marine Regiment was the first Marine unit to move into WW I front-line trenches.

1924 – Four Douglas army aircraft leave Los Angeles for an around the world flight.

1927 – The Teapot Dome and Elk hills naval oil reserve, which had featured in the scandals of the Harding Administration, are returned to the jurisdiction of the Navy Department. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Mammoth Company has received them under fraudulent contracts which renders ownership invalid.

1930 – James Benson Irwin, Col. USAF, astronaut (Apollo 15), was born in Pittsburgh, Penn.

1930 – John North Willys of the Willys-Overland Corporation became the first U. S. ambassador to Poland. Willys had rescued the ailing Overland firm from its woeful production of 465 cars in 1908. By 1916, Willys-Overland produced over 140,000 cars per year. Willys subsequently left the day-to-day operations of the company, moving his personal offices to New York in order to pursue work related to World War I. During his absence, mismanagement nearly buried the company he had worked so hard to build up. Massive strikes, bloated inventories, and other troubles had cost Willys-Overland dearly. By 1920, the company was $46 million in debt. The briefly retired Walter Chrysler was called on to rework the company’s daily operations, and in no time at all, he had cut the debt by nearly two-thirds to $18 million. Chrysler claimed, however, that without the release of a new model of automobile, the debt would decrease no further. Willys, who remained president of Willys-Overland, disagreed. He maintained that through the improvement of the existing models, the company could regain its original profit margins. Chrysler left. Continuing to pursue his political interests, Willys became the U.S. ambassador to Poland on this day in 1930. Eight years later Poland would be absorbed into the Third Reich. Three years after that, in 1941, Willys-Overland began mass production of the Willys Jeep, the “General Purpose” vehicle of the U.S. Army. In 1944, Willys’ political and manufacturing legacies merged symbolically as Willys Jeeps carried U.S. troops across liberated Poland.

1941 – CGC Cayuga left Boston with the South Greenland Survey Expedition on board to locate airfields, seaplane bases, radio and meteorological stations, and aids to navigation in Greenland. This was the beginning of the Coast Guard’s predominate role in Greenland during World War II.

1942 – Gen. Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia to become supreme commander of Allied forces in the southwest Pacific theater during World War II.

1942 – United States Naval Forces Europe established to plan joint operations with British.

1944 – The US Eighth Air Force bombed Vienna.

1944 – The battle for Cassino continues. Indian and New Zealander troops of US 5th Army mount attacks on the southwest of the town and along Snake’s Head Ridge to Point 593. German forces mount attacks against Castle Hill and Hangman’s Hill.

1944 – On Manus Island, US forces reach their primary objective and take Lorengau airfield.

1945 – The Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine River, at Remagen, collapses under the combined strain of bomb damage and heavy use but US Army engineers have built several other bridges nearby and the advance over the Rhine continues. To the south, the US 3rd Army offensive over the Moselle River takes Koblenz and Boppard on the left flank of the drive while farther forward, the Nahe River has been crossed.

1947 – First flight of the B-45 Tornado strategic bomber. The North American B-45 Tornado was the United States Air Force’s first operational jet bomber, and the first multi-jet engined bomber in the world to be refuelled in midair. The B-45 was an important part of the United States’s nuclear deterrent for several years in the early 1950s, but was rapidly succeeded by the Boeing B-47 Stratojet. B-45s and RB-45s served in the United States Air Force’s Strategic Air Command from 1950 until 1959. It was also the first jet bomber of the NATO Alliance, which was formed in 1949.

1951 – The Chinese threw two fresh armies against the U.N. forces in an attempt to delay their advance.

1951 – The newly trained ROK 8th Division replaced the U.S. 1st Marine Division in the Punchbowl area. The 1st Marine Division was moved to the western corridor where it relieved the ROK 1st Division on March 25.

1958 – Navy Vanguard rocket launches 3.25 pound sphere from Cape Canaveral. This first US artificial satellite was designed to measure the Earth’s shape.

1959 – The USS Skate became the 1st submarine to surface at the North Pole. The ships crew held a funeral service and scattered the ashes of explorer Hubert Wilkins (d.1958), who had attempted the feat in 1931.

1960 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the National Security Council directive on the anti-Cuban covert action program that will ultimately lead to the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

1961 – The U.S. increased military aid and technicians to Laos.

1962 – The Soviet Union asked the U.S. to pull out of South Vietnam.

1962 – After requesting the evacuation of a seriously injured crewman, the Russian merchant vessel Dbitelny transferred the patient to the Coast Guard LORAN station on St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea. Meanwhile, a Coast Guard aircraft flew a US Navy doctor and a hospital corpsman there to perform an emergency operation. Afterwards, the injured man was flown to Elmendorf Air Force Base, where he was admitted to the US Air Force hospital.

