This Date in Military History:

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10 November

1674 – The Dutch formally ceded New Netherlands (NY) to English as provision of the Treaty of Westminster at the End of the Third Anglo-Dutch War.

1702 – English colonists under the command of James Moore besiege Spanish St. Augustine during Queen Anne’s War. The Siege of St. Augustine was an action in Queen Anne’s War during November and December 1702. It was conducted by English provincial forces from the Province of Carolina and their native allies, under the command of Carolina’s governor James Moore, against the Spanish colonial fortress of Castillo de San Marcos at St. Augustine, in Spanish Florida. After destroying coastal Spanish communities north of St. Augustine, Moore’s forces arrived at St. Augustine and immediately began siege operations. The Spanish governor, Joseph de Zúñiga y Zérda, had advance warning of their arrival, and withdrew civilians and food supplies into the fortress, and also sent messengers to nearby Spanish and French communities for relief. The English guns did little damage to the fortress walls, prompting Governor Moore to send an appeal to Jamaica for larger guns. The Spanish calls for relief were successful; a fleet sent from Havana, Cuba landed troops nearby on 29 December. Moore lifted the siege the next day, and was forced to burn many of his boats before retreating to Charles Town in disgrace.

1775 – During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress passes a resolution stating that “two Battalions of Marines be raised” for service as landing forces for the recently formed Continental Navy. The resolution, drafted by future U.S. president John Adams and adopted in Philadelphia, created the Continental Marines and is now observed as the birth date of the United States Marine Corps. Serving on land and at sea, the original U.S. Marines distinguished themselves in a number of important operations during the Revolutionary War. The first Marine landing on a hostile shore occurred when a force of Marines under Captain Samuel Nicholas captured New Province Island in the Bahamas from the British in March 1776. Nicholas was the first commissioned officer in the Continental Marines and is celebrated as the first Marine commandant. After American independence was achieved in 1783, the Continental Navy was demobilized and its Marines disbanded. In the next decade, however, increasing conflict at sea with Revolutionary France led the U.S. Congress to establish formally the U.S. Navy in May 1798.

Two months later, on July 11, President John Adams signed the bill establishing the U.S. Marine Corps as a permanent military force under the jurisdiction of the Department of Navy. U.S. Marines saw action in the so-called Quasi-War with France and then fought against the Barbary pirates of North Africa during the first years of the 19th century. Since then, Marines have participated in all the wars of the United States and in most cases were the first soldiers to fight. In all, Marines have executed more than 300 landings on foreign shores. Today, there are more than 200,000 active-duty and reserve Marines, divided into three divisions stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina; Camp Pendleton, California; and Okinawa, Japan. Each division has one or more expeditionary units, ready to launch major operations anywhere in the world on two weeks’ notice. Marines expeditionary units are self-sufficient, with their own tanks, artillery, and air forces. The motto of the service is Semper Fidelis, meaning “Always Faithful” in Latin.

1782 – In the last battle of the American Revolution, George Rodgers Clark attacked Indians and Loyalists at Chillicothe, in Ohio Territory.

1808 – In a decision that would eventually make them one of the wealthiest surviving Indian nations, the Osage Indians agree to abandon their lands in Missouri and Arkansas in exchange for a reservation in Oklahoma. The Osage were the largest tribe of the Southern Sioux Indians occupying what would later become the states of Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. When the first Anglo explorers and settlers moved into this region, they encountered a sophisticated society of Native Americans who lived in more or less permanent villages made of sturdy earthen and log lodges. The Osage-like the related Quapaw, Ponca, Omaha, and Kansa peoples-hunted buffalo and wild game like the Plains Indians, but they also raised crops to supplement their diets. Although the Southern Sioux warred among themselves almost constantly, Americans found it much easier to understand and negotiate with these more sedentary tribes than with the nomadic Northern Sioux. American negotiators convinced the Osage to abandon their traditional lands and peacefully move to a reservation in southern Kansas in 1810.

When American settlers began to covet the Osage reservation in Kansas, the tribe agreed to yet another move, relocating to what is now Osage County, Oklahoma, in 1872. Such constant pressure from American settlers to push Native Americans off valuable lands and onto marginal reservations was all too common throughout the history of western settlement. Most Indian tribes were devastated by these relocations, including some of the Southern Sioux tribes like the Kansa, whose population of 1,700 was reduced to only 194 following their disastrous relocation to a 250,000-acre reservation in Kansas. The Osage, though, proved unusually successful in adapting to the demands of living in a world dominated by Anglo-Americans, thanks in part to the fortunate presence of large reserves of oil and gas on their Oklahoma reservation. In concert with their effective management of grazing contracts to Anglos, the Osage amassed enormous wealth during the twentieth century from their oil and gas deposits, eventually becoming the wealthiest tribe in North America.

1827 – Alfred Howe Terry (d.1890), Major General (Union volunteers), was born. Alfred Howe Terry was born in Hartford, Connecticut. After attended Yale Law School in 1848, he withdrew from the Connecticut bar, and served as clerk of the New Haven County Superior Court until the Civil War. When the war began, he joined the Union forces, and commanded the 2d Connecticut at the First Battle of Bull Run. Terry recruited troops for three years, and took part in the capture of Port Royal, South Carolina and Fort Pulaski, Georgia. Promoted to brigadier general on April 26, 1862, he led a corps in the in the operations against Petersburg and Richmond. He was part of the force that tried to capture Fort Fisher, North Carolina. Later placed in command of the effort, he succeeded in capturing the fort and sealing off the Confederacy’s last port on the East Coast, Wilmington. Terry won a Thanks of Congress for this achievement, and was promoted to major general of volunteers, and brigadier general in the Regular Army, as of January 15, 1865. He spent the last section of the war in the Carolinas in the Army of the Ohio, under Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman. After the Civil War, Terry led a department in the West and fought Native Americans. After serving on the military board that reexamined the Fitz John Porter casein 1878, he was promoted to major general in the Regular Army in 1886; one of the few people to obtain that rank in the volunteers and the Regulars without having attended West Point. Terry died on December 16, 1890, in New Haven, Connecticut.


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1865 – Henry Wirz, a Swiss immigrant and the commander of Andersonville prison in Georgia, is hanged for the murder of soldiers incarcerated at his prison. Wirz was born in Switzerland in 1823 and immigrated to the United States in 1849. He lived in several Southern locations, mostly in Louisiana, and studied medicine. Eventually, he became a physician to slaves. When the war broke out, he joined the Fourth Louisiana Battalion. After the First Battle of Bull Run, Wirz guarded prisoners in Richmond and was noticed by Inspector General John Winder. Winder had Wirz transferred to his department, and Wirz spent the rest of the war working with prisoners of war. He commanded a prison in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; escorted prisoners around the Confederacy; handled exchanges with the Union; and was wounded in a stagecoach accident. After returning to duty, he traveled to Europe and likely delivered messages to Confederate envoys. When Wirz arrived back in the Confederacy in early 1864 he was assigned the responsibility for Andersonville prison. While both sides incarcerated prisoners under horrible conditions, Andersonville deserves special mention for the inhumane circumstances under which its inmates were kept. A stockade held thousands of men inside a barren and polluted patch of ground. Barracks were planned but never built; the men slept in makeshift housing, called “she bangs,” constructed from scrap wood and blankets that offered little protection from the elements. A small stream flowed through the compound and provided water for the Union soldiers, but this became a cesspool of disease and human waste. Erosion caused by the prisoners turned the stream into a huge swamp.

The prison was designed to hold 10,000 men but the Confederates had packed it with more than 31,000 inmates by August 1864. Wirz oversaw an operation in which nearly a third of its 46,000 inmates died. Partly a victim of circumstance, Wirz was given few resources with which to work, and the Union ceased prisoner exchanges in 1864. As the Confederacy began to dissolve, food and medicine for prisoners were difficult to obtain. When word about Andersonville leaked out, Northerners were understandably horrified. Poet Walt Whitman saw some of the survivors of the camp and wrote, “There are deeds, crimes that may be forgiven, but this is not among them.” Wirz was charged with conspiracy to injure the health and lives of Union soldiers and murder. His trial began on August 23, 1865, and ran for two months. During the trial, 160 witnesses were called to testify. Though Wirz did demonstrate indifference towards Andersonville’s prisoners, he was, in part, a scapegoat–some evidence against him was fabricated entirely. On the scaffold, Wirz said to the officer in charge, “I know what orders are, Major. I am being hanged for obeying them.” He was found guilty on October 24 and sentenced to die on November 10. Wirz was the only person executed for crimes committed during the war.

