1912 – President Taft recommended abolishing Revenue Cutter Service. His actions led to the creation of the Coast Guard by merging the Revenue Cutter Service and the Life-Saving Service on 28 January 1915.
1917 – U.S. Senate voted 90-6 to enter World War I on Allied side.
1918 – During World War I, the Second Battle of the Somme, the first major German offensive in more than a year, ends on the western front. On March 21, 1918, a major offensive against Allied positions in the Somme River region of France began with five hours of bombardment from more than 9,000 pieces of German artillery. The poorly prepared British Fifth Army was rapidly overwhelmed and forced into retreat. For a week, the Germans pushed toward Paris, shelling the city from a distance of 80 miles with their “Big Bertha” cannons. However, the poorly supplied German troops soon became exhausted, and the Allies halted the German advance as French artillery knocked out the German guns besieging Paris. On April 2, U.S. General John J. Pershing sent American troops down into the trenches to help defend Paris and repulse the German offensive. It was the first major deployment of U.S. troops in World War I. Several thousand American troops fought alongside the British and French in the Second Battle of Somme. By the time the Somme offensive ended on April 4, the Germans had advanced almost 40 miles, inflicted some 200,000 casualties, and captured 70,000 prisoners and more than 1,000 Allied guns. However, the Germans suffered nearly as many casualties as their enemies and lacked the fresh reserves and supply boost the Allies enjoyed following the American entrance into the fighting.
1921 – The US Navy Department completes the first helium production plant in Fort Worth, Texas.
1933 – Navy airship USS Akron crashed off the Barnegat Lightship, off the New Jersey coast. The search employed over 20 Coast Guard vessels under Navy supervision. USS Akron (ZRS-4) was a helium-filled rigid airship of the U.S. Navy that was destroyed in a thunderstorm killing 73 of the 76 crewmen and passengers. This accident was the greatest loss of life in any known airship crash. During its accident-prone 18-month term of service, the Akron also served as a flying aircraft carrier for launching and recovering F9C Sparrowhawk fighter planes. With lengths of 785 ft (239 m), 20 ft (6.1 m) shorter than the German commercial airship Hindenburg, which was destroyed in 1937, the Akron and its sister airship the Macon were among the largest flying objects in the world. Although the Hindenburg was longer, it was filled with hydrogen, so the two U.S. airships still hold the world record for helium-filled airships.
1941 – Roosevelt agrees to allow Royal Navy warships to be repaired in the US. Among the first ships to benefit from this order are the battleships Malaya and Resolution. RN warships are also to be allowed to refuel in the US when on combat missions.
1944 – The Bucharest marshaling yards are bombed by heavily escorted bombers of the US 15th Air Force. A total of 20 aircraft are lost. Civilian casualties are reported to amount to 2942 killed and 2126 injured.
1945 – US 9th Army units have reached the river Weser opposite Hameln. Troops from US 3rd Army capture Kassel while other units take Gotha and advance near Erfurt. French units take Karlsruhe. The Nazi gold reserves are captured in the salt mine at Merkers.
1945 – American troops liberate Ohrdruf forced labor camp in Germany. It was part of the Buchenwald concentration camp network and the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by U.S. troops.
1945 – On Okinawa, the forces of US 10th Army begin to meet the first real Japanese resistance on the ground. Troops of US 24th Corps are brought to a halt on a line just south of Kuba while the forces of 3rd Amphibious Corps have reached the Ishikawa Isthmus. A storm damages many landing craft and hampers further reinforcement.
