1918 – Marines were placed under the command of French Marshall Foch in WW I.
1933 – German Reichstag conferred dictatorial powers on Hitler.
1935 – Goddard used gyroscopes to control a rocket.
1940 – Sumner Welles, Under-Secretary of State, reports to Roosevelt about his mission to the belligerent countries in Europe.
1942 – A British ship, the HMS Capbeltown, a Lend-Lease American destroyer, which was specifically rammed into a German occupied dry-dock in France, exploded, knocking the area out of action for the German battleship Tirpitz.
1945 – Stalin receives a personal telegram from General Eisenhower (Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force) giving details of his order of battle and saying that he intends to send the main weight of his advance across southern Germany and Austria. The main thrust is to be toward Erfurt and Leipzig and a secondary effort is to go for Nuremberg, Regensburg and Linz. The British protest the signal sent to Stalin, suggesting that decisions of such importance should not be taken by Eisenhower alone and that he also overstepping the authority in communicating directly with the Soviets. Both Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff would prefer the advance to be directed on Berlin as had been the plan up to now for the political value of this move. However, President Roosevelt, weakened by his illness, leaves most military decisions to General Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Marshall confirms his support for Eisenhower in response to the British protest.
1945 – Marburg is taken by US 3rd Corps (part of US 1st Army) which has made a rapid advance from the Remagen bridgehead.
1945 – US naval forces, including TF58 and TF52, continue air strikes on Okinawa while TF54 continues bombarding the island. Japanese Kamikaze and submarine attacks continue.
1946 – The State Department releases the so-called Acheson-Lilienthal Report, which outlines a plan for international control of atomic energy. The report represented an attempt by the United States to maintain its superiority in the field of atomic weapons while also trying to avoid a costly and dangerous arms race with the Soviet Union. The March 1946 report had been instigated by a rather hastily assembled proposal put forward by Secretary of State James Byrnes at the Moscow Conference in December 1945. Byrnes presented a hazy plan for some sort of United Nations control of atomic energy; Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed to the idea. President Harry S. Truman was livid when he learned of Byrnes’s proposal. By the time of the meeting in Moscow, Truman had come to the conclusion that the Soviets were dangerous adversaries who must be met with force. Giving up America’s nuclear monopoly was not appealing. Nevertheless, he ordered the Department of State to put together a preliminary plan, assuming that America had such a huge head start in atomic power that the Soviets could never really catch up. In addition, perhaps an international body could help avert a potentially dangerous arms race with the Soviets. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, administrator of the Tennessee Valley Authority David Lilienthal, and others hammered out a proposal by March 1946. The Acheson-Lilienthal Report suggested that an international body-such as the United Nations-have control over atomic materials and the means of producing nuclear energy. Information on atomic energy would be shared, research facilities would be divided among the nations involved, and the international body would conduct inspections. In the meantime, while this organization was being established, the United States would maintain its atomic monopoly. In June 1946, Truman selected businessman Bernard Baruch to present the plan at the United Nations. Baruch, however, changed many of the key points of the plan and insisted that the United States would have an ultimate veto power on any issues arising in connection with the plan. The Soviets quickly rejected the idea so the vote was never held in the United Nations. The United States and the Soviet Union would go their own ways in developing their nuclear arsenals. In 1949, the Soviets exploded an atomic device and the nuclear arms race was on.
1953 – The Chinese agreed to the exchange of sick and wounded prisoners proposed by U.N. Forces Commander General Mark Clark and further proposed that prisoners unwilling to be repatriated be transferred to a neutral state.
1953 – U.S. Air Force Colonel James K. Johnson, 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing, became the 29th ace of the Korean War.
1961 – A U.S. national intelligence estimate prepared for President John F. Kennedy declares that South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and the Republic of Vietnam are facing an extremely critical situation. As evidence, the reports cites that more than half of the rural region surrounding Saigon is under communist control and points to a barely failed coup against Diem the preceding November. Not only were Diem’s forces losing to the Viet Cong on the battlefield, the report alleged that he had not effectively dealt with the discontent among a large segment of South Vietnamese society, which had given rise to the coup against him. The report questioned Diem’s ability to rally the people against the communists. Kennedy wondered what to do about Diem, who was staunchly anticommunist but did not have a lot of credibility with the South Vietnamese people because he was Catholic while the country was predominantly Buddhist. Kennedy and his advisers tried to convince Diem to put in place land reform and other measures that might build popular support, but Diem steadfastly refused to make any meaningful concessions to his opponents. He was assassinated in November 1963 during a coup by a group of South Vietnamese generals.
1962 – The U.S. Air Force announced research into the use of lasers to intercept missiles and satellites.
1967 – UN Sec. General U Thant made public proposals for peace in Vietnam.
1968 – The U.S. lost its first aircraft in Vietnam. An F-111 vanished in a combat mission over North Vietnam. Republic Aircraft’s F-105 Thunderchief, better known as the ‘Thud,’ was the Air Force’s war-horse in Vietnam.