1879 – Little Bighorn participant Major Marcus Reno was caught window-peeping at the daughter of his commanding officer–an offense for which he would be court-martialed.

1898 – A race riot in Wilmington, NC, left 8 blacks killed. The Wilmington race riot claimed the lives of over 20 African-Americans. In the days preceding the election of 1898 Waddell, a former Confederate officer and U.S. Congressman, called for the removal of the Republicans and Populists then in power in Wilmington and proposed in a speech at Thalian Hall that the white citizens, if necessary, “choke the Cape Fear with carcasses.” What had particularly incensed Waddell and others was the publication in August of an editorial in the Wilmington Daily Record, a local black-owned newspaper. Alex Manly, the editor, charged that, “poor white men are careless in the matter of protecting their women,” and that, “our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than the white men with the colored women.” The sexually charged editorial, reprinted across the state, provided Democrats with an issue to inflame racial tensions as election day approached. Yet the day passed without notable incident. At 8:00 A.M. two days later about 500 white men assembled at the armory of the Wilmington Light Infantry and, after several others declined, Waddell took on the task of leading them to the Daily Record office in Free Love Hall four blocks south on Seventh Street between Nun and Church Streets.

The crowd swelled to perhaps 2,000 as they moved across town. Manly, in the meantime, had fled the city, as had numerous other African Americans in expectation of violence. The mob broke into the building, a fire broke out, and the top floor of the building was consumed. The crowd posed for a photograph in front of the burned-out frame. Dr. Silas P. Wright, the white Republican mayor, resigned under pressure as did members of the city council and other officers, both black and white. Waddell then took office as mayor. The revolt had the support of many of the most powerful men in the city, among them William Rand Kenan and Hugh McRae. George Roundtree, an attorney and advisor to the coup leaders, in 1899 served as chairman of the state legislative committee on constitutional reform that drafted and sponsored the so-called “Grandfather Clause,” providing that the male citizens could vote if they could read and write or if their grandfather voted, thereby denying most African Americans the right to vote.

1910 – The date of Thomas A. Davis’ opening of the San Diego Army and Navy Academy, though the official founding date is November 23, 1910.

1915 – Great fire at Bethlehem Steel Co., German incendiaries suspected. Many guns destroyed.

1918 – French and Americans cross Meuse, capture Hirson, and advance towards Montmedy; surround Mezieres.

1918 – Retired German Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to the Netherlands.

1918 – The Western Union Cable Office in North Sydney, Nova Scotia, receives a top-secret coded message from Europe (that would be sent to Ottawa and Washington, D.C.) that said on November 11, 1918, all fighting would cease on land, sea and in the air.

1919 – The American Legion held its first national convention, in Minneapolis.

1928 – Hirohito was enthroned as Emperor of Japan. Two years after the death of his father, Michinomiya Hirohito is enthroned as the 124th Japanese monarch in an imperial line dating back to 660 B.C. Emperor Hirohito presided over one of the most turbulent eras in his nation’s history. From rapid military expansion beginning in 1931 to the crushing defeat of Japan by Allied forces in 1945, Hirohito ruled the Japanese people as an absolute monarch whose powers were nevertheless sharply limited in practice. After U.S. atomic bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was Hirohito who argued for his country’s surrender, explaining to the Japanese people in his first-ever radio address that the “unendurable must be endured.” Under U.S. occupation and postwar reconstruction, Hirohito was formally stripped of his powers and forced to renounce his alleged divinity, but he remained his country’s official figurehead until his death in 1989. He was the longest-reigning monarch in Japanese history.

1939 – The US consulate advises Americans to leave the Netherlands.1941 – Churchill promised to join the U.S. “within the hour” in the event of war with Japan.

1941 – U.S. escorted convoy WS 12, carrying 20,000 British troops to Singapore, sails from Halifax.

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1942 – German troops occupy Vichy France, which had previously been free of an Axis military presence. Since July 1940, upon being invaded and defeated by Nazi German forces, the autonomous French state had been split into two regions. One was occupied by German troops, and the other was unoccupied, governed by a more or less puppet regime centered in Vichy, a spa region about 200 miles southeast of Paris, and led by Gen. Philippe Petain, a World War I hero. Publicly, Petain declared that Germany and France had a common goal, “the defeat of England.” Privately, the French general hoped that by playing mediator between the Axis power and his fellow countrymen, he could keep German troops out of Vichy France while surreptitiously aiding the antifascist Resistance movement. Petain’s compromises became irrelevant within two years. When Allied forces arrived in North Africa to team up with the Free French Forces to beat back the Axis occupiers, and French naval crews, emboldened by the Allied initiative, scuttled the French fleet off Toulon, in southeastern France, to keep it from being used by those same Axis powers, Hitler retaliated. In violation of the 1940 armistice agreement, German troops moved into southeastern-Vichy–France. From that point forward, Petain became virtually useless, and France merely a future gateway for the Allied counteroffensive in Western Europe, namely, D-Day.

1942 – Oran falls to the American attack. In the east, troops under General Patton begin to move into the town. Admiral Darlan, takes up the Allied cause and broadcasts orders for all the French forces to cease fighting and join the Allies. A similar appeal is sent to the powerful French Fleet at Toulon.

1942 – On Guadalcanal, the Japanese forces around Koli Point are dispersed by the American attacks. American attacks to the west are renewed.

1944 – On Leyte, heavy fighting is reported near Carigara. Elements of the US 24th Division (part of US 10th Corps) are amphibiously transported west along the north coast from Carigara toward Belen.

1944 – Forces of US 3rd Army continue to advance beyond the Moselle River to the south of Thionville and farther south beyond Metz.

1944 – The ammunition ship USS Mount Hood explodes at Seeadler Harbour, Manus, Admiralty Islands, killing at least 432 and wounding 371.

1951 – Direct-dial, coast-to-coast telephone service began as Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, N.J., called his counterpart in Alameda, California.

1951 – At Panmunjom, the U.N. Command proposed that the demarcation line should be that of the line of contact at the time of the signing of the armistice.

1951 – With the rollout of the North American Numbering Plan, direct-dial coast-to-coast telephone service begins in the United States.

1952 – General James A. Van Fleet retired. General Maxwell D. Taylor assumed command of Eighth Army. On the same day, Eighth Army announced the mobilization of two new ROK divisions.

1954 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower dedicates the USMC War Memorial (Iwo Jima memorial) in Arlington National Cemetery.

1954 – Lt. Col. John Strapp traveled 632 MPH in a rocket sled.

1964 – At a news conference, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara says that the United States has no plans to send combat troops into Vietnam. When asked whether the United States intended to increase its activities in Vietnam, he replied, “Wait and see.” By 1969, more than 500,000 American troops were in South Vietnam.

1970 – For the first time in five years, no U.S. combat fatalities in Southeast Asia are reported for the previous week. This was a direct result of President Richard Nixon’s Vietnamization program, whereby the responsibility for the war was slowly shifted from U.S. combat forces to the South Vietnamese. This effort began in 1969 and was accompanied by U.S. troop withdrawals that began in the fall of that year. Although American casualties were down, U.S. forces were still involved in significant combat operations at this time.

1971 – Communist forces bombard the airport at the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, killing 25 persons and wounding 30. This attack was another chapter in the Communist Khmer Rouge war against the government troops of Prime Minister Lon Nol. Nine airplanes were damaged in the attack. At the same time, another Khmer Rouge unit attacked a government radio transmission facility nine miles to the northwest of the city, leaving 19 Cambodians dead. This assault left Phnom Penh without access to international communications networks for several hours.

1972 – Three black men successfully hijack a DC-9 from Birmingham to Cuba with $10 million and 10 parachutes. They are still fugitives. The copilot is wounded. Two are sentenced in Cuba to 20 years, one to 15 years. They threaten to crash the plane into the Oak Ridge nuclear installation. At McCoy Air Force Base, Orlando, the FBI shoots out the tires. The plane finally lands on a foam-covered runway in Havana.

1975 – PLO leader Yasser Arafat addressed the UN in NYC.

1982 – The newly finished Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened to its first visitors in Washington, D.C.