1949 – The United States and 11 other nations establish the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact aimed at containing possible Soviet aggression against Western Europe. NATO stood as the main U.S.-led military alliance against the Soviet Union throughout the duration of the Cold War. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union began to deteriorate rapidly in 1948. There were heated disagreements over the postwar status of Germany, with the Americans insisting on German recovery and eventual rearmament and the Soviets steadfastly opposing such actions. In June 1948, the Soviets blocked all ground travel to the American occupation zone in West Berlin, and only a massive U.S. airlift of food and other necessities sustained the population of the zone until the Soviets relented and lifted the blockade in May 1949. In January 1949, President Harry S. Truman warned in his State of the Union Address that the forces of democracy and communism were locked in a dangerous struggle, and he called for a defensive alliance of nations in the North Atlantic–NATO was the result. In April 1949, representatives from Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal joined the United States in signing the NATO agreement. The signatories agreed, “An armed attack against one or more of them … shall be considered an attack against them all.” President Truman welcomed the organization as “a shield against aggression.” Not all Americans embraced NATO. Isolationists such as Senator Robert A. Taft declared that NATO was “not a peace program; it is a war program.” Most, however, saw the organization as a necessary response to the communist threat. The U. S. Senate ratified the treaty by a wide margin in June 1949. During the next few years, Greece, Turkey, and West Germany also joined. The Soviet Union condemned NATO as a warmongering alliance and responded by setting up the Warsaw Pact (a military alliance between the Soviet Union and its Eastern Europe satellites) in 1955. NATO lasted throughout the course of the Cold War, and continues to play an important role in post-Cold War Europe. In recent years, for example, NATO forces were active in trying to bring an end to the civil war in Bosnia.
1951 – Far East Air Forces aircraft racked up 1,000 sorties hitting enemy frontline positions and supply areas.
1951 – Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE) is established with General Dwight D. Eisenhower in command.
1966 – US F-4C Phantom bombers hit the main supply route between North Vietnam and Naning, China, striking the Phulangthong bridge, among others.
1967 – “CHINOOK II” ended in Vietnam (17 Feb – 4 Apr).
1967 – The U.S. lost its 500th plane over Vietnam.
1967 – Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. indicates that a link is forming between the civil rights movement and the peace movement. King proposes that the US stop all bombing in Vietnam, declare a unilateral truce in hopes of fostering peace talks, setting a date for the withdrawal of all troops from Vietnam, and include the National Liberation Front in any resulting negotiations.
1968 – Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 6. Apollo 6 was the second A type mission of the United States Apollo program, an unmanned test of the Saturn V launch vehicle. It was also the final unmanned Apollo test mission. Objectives were to demonstrate trans-lunar injection capability of the Saturn V with a simulated payload equal to about 80% of a full Apollo spacecraft, and to repeat demonstration of the Command Module’s (CM) heat shield capability to withstand a lunar re-entry. The flight plan called for following trans-lunar injection with a direct return abort using the Command/Service Module’s (CSM) main engine, with a total flight time of about 10 hours. A phenomenon known as pogo oscillation damaged some of the Rocketdyne J-2 engines in the second and third stages by rupturing internal fuel lines, causing two second-stage engines to shut down early. The vehicle’s onboard guidance system was able to compensate by burning the second and third stages longer, though the resulting parking orbit was more elliptical than planned. The damaged third stage engine also failed to restart for trans-lunar injection. Flight controllers elected to repeat the flight profile of the previous Apollo 4 test, achieving a high orbit and high-speed return using the Service Module (SM) engine. Despite the engine failures, the flight provided NASA with enough confidence to use the Saturn V for manned launches. Since Apollo 4 had already demonstrated S-IVB restart and tested the heat shield at full lunar re-entry velocity, a potential third unmanned flight was cancelled.
1970 – About 15,000 people stage a rally at the Washington monument to support “victory over the Communists in Vietnam.”
1970 – The heaviest fighting in five months involving US troops occurs along the DMZ and new clashes in Cambodia where South Vietnamese battalions move 10 miles into Cambodia.
1971 – Veterans stadium in Philadelphia, PA, was dedicated.
1973 – A Lockheed C-141 Starlifter, dubbed the Hanoi Taxi, makes the last flight of Operation Homecoming. Operation Homecoming was a series of diplomatic negotiations that in January 1973 made possible the return of 591 American prisoners of war held by North Vietnam. On Feb. 12, 1973, three C-141 transports flew to Hanoi, North Vietnam, and one C-9A aircraft was sent to Saigon, South Vietnam to pick up released prisoners of war. The first flight of 40 U.S. prisoners of war left Hanoi in a C-141A, later known as the “Hanoi Taxi” and now in a museum. From February 12 to April 4, there were 54 C-141 missions flying out of Hanoi, bringing the former POWs home. Each plane brought back 40 POWs. During the early part of Operation Homecoming, groups of POWs released were selected on the basis of longest length of time in prison. The first group had spent 6-8 years as prisoners of war. After Operation Homecoming, the U.S. still listed about 1,350 Americans as prisoners of war or missing in action and sought the return of roughly 1,200 Americans reported killed in action and body not recovered. These missing personnel would become the subject of the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue. The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines each had liaison officers dedicated to prepare for the return of American POWs well in advance of their actual return. These liaison officers worked behind the scenes traveling around the United States assuring the returnees well being. They also were responsible for debriefing POWs to discern relevant intelligence about MIAs and to discern the existence of war crimes committed against them.