1969 – Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States and one of the most highly regarded American generals of World War II, dies in Washington, D.C., at the age of 78. Born in Denison, Texas, in 1890, Eisenhower graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1915, and after World War I he steadily rose in the peacetime ranks of the U.S. Army. After the U.S. entrance into World War II, he was appointed commanding general of the European theater of operations and oversaw U.S. troops massing in Great Britain. In 1942, Eisenhower, who had never commanded troops in the field, was put in charge of Operation Torch, the Anglo-American landings in Morocco and Algeria. As supreme commander of a mixed force of Allied nationalities, services, and equipment, Eisenhower designed a system of unified command and rapidly won the respect of his British and Canadian subordinates. From North Africa, he successfully directed the invasions of Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy, and in January 1944 was appointed supreme Allied commander of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of northwestern Europe. Although Eisenhower left much of the specific planning for the actual Allied landing in the hands of his capable staff, such as British Field Marshall Montgomery, he served as a brilliant organizer and administrator both before and after the successful invasion. After the war, he briefly served as president of Columbia University before returning to military service in 1951 as supreme commander of the combined land and air forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Pressure on Eisenhower to run for U.S. president was great, however, and in the spring of 1952 he relinquished his NATO command to run for president on the Republican ticket. In November 1952, “Ike” won a resounding victory in the presidential elections and in 1956 was reelected in a landslide. A popular president, he oversaw a period of great economic growth in the United States and deftly navigated the country through increasing Cold War tension on the world stage. In 1961, he retired with his wife, Mamie Doud Eisenhower, to his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He died in 1969 and was buried on a family plot in Abilene, Kansas.
1979 – At 4 a.m. the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat. The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was built in 1974 on a sandbar on Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River, just 10 miles downstream from the state capitol in Harrisburg. In 1978, a second state-of-the-art reactor began operating on Three Mile Island, which was lauded for generating affordable and reliable energy in a time of energy crises. After the cooling water began to drain out of the broken pressure valve on the morning of March 28, 1979, emergency cooling pumps automatically went into operation. Left alone, these safety devices would have prevented the development of a larger crisis. However, human operators in the control room misread confusing and contradictory readings and shut off the emergency water system. The reactor was also shut down, but residual heat from the fission process was still being released. By early morning, the core had heated to over 4,000 degrees, just 1,000 degrees short of meltdown. In the meltdown scenario, the core melts, and deadly radiation drifts across the countryside, fatally sickening a potentially great number of people. As the plant operators struggled to understand what had happened, the contaminated water was releasing radioactive gases throughout the plant. The radiation levels, though not immediately life-threatening, were dangerous, and the core cooked further as the contaminated water was contained and precautions were taken to protect the operators. Shortly after 8 a.m., word of the accident leaked to the outside world. The plant’s parent company, Metropolitan Edison, downplayed the crisis and claimed that no radiation had been detected off plant grounds, but the same day inspectors detected slightly increased levels of radiation nearby as a result of the contaminated water leak. Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh considered calling an evacuation. Finally, at about 8 p.m., plant operators realized they needed to get water moving through the core again and restarted the pumps. The temperature began to drop, and pressure in the reactor was reduced. The reactor had come within less than an hour of a complete meltdown. More than half the core was destroyed or molten, but it had not broken its protective shell, and no radiation was escaping. The crisis was apparently over. Two days later, however, on March 30, a bubble of highly flammable hydrogen gas was discovered within the reactor building. The bubble of gas was created two days before when exposed core materials reacted with super-heated steam. On March 28, some of this gas had exploded, releasing a small amount of radiation into the atmosphere. At that time, plant operators had not registered the explosion, which sounded like a ventilation door closing. After the radiation leak was discovered on March 30, residents were advised to stay indoors. Experts were uncertain if the hydrogen bubble would create further meltdown or possibly a giant explosion, and as a precaution Governor Thornburgh advised “pregnant women and pre-school age children to leave the area within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility until further notice.” This led to the panic the governor had hoped to avoid; within days, more than 100,000 people had fled surrounding towns. On April 1, President Jimmy Carter arrived at Three Mile Island to inspect the plant. Carter, a trained nuclear engineer, had helped dismantle a damaged Canadian nuclear reactor while serving in the U.S. Navy. His visit achieved its aim of calming local residents and the nation. That afternoon, experts agreed that the hydrogen bubble was not in danger of exploding. Slowly, the hydrogen was bled from the system as the reactor cooled. At the height of the crisis, plant workers were exposed to unhealthy levels of radiation, but no one outside Three Mile Island had their health adversely affected by the accident. Nonetheless, the incident greatly eroded the public’s faith in nuclear power. The unharmed Unit-1 reactor at Three Mile Island, which was shut down during the crisis, did not resume operation until 1985. Cleanup continued on Unit-2 until 1990, but it was too damaged to be rendered usable again. In the more than two decades since the accident at Three Mile Island, not a single new nuclear power plant has been ordered in the United States.
1986 – The U.S. Senate passed a $100 million aid package for the Nicaraguan contras.
1990 – British customs officials announced they had foiled an attempt to supply Iraq with 40 American-made devices for triggering nuclear weapons, following an 18-month investigation by U.S. and British authorities.
1991 – Fire seriously damaged the US Embassy in Moscow.
1993 – The last A-6E Intruder departed from Marine Corps service. Marine All Weather Attack Squadron 332 transferred the last Marine A-6E to St. Augustine, Florida, and prepared for the squadron’s transition to the F/A-18D and eventual movement from Cherry Point to Beaufort, South Carolina.
1996 – Congress passed the line-item veto, giving the president power to cut government spending by scrapping specific programs.
1996 – The space shuttle Atlantis astronauts said goodbye to the crew of Russia’s space station Mir and then flew away, leaving Shannon Lucid behind for a five-month stay in orbit.
1997 – The UN Security Council agreed to send a multinational force to Albania to protect the delivery of humanitarian aid.
1998 – It was reported that the US government conducted a series of “sub-critical” underground explosions involving radioactive plutonium in a sealed chamber 960 feet below ground at the Los Alamos National Lab.
1999 – NATO broadened its attacks on Yugoslavia to target Serb military forces in Kosovo in the fifth straight night of airstrikes. UN officials reported that some 500,000 ethnic Albanians had fled Kosovo. NATO officials raised the possibility of using ground troops in Yugoslavia as low-level strikes against tanks began. It was feared that anger over the war would spill over to Bosnia.
https://thisdayinusmilhist.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/march-28/