1982 – After 18 years as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev dies. His death signaled the end of a period of Soviet history marked by both stability and stagnation. Brezhnev came to power in 1964 when, along with Alexei Kosygin, he was successful in pushing Nikita Khrushchev out of office. For the next 18 years, he brought a degree of stability to Soviet politics unknown since the Stalinist period. However, his time in office was also marked by forceful repression of political opponents and dissidents, a massive military buildup that bankrupted the Russian economy, and a foreign policy that seemed confusing at best. During Brezhnev’s reign political repression took on more and more ominous overtones. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov were harassed and sometimes sentenced to internal exile.

His program to bring the Soviet military to parity with the United States drove the Russian economy to the breaking point; by the late 1970s economic growth was almost at a standstill. His foreign policy was often confusing for U.S. officials. On the one hand, he seemed to approve of the idea of “peaceful coexistence,” pushed for control of nuclear weapons, and helped the United States in its negotiations with North Vietnam. On the other, he unleashed Soviet forces against Czechoslovakia in 1968, became involved with revolts in Ethiopia and Angola in the 1970s, reacted in a threatening manner during the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1973, and ordered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. By the end of his rule, discussions about nuclear arms control had almost completely lapsed. Upon his death in November 1982, Yuri Andropov took control of the Soviet Union.

1983 – Bill Gates of Microsoft introduces Windows 1.0.

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1986 – President Ronald Reagan refused to reveal details of the Iran arms sale. 1989 – Workers began punching a hole in the Berlin Wall, a day after East Germany abolished its border restrictions.

1990 – Secretary of State James A. Baker the Third returned to Washington, claiming success in his weeklong diplomatic tour aimed at shoring up the anti-Iraq coalition.

1994 – Officials said the United States would lift the arms embargo against the Bosnian government, despite opposition of the U.N. Security Council.

1994 – Iraq, hoping to win an end to trade sanctions, recognized the independence and boundaries of Kuwait.

1995 – Dario Kordic, ex-chairman of the Croatian Party in Bosnia, and Gen’l. Tihomir Blaskic, former leader of the Bosnian Croat militia, were indicted for genocide by the UN War Crimes Tribunal for commanding forces responsible that killed hundreds of Muslims in Central Bosnia in 1992-93.

1997 – A jury in Fairfax, Va., convicted Mir Aimal Kasi of one count of capital murder, one count of first-degree murder and eight additional charges stemming from a shooting attack outside CIA headquarters in January 1993.

1997 – The U-2 surveillance flights over Iraq were resumed by the UN. The plane flew out of range of Iraqi gunners.

1998 – The US military moved warships into the Persian Gulf in anticipation of a possible attack on Iraq over cancellation of weapons inspections.

1999 – President Clinton decided to delay and shorten a trip to Greece in reaction to growing security concerns and the prospect of violent anti-American demonstrations.

2000 – The battle over Florida’s disputed presidential election continued, with George W. Bush’s camp pressing Al Gore to concede without pursuing multiple recounts, and Democrats pressing ahead with protests, determined to find enough votes to erase Bush’s razor-thin lead in initial counting. An unofficial tally gave Bush a 327-vote lead.

2001 – Pres. Bush made his 1st address to the UN. He warned that all nations were possible targets of terrorism and urged them to join with the United States in a campaign to prevent more attacks. Bush also met with Gen. Musharraf of Pakistan and pledged to boost aid there.

2001 – Traces of anthrax were reported in offices of the Hart and Longworth government buildings in Washington DC.

2001 – Northern Alliance forces swept through five northern provinces, Shibarghan, Meimanah, Aybal, Taloqan, and Kunduz, in a rapid advance. The fall of Mazari Sharif had triggered a complete collapse of Taliban positions. Many local commanders switched sides rather than fight. The regime was beginning to unravel at the seams throughout the north. Many of their front line troops were outflanked and then surrounded in the northern city of Kunduz as the Northern Alliance drove past them southwards. Even in the south, their hold on power seemed tenuous at best. The religious police stopped their regular patrols. A complete implosion of the Taliban regime seemed imminent.

2002 – Bush administration officials promised “zero-tolerance” if Saddam Hussein refused to comply with international calls to disarm.

2002 – U.S. warplanes flying from an aircraft carrier in the Gulf struck missile sites in southern Iraq in response to hostile acts.

2003 – The US State Dept. distanced itself from a congressional push to capture toppled Liberian leader Charles Taylor in Nigeria via a $2 million reward.

2003 – In Burundi Hutu rebels bombarded the capital with rockets, killing 5 people, destroying part of the Chinese Embassy and striking the home of a U.S. military attaché.

2003 – A top Iranian official said that his country had suspended its enrichment of uranium and sent a letter to the IAEA accepting additional inspections of its nuclear facilities.

2006 – The National Museum of the Marine Corps is opened and dedicated by U.S. President George W. Bush and announces that Marine Corporal Jason Dunham will receive the Medal of Honor in Quantico, Virginia.

2006 – NASA’s Cassini spacecraft records a hurricane-like storm on the south pole of Saturn which is the first time such an event has been observed on another planet.

2008 – Over five months after landing on Mars, NASA declares the Phoenix mission concluded after communications with the lander were lost.

2011 – Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs of the United States Army is convicted of murder in relation to the 2010 Maywand District killings in Afghanistan.

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Congressional Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day

BRITT, MAURICE L.
Rank and organization: Captain (then Lieutenant), U.S. Army, 3d Infantry Division. Place and date: North of Mignano, Italy, 10 November 1943. Entered service at: Lonoke, Ark. Born: 29 June 1919, Carlisle, Ark. G.O. No.: 23, 24 March 1944. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Disdaining enemy hand grenades and close-range machine pistol, machinegun, and rifle, Lt. Britt inspired and led a handful of his men in repelling a bitter counterattack by approximately 100 Germans against his company positions north of Mignano, Italy, the morning of 10 November 1943. During the intense fire fight, Lt. Britt’s canteen and field glasses were shattered; a bullet pierced his side; his chest, face, and hands were covered with grenade wounds. Despite his wounds, for which he refused to accept medical attention until ordered to do so by his battalion commander following the battle, he personally killed 5 and wounded an unknown number of Germans, wiped out one enemy machinegun crew, fired 5 clips of carbine and an undetermined amount of Ml rifle ammunition, and threw 32 fragmentation grenades. His bold, aggressive actions, utterly disregarding superior enemy numbers, resulted in capture of 4 Germans, 2 of them wounded, and enabled several captured Americans to escape. Lt. Britt’s undaunted courage and prowess in arms were largely responsible for repulsing a German counterattack which, if successful, would have isolated his battalion and destroyed his company.

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11 November

VETERANS DAY

Feast Day of St. Martin of Tours, Patron Saint of Chaplains and Logisticians: When Sulpicius Severus first met Martin of Tours he was stunned. Not only did the bishop offer him hospitality at his residence — a monk’s cell in the wilderness instead of a palace — but Martin washed Sulpicius’ hands before dinner and his feet in the evening. But Sulpicius was just the kind of person Martin showed the greatest honor to — a humble man without any rank or privilege. People of nobility and position were turned away from his abbey by chalk cliffs, out of fear of the temptation to pride. From that visit, Sulpicius became Martin’s disciple, friend, and biographer. Little is known of many of the saints who died in the early years of Christianity but thanks to Sulpicius, who wrote his first biography of Martin before the saint died and who talked to most of the people involved in his life, we have a priceless record of Martin’s life.

1620 – The Mayflower Compact is signed in what is now Provincetown Harbor near Cape Cod. The Mayflower Compact was the first governing document of Plymouth Colony. It was written by the Separatists, sometimes referred to as the “Saints”, fleeing from religious persecution by King James of England. They traveled aboard the Mayflower in 1620 along with adventurers, tradesmen, and servants, most of whom were referred to, by the Separatists as “Strangers”. The Mayflower Compact was signed aboard ship by most adult men. The Pilgrims used the Julian Calendar, also known as Old Style dates, which, at that time, was ten days behind the Gregorian Calendar. Signing the covenant were 41 of the ship’s 101 passengers, while the Mayflower was anchored in what is now Provincetown Harbor within the hook at the northern tip of Cape Cod.