1975 – The first group of boat people from Vietnam began arriving in Malaysia. More than 1 million people fled from the close of the war to the early 1980s.
1975 – A major U.S. airlift of South Vietnamese orphans begins with disaster when an Air Force cargo jet crashes shortly after departing from Tan Son Nhut airbase in Saigon. More than 138 passengers, mostly children, were killed. Operation Baby Lift was designed to bring 2,000 South Vietnamese orphans to the United States for adoption by American parents. Baby Lift lasted for 10 days and was carried out during the final, desperate phase of the war, as North Vietnamese forces closed in on Saigon. Although this first flight ended in tragedy, all subsequent flights were completed safely, and Baby Lift aircraft brought orphans across the Pacific until the mission’s conclusion on April 14, only 16 days before the fall of Saigon and the end of the war.
1977 – The Coast Guard designated its first female Coast Guard aviator, Janna Lambine. She was Coast Guard Aviator #1812.
1983 – The space shuttle Challenger roared into orbit on its maiden voyage and the first US female into space was Sally Ride. Space Shuttle Challenger (NASA Orbiter Vehicle Designation: OV-099) was the second orbiter of NASA’s space shuttle program to be put into service following Columbia. The shuttle was built by Rockwell International’s Space Transportation Systems Division in Downey, California. It launched and landed nine times before breaking apart 73 seconds into its tenth mission, STS-51-L, on January 28, 1986, resulting in the death of all seven crew members. It was the first of two shuttles to be destroyed. The accident led to a two-and-a-half year grounding of the shuttle fleet; flights resumed in 1988 with STS-26 flown by Discovery. Challenger itself was replaced by Endeavour which was built using structural spares ordered by NASA as part of the construction contracts for Discovery and Atlantis. Endeavour launched for the first time in May 1992.
1984 – President Ronald Reagan calls for an international ban on chemical weapons.
1992 – His campaign acknowledged that Bill Clinton had received an induction notice in April 1969 while attending college in Oxford, England; Clinton said the notice arrived after he was due to report, and that his local draft board had told him he could complete the school term.
1992 – Jury deliberations began in the Noriega case in Florida.
1993 – President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin wrapped up their two-day summit in Vancouver, B.C. Clinton extended $1.6 billion in aid; Yeltsin proclaimed the two countries “partners and future allies.”
1995 – Francisco Martin Duran, who had raked the White House with semiautomatic rifle fire in October 1994, was convicted in Washington of trying to assassinate President Clinton. Duran was later sentenced to 40 years in prison.
1996 – US intelligence indicated the Libya was building a chemical weapons plant at Tarhunah, 40 miles southeast of Tripoli. The plant was reportedly designed to replace a plant a Rabta, 55 miles SW of Tripoli, where Libya insists that only pharmaceuticals are produced.
1996 – In Afghanistan Mohammed Omar unsealed a shrine in Kandahar that held a cloak believed to have belonged to the prophet Mohammed. He placed the cloak over his shoulders and declared himself Caliph, the commander of the faithful and leader of all Islam.
1996 – Comet Hyakutake is imaged by the USA Asteroid Orbiter Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous.
1997 – Space shuttle Columbia blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on what was supposed to have been a 16-day mission. However, a defective power generator forced the shuttle’s return four days later.
1998 – Richard Butler, chief arms inspector in Iraq, refused to certify the Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have been destroyed.
1999 – NATO dropped more bombs on downtown Belgrade and said that it would send some 8,000 troops into Albania to help Kosovo refugees. The Freedom Bridge over the Danube at Novi Sad was destroyed. The US announced that it would send 24 Apache helicopter gunships to attack Serbian troops and tanks in Kosovo. Some 30,000 refugees crossed into Albania in the last 24-hour period. Shipping on the Danube was not fully restored until 2002.1999 – Several NATO countries announced they would take in refugees being forced out of Kosovo by Serbian forces.
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