1964 – President Lyndon B. Johnson presides over a session of the National Security Council during which Secretary of Defense McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor present a full review of the situation in Vietnam. During the meeting, various secret decisions were made, including the approval of covert intelligence-gathering operations in North Vietnam; contingency plans to launch retaliatory U.S. Air Force strikes against North Vietnamese military installations and against guerrilla sanctuaries inside the Laotian and Cambodian borders; and a long-range “program of graduated overt military pressure” against North Vietnam. President Johnson directed that planning for the bombing raids “proceed energetically.” A statement issued to the public afterwards stated that the United States would increase military and economic aid to support South Vietnamese President Nguyen Khanh’s new plan for fighting the Viet Cong. Khanh’s intention was to mobilize all able-bodied South Vietnamese males, raise the pay and status of paramilitary forces, and provide more equipment for the South Vietnamese armed forces.

1966 – A U.S. midget submarine located a missing hydrogen bomb which had fallen from an American bomber into the Mediterranean off Spain.

1967 – The first woman Marine to report to Vietnam for duty, Master Sergeant Barbara J. Dulinsky, began her 18-hour flight to Bien Hoa, 30 miles north of Saigon. MSgt Dulinsky and the other officer and enlisted Women Marines that followed were assigned to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) based in Saigon. Most worked with the Marine Corps Personnel Section providing administrative support to Marines assigned as far north as the DMZ, but two Lieutenant Colonels, Ruth Reinholz and Ruth O’Holleran, served as historians with the Military History Branch, Secretary Joint Staff, MACV.

1970 – After an investigation, the U.S. Army accuses 14 officers of suppressing information related to an incident at My Lai in March 1968. Soldiers from a company had massacred Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, at My Lai 4, a cluster of hamlets in Quang Ngai Province, on March 16, 1968. The company had been conducting a search-and-destroy mission looking for the 48th Viet Cong (VC) Local Force Battalion. The unit entered My Lai, but found only women, children, and old men. Frustrated by unanswered losses due to snipers and mines, the soldiers took out their anger on the villagers, indiscriminately shooting people as they ran from their huts, and systematically rounding up and executing the survivors. Reportedly, the killing was only stopped when Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between the Americans and the fleeing South Vietnamese, confronting the soldiers and blocking them from further action against the villagers. The incident was subsequently covered up, but eventually came to light a year later. The Army commissioned a board of inquiry, headed by Lieutenant General Peers. After investigating, Peers reported that U.S. soldiers committed individual and group acts of murder, rape, sodomy, maiming and assault that took the lives of a large number of civilians–he concluded that a “tragedy of major proportions” occurred at My Lai. The Peers report said that each successive level of command received a more watered-down account of what had actually occurred; the higher the report went, the lower the estimate of civilians allegedly killed by Americans. Peers found that at least 30 persons knew of the atrocity, but only 14 were charged with crimes. All eventually had their charges dismissed or were acquitted by courts-martial except Lt. William Calley, the platoon leader of the unit involved. He was found guilty of personally murdering 22 civilians and sentenced to life imprisonment, but his sentence was reduced to 20 years by the Court of Military Appeals and further reduced later to 10 years by the Secretary of the Army. Proclaimed by much of the public as a “scapegoat,” Calley was paroled in 1974 after having served about a third of his 10-year sentence.

1970 – The United States cast its first veto in the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. killed a resolution that would have condemned Britain for failure to use force to overthrow the white-ruled government of Rhodesia.

1973 – First POWs were released from the “Hanoi Hilton” in Hanoi, North Vietnam.

1980 – In Iran, militants refuse to turn hostages over to government until parliament convenes in May.

1982 – Navy Secretary John Lehman testified before Congress on behalf of the Coast Guard. He characterized the relationship between the Navy and the Coast Guard as being “close and warm.” He also praised the new NAVGARD Board, created in November 1980, to formalize the relationship between the two services.

1988 – Planeloads of U.S. soldiers arrived at Palmerola Air Base in Honduras in a show of strength ordered by President Reagan.

1991 – Allied commanders from the Gulf War held a second round of cease-fire talks with Iraqi officers; the Iraqis were told they could not move their warplanes inside Iraq for any reason.

1993 – A Marine is WIA during a shoot-out with gunmen in the Bakara Market. 1 Somali killed.

https://thisdayinusmilhist.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/march-17/

PzLdr:
Jeeps may have carried Red Army soldiers over Poland, but not U.S. troops. They never got further east than the Elbe, and per treaty, Berlin.

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