1778 – Iroquois Indians and Torries, led by William Butler, massacred 40 inhabitants of Cherry Valley, N.Y. The Cherry Valley massacre was an attack by British and Iroquois forces on a fort and the village of Cherry Valley in eastern New York during the American Revolutionary War. It has been described as one of the most horrific frontier massacres of the war. A mixed force of Loyalists, British soldiers, Seneca and Mohawks descended on Cherry Valley, whose defenders, despite warnings, were unprepared for the attack. During the raid, the Seneca in particular targeted non-combatants, and reports state that 30 such individuals were slain, in addition to a number of armed defenders. The raiders were under the overall command of Walter Butler, who exercised little authority over the Indians on the expedition. Historian Barbara Graymont describes Butler’s command of the expedition as “criminally incompetent”. The Seneca were angered by accusations that they had committed atrocities at the Battle of Wyoming, and the colonists’ recent destruction of their forward bases of operation at Unadilla, Onaquaga, and Tioga. Butler’s authority with the Indians was undermined by his poor treatment of Joseph Brant, the leader of the Mohawks. Butler repeatedly maintained, against accusations that he permitted the atrocities to take place, that he was powerless to restrain the Seneca. During the campaigns of 1778, Brant achieved an undeserved reputation for brutality. He was not present at Wyoming, although many thought he was, and actively sought to minimize the atrocities that took place at Cherry Valley. The massacre contributed to calls for reprisals, leading to the 1779 Sullivan Expedition which drove the Iroquois out of western New York.

1811 – Confederate General Ben McCulloch is born near Rutherford City, Tennessee. Raised in Tennessee, McCulloch followed his friends Davy Crockett and Sam Houston to Texas in 1835. Measles kept him from joining Crockett at the Alamo, where its defenders, including Crockett, were massacred when the Mexican army overran the mission during the Texas War for Independence. McCulloch served with Houston at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, in which Mexican General Santa Anna’s army was defeated and Texas gained its independence. After the war, McCulloch served in the Texas legislature and the Texas Rangers, the primary law enforcement agency in the Republic of Texas. He fought under General Zachary Taylor during the Mexican War and served as a U.S. marshal in the 1850s. When the Civil War broke out, McCulloch became a colonel in command of Texas troops. He rode to San Antonio and forced the surrender of a Federal arsenal there, while his brother, Henry, took control of Federal posts on the Texas frontier. In May 1861, Ben McCulloch became a brigadier general in the Confederate army and was assigned to defend Indian Territory. He formed alliances with several tribes in the area before moving his force to southwestern Missouri, where he played a key role in the Confederate victory at Wilson’s Creek on August 10, 1861.

McCulloch commanded a wing of the Army of the West as it approached a Union force led by General Samuel Curtis in northwestern Arkansas in March 1862. Curtis took up a defensive position around Elkhorn Tavern and waited for the Confederates to attack. On the night of March 6, McCulloch marched his troops around Curtis’s right flank and prepared for an early morning assault on March 7. Curtis discovered the movement, and blocked McCulloch’s advance. That day, at the Battle of Pea Ridge, Curtis held off a furious attack by McCulloch’s force. McCulloch rode forward to monitor his men’s progress when he emerged from some underbrush directly in front of a Union regiment. Identifiable by his trademark black velvet suit (he eschewed uniforms), a volley from the Yankees killed McCulloch instantly. His successor, General James McIntosh, was killed minutes later and the leaderless Confederates retreated. McCulloch’s death was the turning point in the battle, and the Confederate defeat ensured Union domination of northern Arkansas for the rest of the war.

1813 – In the Battle of Crysler’s Farm, British and Canadian forces defeat a larger American force, causing the Americans to abandon their Saint Lawrence campaign. The Battle of Crysler’s Farm, also known as the Battle of Crysler’s Field, was fought on 11 November 1813, during the War of 1812. The name Chrysler’s Farm is sometimes used for the engagement, but Crysler is the proper spelling.

1831 – Nat Turner was hanged and skinned in Southampton county, Va. Hysteria surrounded this rebellion and over 200 slaves, some as far away as North Carolina, were murdered by whites in fear of a generalized uprising. A martyr to the anti-slavery cause, Turner’s actions had the adverse effect of virtually ending all abolitionist activities in the south before the Civil War.

1839 – The Virginia Military Institute is founded in Lexington, Virginia.

1861 – Thaddeus Lowe made balloon observation of Confederate forces from Balloon- Boat G.W. Parke Custis anchored in Potomac River. G. W. Parke Custis was procured for $150, and readied for the service at the Washington Navy Yard. Lowe reported: “I left the navy-yard early Sunday morning, the 10th instant– . . . towed our by the steamer Coeur de Lion, having on board competent assistant aeronauts, together with my new gas generating apparatus, which, though used for the first time, worked admirably. We located at the mouth of Mattawoman Creek, about three miles from the opposite or Virginia shore. [11 November] proceeded to make observations accompanied in my ascensions by General Sickles and others. We had a fine view of the enemy’s camp-fires during the evening, and saw the rebels constructing new batteries at Freestone Point.”

1864 – Sherman’s troops destroyed Rome, Georgia and continued on toward Atlanta.

1864 – Commander Henry K. Davenport, U.S.S. Lancaster, captured Confederates on board steamer Salvador, bound from Panama to California, after having been informed that they intended to seize the ship at sea and convert her into a raider. Salvador’s captain had warned naval authorities at Panama Bay that the attempt was to be made, and Davenport and his men arranged to search the baggage of the passengers after the vessel passed the territorial limits of Panama. The search revealed guns and ammunition, along with a commission from Secretary Mallory for the capture; the Confederates were promptly taken into custody. This daring party, led by Acting Master Thomas E. Hogg, CSN, was one of many attempting to seize Union steamers and convert them into commerce raiders, especially with a view toward capturing the gold shipments from California. Union warships usually convoyed the California ships to prevent their capture.

1865 – Dr. Mary Edward Walker, 1st Army female surgeon, was awarded Medal of Honor by Pres. Andrew Johnson for her work as a field doctor for outstanding service at the Battle of Bull Run, at the Battle of Chickamauga, as a Confederate prisoner of war in Richmond, Va., and at the Battle of Atlanta.

1870 – Navy expedition to explore the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, southern Mexico, commanded by CAPT Robert W. Shufeldt, enters the Coatzacoalcos River to begin a survey for possible interoceanic canal. Support provided by USS Kansas and USS Mayflower.

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1885 – George Smith Patton, one of the great American generals of World War II, is born in San Gabriel, California. Patton came from a family with a long history of military service. After studying at West Point, he served as a tank officer in World War I, and his experience in that conflict, along with his extensive military study, led him to become an advocate of the crucial importance of the tank in future warfare. After the American entrance into World War II, Patton was placed in command of an important U.S. tank division and played a key role in the Allied invasion of French North Africa in 1942. In 1943, Patton led the U.S. Seventh Army in its assault on Sicily and won fame for out-commanding Montgomery during the so-called Race to Messina. Although Patton was one of the ablest American commanders in World War II, he was also one of the most controversial. He presented himself as a modern-day cavalryman, designed his own uniform, and was known to make eccentric claims that he was a direct descent from great military leaders of the past through reincarnation.

During the Sicilian campaign, Patton generated considerable controversy when he accused a hospitalized U.S. soldier suffering from battle fatigue of cowardice and then personally struck him across the face. The famously profane general was forced to issue a public apology and was reprimanded by General Dwight Eisenhower. However, when it was time for the invasion of Western Europe, Eisenhower could find no general as formidable as Patton, and the general was again granted an important military post. In 1944, Patton commanded the U.S. Third Army in the invasion of France, and in December of that year his expertise in military movement and tank warfare helped crush the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes. During one of his many successful campaigns, General Patton was said to have declared, “Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.” On December 21, 1945, he died in a hospital in Germany from injuries sustained in an automobile accident near Mannheim.

1889 – Washington became the 42nd state of the US. Washington is located north of Oregon, west of Idaho, and south of the Canadian province of British Columbia on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. Named after George Washington, the first President of the United States, the state was made out of the western part of the Washington Territory which had been ceded by Britain in 1846 by the Oregon Treaty as a settlement of the Oregon Boundary Dispute. It was admitted to the Union as the 42nd state in 1889. Although its official, unambiguous name is “The State of Washington,” the state’s name is often reversed and referred to as “Washington state” to the chagrin of many natives. This is meant to distinguish it from Washington, D.C., also named for George Washington. Another nickname is “the Evergreen State.” Its largest city is Seattle, situated in the west, followed by Spokane, located in the east, and its capital is Olympia.

1909 – Construction began on the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

1918 – At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Great War ends. At 5 a.m. that morning, Germany, bereft of manpower and supplies and faced with imminent invasion, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiýgne, France. The First World War left nine million soldiers dead and 21 million wounded, with Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France, and Great Britain each losing nearly a million or more lives. In addition, at least five million civilians died from disease, starvation, or exposure. On June 28, 1914, in an event that is widely regarded as sparking the outbreak of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, was shot to death with his wife by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Ferdinand had been inspecting his uncle’s imperial armed forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite the threat of Serbian nationalists who wanted these Austro-Hungarian possessions to join newly independent Serbia. Austria-Hungary blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the problem of Slavic nationalism once and for all. However, as Russia supported Serbia, an Austro-Hungarian declaration of war was delayed until its leaders received assurances from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would support their cause in the event of a Russian intervention. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe’s great powers collapsed.

On July 29, Austro-Hungarian forces began to shell the Serbian capital, Belgrade, and Russia, Serbia’s ally, ordered a troop mobilization against Austria-Hungary. France, allied with Russia, began to mobilize on August 1. France and Germany declared war against each other on August 3. After crossing through neutral Luxembourg, the German army invaded Belgium on the night of August 3-4, prompting Great Britain, Belgium’s ally, to declare war against Germany. For the most part, the people of Europe greeted the outbreak of war with jubilation. Most patriotically assumed that their country would be victorious within months. Of the initial belligerents, Germany was most prepared for the outbreak of hostilities, and its military leaders had formatted a sophisticated military strategy known as the “Schlieffen Plan,” which envisioned the conquest of France through a great arcing offensive through Belgium and into northern France. Russia, slow to mobilize, was to be kept occupied by Austro-Hungarian forces while Germany attacked France. The Schlieffen Plan was nearly successful, but in early September the French rallied and halted the German advance at the bloody Battle of the Marne near Paris.

By the end of 1914, well over a million soldiers of various nationalities had been killed on the battlefields of Europe, and neither for the Allies nor the Central Powers was a final victory in sight. On the western front–the battle line that stretched across northern France and Belgium–the combatants settled down in the trenches for a terrible war of attrition. In 1915, the Allies attempted to break the stalemate with an amphibious invasion of Turkey, which had joined the Central Powers in October 1914, but after heavy bloodshed the Allies were forced to retreat in early 1916. The year 1916 saw great offensives by Germany and Britain along the western front, but neither side accomplished a decisive victory. In the east, Germany was more successful, and the disorganized Russian army suffered terrible losses, spurring the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. By the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia and immediately set about negotiating peace with Germany.

In 1918, the infusion of American troops and resources into the western front finally tipped the scale in the Allies’ favor. Germany signed an armistice agreement with the Allies on November 11, 1918. World War I was known as the “war to end all wars” because of the great slaughter and destruction it caused. Unfortunately, the peace treaty that officially ended the conflict–the Treaty of Versailles of 1919–forced punitive terms on Germany that destabilized Europe and laid the groundwork for World War II.

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1919 – The Centralia Massacre in Centralia, Washington results the deaths of four members of the American Legion and the lynching of a local leader of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Centralia Massacre, also known as the Armistice Day Riot, was a violent and bloody incident that occurred during a parade celebrating the first anniversary of Armistice Day. This conflict between the American Legion and workers who were members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or “Wobblies”) resulted in six deaths, additional wounded, multiple prison terms, and an ongoing and especially bitter dispute over the motivations and events that precipitated the massacre. It was the culmination of years of bad blood between members of the local Legion and members of the IWW. Both Centralia and the neighboring town of Chehalis had a large number of World War I veterans, with robust chapters of the Legion, as well as a large number of IWW members, some also war veterans.

The ramifications of this event included a trial that attracted national media attention, notoriety that contributed to the Red Scare of 1919–20, the creation of a powerful martyr for the IWW, a monument to one side of the battle and a mural for the other, a formal tribute to the fallen Legionnaires by President Warren G. Harding, and a deep-rooted enmity between the local American Legion and the Wobblies that persists into the 21st century.

1920– Lenah S. Higbee becomes the first woman to be awarded the Navy Cross. It was awarded for her World War I service.

1921 – Washington Naval Conference begins. More formally known as the International Conference on Naval Limitation, this disarmament effort was occasioned by the hugely expensive naval construction rivalry that existed among Britain, Japan and the United States. Senator William E. Borah, Republican of Idaho, took the lead on this matter and urged that the major Allied nations from the recent war gather in an effort to slow the arms race. The proposal was not met with initial enthusiasm by the Harding administration, but it became a political imperative when it was portrayed as a Republican alternative to League of Nations’ peace efforts. In the summer of 1921, Harding extended invitations and expanded the agenda beyond arms control to include discussion of issues in the Pacific and Far East.

The formal opening of the conference occurred on Armistice Day 1921. The major naval powers of Britain, France, Italy, Japan and the United States were in attendance as well as other nations with concerns about territories in the Pacific — Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and China — who were not parties to the disarmament discussions. Soviet Russia was not invited, nor were the defeated Central Powers. The American delegation was led by Charles Evans Hughes, the secretary of state, and included Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge and Oscar Underwood, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate. In the initial session, Hughes shocked the delegates by going beyond platitudes and offering a detailed plan for arms reduction. Labeled by some as one of the most dramatic moments in American diplomatic history, Hughes called for the scrapping of nearly two million tons of warships and a lengthy “holiday” on the construction of new ships. He was widely hailed in the press as a savior, but leaders of the other Allied governments were quietly skeptical.

1921 – Exactly three years after the end of World War I, the Tomb of the Unknowns is dedicated at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia during an Armistice Day ceremony presided over by President Warren G. Harding. Two days before, an unknown American soldier, who had fallen somewhere on a World War I battlefield, arrived at the nation’s capital from a military cemetery in France. On Armistice Day, in the presence of President Harding and other government, military, and international dignitaries, the unknown soldier was buried with highest honors beside the Memorial Amphitheater. As the soldier was lowered to his final resting place, a two-inch layer of soil brought from France was placed below his coffin so that he might rest forever atop the earth on which he died. The Tomb of the Unknowns is considered the most hallowed grave at Arlington Cemetery, America’s most sacred military cemetery. The tombstone itself, designed by sculptor Thomas Hudson Jones, was not completed until 1932, when it was unveiled bearing the description “Here Rests in Honored Glory an American Soldier Known but to God.” The World War I unknown was later joined by the unidentified remains of soldiers from America’s other major 20th century wars and the tomb was put under permanent guard by special military sentinels. In 1998, a Vietnam War unknown, who was buried at the tomb for 14 years, was disinterred from the Tomb after DNA testing indicated his identity. Air Force Lieutenant Michael Blassie was returned to his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, and was buried with military honors, including an F-15 jet “missing man” flyover and a lone bugler sounding taps.

1922 – Kurt Vonnegut, American author who wrote “Slaughterhouse Five,” was born. Vonnegut was a World War II soldier who witnessed the firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. He attended Cornell and joined the Air Force during World War II. He was captured by Germans and held in Dresden, where he was forced to dig out dead and charred bodies in the aftermath of the city’s bombing. After the war, he studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and later wrote journalism and public relations material. Vonnegut’s other novels, including Cat’s Cradle (1963), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Galapagos (1985), and others, did not generate as much controversy as Slaughterhouse-Five. His experimental writing style, combining the real, the absurd, the satiric, and the fanciful, attracted attention and made his books popular. Vonnegut is also a gifted graphic artist whose satirical sketches appear in some of his later novels, including Breakfast of Champions.

1940 – Willys unveiled the “Jeep.” The invitation to submit bids was sent to 135 U.S. automobile manufacturers to produce 70 vehicles; the small Bantam company managed to meet the deadline delivering the pilot model in September 23, 1940. Although it was 730 lbs. overweight it was judged good. Willys-Overland submitted crude sketches of their vehicle and underbid Bantam, although they could not meet the 75 day delivery period; after adding penalties for this the Bantam proposal was lower and this company received an order to produce 70 Model 60 or MKII. Willys Overland submited two units of its pilot model, the Quad, on this day; this had many of the features from the Bantam as did another prototype from Ford, who delivered two of its Pigmy in November 23.

Both Willys-Overland and Ford were given free access to Bantam’s prototype and blueprints, which goes a long way to explain the similarities. With all three prototypes satisfactory, the Army decided to order 1500 of each for field evaluation, with deliveries to begin in early 1941; each of the prototypes should suffer alterations to remedy deficiencies brought out by the testing. The modified versions were the Bantam 40 BRC, the Willys MA and the Ford GP (G for Government, P for 80″ wheelbase). In July 1941 the War Department decided to adopt one single model; Willys was selected because it bid lower than the others but the MA had to be redesigned in view of the experience gained with the tests. The redesigned model was named MB by Willys but the contracts to manufacture the vehicle went both to Willys and Ford, where it was named GPW (the W was added to refer to the Willys motor). Meanwhile, about 1000 Bantam 40 BRCs were built for the Russian Army.

1940 – The British Mediterranean Fleet attacks the Italian base at Taranto. During the night 21 Swordfish aircraft attack in two waves and gain three torpedo hits on the brand new battleship Littorio and one each on Caio Duilio and Conte di Cavour. Two other ships are damaged. The aircraft have come from the carrier Illustrious and only two are lost. This brilliant attack will certainly be studied by other navies and the potential for such an attack on an enemy fleet in harbor is clear to the Japanese.

1942 – On Guadalcanal, the American attacks to the west are halted when news of Japanese supply convoys comes in.

1942 – Congress approves lowering the draft age to 18 and raising the upper limit to age 37. In September 1940, Congress, by wide margins in both houses, passed the Burke-Wadsworth Act, and the first peacetime draft was imposed in the history of the United States. The registration of men between the ages of 21 and 36 began exactly one month later. There were some 20 million eligible young men-50 percent were rejected the very first year, either for health reasons or because 20 percent of those who registered were illiterate. But by November 1942, with the United States now a participant in the war, and not merely a neutral bystander, the draft ages had to be expanded; men 18 to 37 were now eligible. Blacks were passed over for the draft because of racist assumptions about their abilities and the viability of a mixed-race military. But this changed in 1943, when a “quota” was imposed, meant to limit the numbers of blacks drafted to reflect their numbers in the overall population, roughly 10.6 percent of the whole. Initially, blacks were restricted to “labor units,” but this too ended as the war progressed, when they were finally used in combat. By war’s end, approximately 34 million men had registered; 10 million had been inducted into the military.

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1943 – American Admiral Sherman and Admiral Montgomery lead two separate carrier task forces in an attack on the Japanese base at Rabaul on New Britain Island. Five carriers and 185 planes are involved. The Japanese lost almost 70 of their defending fighters as well as 1 light cruiser and 2 destroyers in the attack. A Japanese air strike on the carriers fails. Raid was first use of SB2C Curtiss Helldivers in combat.

1943 – On Bougainville, the Japanese 23rd Regiment is push back by the US 3rd Marine Division.

1943 – An Allied convoy east of Oran is attacked by about 50 German aircraft. It loses 3 transports and 1 tanker.

1944 – Private Eddie Slovik was convicted of desertion and sentenced to death for refusing to join his unit in the European Theater of Operations.

1944 – Aircraft from 8 carriers of US Task Force 38 attack a Japanese convoy off Leyte, near Ormoc. Four destroyers, 1 minesweeper and 5 transports (carrying nearly 10,000 troops) are sunk.

1944 – An American cruiser and destroyer task force, commanded by Admiral Smith, shells the island of Iwo Jima during the night.

1944 – In China, Japanese forces capture the Allied airbases at Kweilin and Liuchow. American forces have rendered the base at Liuchow unusable prior to withdrawing.

1954 – November 11 designated as Veterans Day to honor veterans of all U.S. wars.

1966 – Gemini 12 blasted off from Cape Kennedy, Fla., with astronauts James A. Lovell and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr.

1967 – Three U.S. prisoners of war, two of them African American, are released by the Viet Cong in a ceremony in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The three men were turned over to Tom Hayden, a “new left” antiwar activist. U.S. officials in Saigon said that the released prisoners had been “brainwashed,” but the State Department denied it. The Viet Cong said that the release was a response to antiwar protests in the U.S. and a gesture towards the “courageous struggle” of blacks in the United States. Also on this day: In Vietnam, the Americal (formerly Task Force Oregon) and 1st Cavalry Divisions combine to form Operation Wheeler/Wallowa in Quang Nam and Quang Tin Provinces, I Corps. The purpose of the operation was to relieve enemy pressure and to reinforce the III Marine Amphibious Force in the area, thus permitting Marines to be deployed further north. The operation lasted more than 12 months and resulted in 10,000 enemy casualties.

1968 – U.S. joint-service Operation Commando Hunt is launched. This operation was designed to interdict Communist routes of infiltration along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, through Laos into South Vietnam. The aerial campaign involved a series of intensive air operations by U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps aircraft and lasted until April 1972. During the course of the operation, nearly 3 million tons of bombs fell on Laos. While Communist infiltration was slowed by this campaign, it was not seriously disrupted. Commando Hunt was ultimately considered a failure.

1972 – The massive Long Binh military base, once the largest U.S. installation outside the continental United States, is handed over to the South Vietnamese. This logistical complex, which had been constructed on the outskirts of Bien Hoa near the outskirts of Saigon, included numerous ammunition depots, supply depots, and other logistics installations. It served as the headquarters for U.S. Army Vietnam, 1st Logistical Command, and several other related activities. The handing-over of the base effectively marked the end–after seven years–of direct U.S. participation in the war. After the Long Binh base was turned over, about 29,000 U.S. soldiers remained in South Vietnam, most them advisors with South Vietnamese units, or helicopter crewmen, and maintenance, supply, and office staff.

1978 – Veteran’s Day, originally know as Armistice Day, became a national holiday in 1938. It was changed back by Congress in this year to this day rather than the 4th Monday of October, which had been set in 1968.

1981 – Commissioning of first Trident-class Nuclear Powered Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarine, USS Ohio (SSBN-726).

1991 – The United States stationed its first diplomat in Cambodia in 16 years to help the war-shocked nation arrange democratic elections.

1992 – By letter, Russian President Boris Yeltsin told U.S. senators that Americans had been held in prison camps after World War II and some were “summarily executed,” but that others were still living in his country voluntarily.

1993 – A bronze statue honoring the more than 11,000 American women who had served in the Vietnam War was dedicated in Washington, D.C.

1996 – The Army reported getting nearly 2,000 calls to a hot line set up after revelations of a sex scandal at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Meanwhile, a Pentagon official said the Army was ready to take action in another case of alleged sexual misconduct at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.

1996 – Phan Thi Kim Phuc laid a wreath at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. John Plummer, Vietnam era helicopter pilot, met with Phan Thi Kim at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington in reconciliation. Phan Thi Kim had suffered severe napalm burns after a napalm bombing of her village in Jun 1972.

1997 – In Pakistan 4 American oil company employees and their driver were shot dead in Karachi. It was believed to be in retaliation for the conviction of Amil Kasi for the 1993 murder of 2 CIA employees.

1998 – President Clinton ordered warships, planes and troops to the Persian Gulf as he laid out his case for a possible attack on Iraq. Iraq, meanwhile, showed no sign of backing down on its refusal to deal with U.N. weapons inspectors.

2000 – President Clinton led groundbreaking ceremonies in Washington DC for the National WW II Memorial.

2000 – General elections were held in Bosnia.

2001 – In Afghanistan Northern Alliance forces with help from US warplanes and advisers captured Taloqan and some 200 Taliban were reported killed. Local warlords accepted a payment to change allegiance.

2001 – A Pakistani newspaper (Ausaf) published the second part of an interview in which Osama bin Laden was quoted as saying he had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks in the United States, and declared he would never allow himself to be captured.

2002 – Iraqi lawmakers denounced a new UN resolution on weapons inspections as dishonest, provocative and worthy of rejection. But the Iraqi parliament said it ultimately would trust whatever President Saddam Hussein decided.

2003 – The Kurdish guerrilla group that battled the Turkish army for some 15 years announced that it was dissolving itself and was planning to form a new group that would likely would pursue Kurdish rights through negotiations. The Kurdistan Workers Party changed its name to the Congress for Freedom and Democracy in Kurdistan, or KADEK, last year.

2010 – Iceland opens an inquiry as it emerges that its citizens may be being spied on by the United States embassy. This follows similar investigations into possible illegal U.S. activities in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, with possibly hundreds of Norwegians being monitored and Sweden describing the matter as “very serious”.

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Congressional Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day

STICKOFFER, JULIUS H.
Rank and organization: Saddler, Company L, 8th U.S. Cavalry. Place and date: At Cienaga Springs, Utah, 11 November 1868. Entered service at:——. Birth: Switzerland. Date of issue: 3 March 1870. Citation: Gallantry in action.

*LOGAN, JOHN A.
Rank and organization: Major, 33d Infantry, U.S. Volunteers. Place and date: At San Jacinto, Philippine Islands, 11 November 1899. Entered service at: Youngstown, Ohio. Born: 24 July 1865, Carbondale, Ill. Date of issue: 3 May 1902. Citation: For most distinguished gallantry in leading his battalion upon the entrenchments of the enemy, on which occasion he fell mortally wounded.

MULLIN, HUGH P.
Rank and organization: Seaman, U.S. Navy. Born: 20 March 1878, Richmond, Ill. Accredited to: Illinois. G.O. No.: 537, 8 January 1900. Citation: On board the U.S.S. Texas during the coaling of that vessel at Hampton Roads, Va., 11 November 1899. Jumping overboard while wearing a pair of heavy rubber boots and at great risk to himself, Mullin rescued Alfred Kosminski, apprentice, second class, who fell overboard, by supporting him until he was safely hauled from the water.

*LINDSTROM, FLOYD K.
Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, 3d Infantry Division. Place and date: Near Mignano, Italy, 11 November 1943. Entered service at: Colorado Springs, Colo. Birth: Holdredge, Nebr. G.O. No.: 32, 20 April 1944. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of life above and beyond the call of duty. On 11 November 1943, this soldier’s platoon was furnishing machinegun support for a rifle company attacking a hill near Mignano, Italy, when the enemy counterattacked, forcing the riflemen and half the machinegun platoon to retire to a defensive position. Pfc. Lindstrom saw that his small section was alone and outnumbered 5 to 1, yet he immediately deployed the few remaining men into position and opened fire with his single gun. The enemy centered fire on him with machinegun, machine pistols, and grenades. Unable to knock out the enemy nest from his original position, Pfc. Lindstrom picked up his own heavy machinegun and staggered 15 yards up the barren, rocky hillside to a new position, completely ignoring enemy small arms fire which was striking all around him.

From this new site, only 10 yards from the enemy machinegun, he engaged it in an intense duel. Realizing that he could not hit the hostile gunners because they were behind a large rock, he charged uphill under a steady stream of fire, killed both gunners with his pistol and dragged their gun down to his own men, directing them to employ it against the enemy. Disregarding heavy rifle fire, he returned to the enemy machinegun nest for 2 boxes of ammunition, came back and resumed withering fire from his own gun. His spectacular performance completely broke up the German counterattack. Pfc. Lindstrom demonstrated aggressive spirit and complete fearlessness in the face of almost certain death.




HAPPY VETERANS DAY


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12 November

1439 – Plymouth, England, becomes the first town incorporated by the English Parliament.

1602 – The Vizcaino expedition held Mass on the feast day of San Diego de Alcala. He named the California landing port after the saint.

1775 – General Washington forbade the enlistment of blacks.

1861 – Fingal (later C.S.S. Atlanta ), purchased in England, entered Savannah laden with military supplies– the first ship to run the blockade solely on Confederate government account.

1863 – Confederate General James Longstreet arrived at Loudon, Tennessee to assist the attack on Union General Ambrose Burnside’s troops at Knoxville.

1864 – A boat expedition from U.S.S. Hendrick Hudson, Acting Lieutenant Charles H. Rockwell, and U.S.S. Nita, Acting Lieutenant Robert B. Smith, attempted to destroy Confederate salt works on a reconnaissance near Tampa Bay, Florida, but the sailors were driven back to their boats by Southern cavalry.

1864 – Union General William T. Sherman orders the business district of Atlanta destroyed before he embarks on his famous March to the Sea. When Sherman captured Atlanta in early September 1864, he knew that he could not remain there for long. His tenuous supply line ran from Nashville, Tennessee, through Chattanooga, then one hundred miles through mountainous northern Georgia. The army he had just defeated, the Army of Tennessee, was still in the area and its leader, John Bell Hood, swung around Atlanta to try to damage Sherman’s lifeline. Of even greater concern was the Confederate cavalry of General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was a brilliant commander who could strike quickly against the railroads and river transports on which Sherman relied. During the fall, Sherman conceived of a plan to split his enormous army. He sent part of it, commanded by General George Thomas, back toward Nashville to deal with Hood while he prepared to take the rest of the troops across Georgia. Through October, Sherman built up a massive cache of supplies in Atlanta. He then ordered a systematic destruction of Atlanta to prevent the Confederates from recovering anything once the Yankees had abandoned the city. By one estimate, 37 percent of the city was ruined. This was the same policy Sherman would apply to the rest of Georgia as he marched to Savannah. Before leaving on November 15, Sherman’s forces had burned the industrial district of Atlanta and left little but a smoking shell.

1867 – After more than a decade of ineffective military campaigns and infamous atrocities, a conference begins at Fort Laramie to discuss alternative solutions to the “Indian problem” and to initiate peace negotiations with the Sioux. The United States had been fighting periodic battles with Sioux and Cheyenne tribes since the 1854. That year, the Grattan Massacre inspired loud calls for revenge, though largely unjustified, against the Plains Indians. Full-scale war erupted on the plains in 1864, leading to vicious fighting and the inexcusable Sand Creek Massacre, during which Colorado militiamen killed 105 Cheyenne women and children who were living peacefully at their winter camp. By 1867, the cost of the war against the Plains Indians, the Army’s failure to achieve decisive results, and news of atrocities like those at Sand Creek turned the American public and U.S. Congress against the Army’s aggressive military solution to the “Indian problem.” Concluding that peaceful negotiations were preferable to war, the attendees at the Fort Laramie conference initiated talks with the Sioux. The talks bore results the following year when U.S. negotiators agreed to abandon American forts on the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming and Montana, leaving the territory in the hands of the Sioux. However, the promise of peace on the central plains was fleeting. Concern about wars between the different Indian tribes led the U.S. to renege on its promise to provide guns to the Cheyenne, and the angry Indians took revenge on Kansas settlements by killing 15 men and raping five women. By late 1868, American soldiers were again preparing for war on the Plains.

1912 – Robert Scott’s diary and frozen dead body were found in Antarctica.

1912 – LT Theodore Ellyson makes first successful launching of an airplane (A-3) by catapult at the Washington Navy Yard.

1923 – Adolf Hitler was arrested for his Nov 8 attempted German coup.

1927 – Josef Stalin became the undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union as Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party.

1940 – CNO Admiral Stark submits memorandum to Secretary of the Navy on 4 plans if U.S. enters war. He favors the fourth one, Plan Dog, calling for strong offensive in the Atlantic and defense in the Pacific.

1942 – The World War II naval Battle of Guadalcanal began. A large American convoy carrying supplies and reinforcements retreats upon the approach of a large Japanese naval force. The Japanese carry out air attacks on the American land positions as well as their shipping.

1943 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt embarks on USS Iowa (BB-61) to go to the Allied conferences at Teheran, Iran, and Cairo, Egypt.

1943 – The Japanese carrier aircraft stationed at Rabaul on New Britain are withdrawn. Of the 173 planes committed, 121 have been lost, with many pilots.

1943 – The US 5th Army assault on the Reinhard Line fails to achieve any further progress. The British 56th Division (part of 10th Corps, US 5th Army) is forced to withdraw from some positions on Monte Camino.

1944 – U.S. fighters wiped out a Japanese convoy near Leyte, consisting of six destroyers, four transports, and 8,000 troops.

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1948 – An international war crimes tribunal in Tokyo passes death sentences on seven Japanese military and government officials, including General Hideki Tojo, who served as premier of Japan from 1941 to 1944. Eight days before, the trial ended after 30 months with all 25 Japanese defendants being found guilty of breaching the laws and customs of war. In addition to the death sentences imposed on Tojo and others principals, such as Iwane Matsui, who organized the Rape of Nanking, and Heitaro Kimura, who brutalized Allied prisoners of war, 16 others were sentenced to life imprisonment. The remaining two of the 25 defendants were sentenced to lesser terms in prison. Unlike the Nuremberg trial of German war criminals, where there were four chief prosecutors representing Great Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR, the Tokyo trial featured only one chief prosecutor–American Joseph B. Keenan, a former assistant to the U.S. attorney general. However, other nations, especially China, contributed to the proceedings, and Australian judge William Flood Webb presided. In addition to the central Tokyo trial, various tribunals sitting outside Japan judged some 5,000 Japanese guilty of war crimes, of whom more than 900 were executed.

1951 – The U.S. Eighth Army in Korea was ordered to cease offensive operations and begin an active defense.

1960 – Discoverer XVII was launched into orbit from California’s Vandenberg AFB. The Discoverer Program (1959-1962) was a ruse to conceal the Corona Program, a series of photoreconnaissance spy satellites. Corona was the first photoreconnaissance program, and a precursor of the military and civilian space imaging programs of today.

1960 – A coup against South Vietnam president Ngo Dinh Diem failed.

1969 – The US Army admitted to the 1968 Vietnam massacre of civilians at My Lai and announced an investigation of Lt William Calley for massacre of civilians at the Vietnamese village on March 16, 1968. The number of civilians who were killed numbered at least 100. Lt. Calley was later found guilty of murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor. Calley was the only person ever charged in connection with the events at My Lai. The nation was shocked and divided by the claims from Calley that he was following orders and that he was a scapegoat. President Richard Nixon in 1971 ordered him released from prison and placed under house arrest, and finally a federal judge threw out all charges against Calley and ordered him freed. Although the charges were later re-instated on appeal, he served no more jail time for the massacre at My Lai.

1971 – President Richard Nixon sets February 1, 1972, as the deadline for the withdrawal of an additional 45,000 U.S. troops. U.S. troop withdrawals had begun in the fall of 1969. After the February withdrawals were complete, the total U.S. force strength in South Vietnam was 139,000. Nixon said that most offensive activities were now being undertaken entirely by the South Vietnamese and that U.S. ground forces were “now in defensive positions.” He further stated that 80 percent of the forces that were in Vietnam when he took office had come home, and that American casualties had dropped to less than 10 a week.

1979 – President Carter announced an immediate halt to all imports of Iranian oil and freezes Iranian assets in US.

1980 – The U.S. space probe Voyager 1...more than three years after its launch, the U.S. planetary probe Voyager 1 edges within 77,000 miles of Saturn, the second-largest planet in the solar system. The photos, beamed 950 million miles back to California, stunned scientists. The high-resolution images showed a world that seemed to confound all known laws of physics. Saturn had not six, but hundreds of rings. The rings appeared to dance, buckle, and interlock in ways never thought possible. Two rings were intertwined, or “braided,” and pictures showed dark radial “spokes” moving inside the rings in the direction of rotation. Voyager 2, a sister spacecraft, arrived at Saturn in August 1981. The Voyagers also discovered three new moons around Saturn and a substantial atmosphere around Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Voyager 1 was preceded to Saturn by Pioneer 11, a smaller and less sophisticated U.S. spacecraft that flew by the gas giant in September 1979.

The Voyager space crafts were equipped with high-resolution television cameras that sent back more than 30,000 images of Saturn, its rings, and satellite. Voyager 1 was actually launched 16 days after Voyager 2, but its trajectory followed a quicker path to the outer planets. Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter in March 1979, followed by Voyager 2 four months later. Both spacecraft then continued on to Saturn, with Voyager 1 arriving in November 1980 and Voyager 2 in August 1981. Voyager 2 was then diverted to the remaining gas giants, arriving at Uranus in January 1986 and Neptune in August 1989. Voyager 1, meanwhile, studied interplanetary space and continued on to the edge of the solar system. In February 1998, Voyager 1 became the most distant man-made object from the sun, surpassing the distance of Pioneer 10. Voyager 2 is also traveling out of the solar system but at a slower pace. Both Voyager spacecrafts contain a gold-plated copper disk that has on it recorded sounds and images of Earth. Along with 115 analog images, the disk features sound selections that include greetings in 55 languages, 35 natural and man-made sounds, and portions of 27 musical pieces. The Voyagers are expected to remain operable until about the year 2020, periodically sending back data on the edge of the solar system.

1982 – Space shuttle Columbia launched for its first operational flight. The crew successfully used a remote manipulator arm.

1985 – The Unabomber mailed a pipe bomb to Prof. James V. McConnell of Ann Arbor, Mich. Two people were injured 3 days later when the package was opened, but not McConnell. McConnell and research assistant Nick Suing were injured when the bomb exploded.

1990 – Tim Berners-Lee publishes a formal proposal for the World Wide Web.

1991 – Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev told a news conference he’d been warned by President George H.W. Bush and other U.S. officials that a revolt was brewing before hard-liners staged their coup, but that he had discounted their information.

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1991 – President George H. W. Bush extends the initial mobilization of all Reserve Component units called in support of Operation Desert Shield from 90-days to 180-days (soon to be increased to 360-days) as the mission changes from defending Saudi Arabia from Iraqi invasion to compelling the Iraqi Army to withdraw from Kuwait. Along with this announcement came his decision to send an additional 200,000 troops (all branches) to the Southwest Asia theater.

1993 – US soldiers wound two Somalis near Mogadishu’s K-4 traffic circle. GIs are fired on by small arms and RPG’s.

1994 – President Clinton arrived in the Philippines to open a campaign for free trade in Asia and to commemorate World War II Allied victories in the Pacific.

1995 – The space shuttle “Atlantis” blasted off on a mission to dock with the Russian space station “Mir.”

1997 – Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

1998 – Eight Arab states declared that Iraq would be held responsible for any consequences from its stopping the work of UN arms inspectors.

1999 – In Pakistan several explosions near American structures struck in downtown Islamabad and injured 6 people. It was speculated that Taliban supporters were linked to the blasts.

2000 – On the eve of a federal court hearing on the Florida presidential election, advocates for George W. Bush and Al Gore previewed their legal strategies. Democrats justified painstaking recounts and Republicans said the practice could result in political “mischief” and human error.

2000 – In Florida Palm Beach election officials decided to recount all county votes, some 425,000, by hand.

2001 – Taliban forces fled Kabul under cover of darkness. Northern Alliance forces arrived the following afternoon, encountering a group of about twenty fighters hiding in the city’s park. This group was killed in a 15-minute gun battle. After these forces were neutralized, Kabul was in the hands of coalition forces. The fall of Kabul started a cascading collapse of Taliban positions. Within 24 hours, all Afghan provinces along the Iranian border had fallen, including Herat. Local Pashtun commanders and warlords had taken over throughout northeastern Afghanistan, including Jalalabad. Taliban holdouts in the north, mainly Pakistani volunteers, fell back to the northern city of Kunduz.

2002 – An Arab TV station broadcast an audiotape of Osama bin Laden, a voice that U.S. counter terrorism officials said is probably authentic.

2003 – Imelda Ortiz, a former Mexican consul to Lebanon, was arrested on charges of helping a smuggling ring move Arab migrants into the United States from Mexico. Federal agents over the previous 2 days arrested alleged ring leader Salim Boughader Mucharrafille along with alleged collaborators Melissa Ataja Valdez and Orlando Alfaro, in Tijuana.

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Congressional Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day

ADAMS, JAMES F.
Rank and organization: Private, Company D, 1st West Virginia Cavalry. Place and date: At Nineveh, Va., 12 November 1864. Entered service at: ——. Birth: Cabell County, Va. Date of issue: 26 November 1864. Citation: Capture of State flag of 14th Virginia Cavalry (C.S.A.)

SHOEMAKER, LEVI
Rank and organization: Sergeant, Company A, 1st West Virginia Cavalry. Place and date: At Nineveh, Va., 12 November 1864. Entered service at:——. Birth: Monongalia County, W. Va. Date of issue: 26 November 1864. Citation: Capture of flag of 22d Virginia Cavalry (C.S.A.).

EVERHART, FORREST E.
Rank and organization: Technical Sergeant, U.S. Army, Company H, 359th Infantry, 90th Infantry Division. Place and date: Near Kerling, France, 12 November 1944. Entered service at: Texas City, Tex. Birth: Bainbridge, Ohio. G.O. No.: 77, 10 September 1945. Citation: He commanded a platoon that bore the brunt of a desperate enemy counterattack near Korling, France, before dawn on 12 November 1944. When German tanks and self-propelled guns penetrated his left flank and overwhelming infantry forces threatened to overrun the 1 remaining machinegun in that section, he ran 400 yards through woods churned by artillery and mortar concentrations to strengthen the defense. With the 1 remaining gunner, he directed furious fire into the advancing hordes until they swarmed close to the position. He left the gun, boldly charged the attackers and, after a 15-minute exchange of hand grenades, forced them to withdraw leaving 30 dead behind. He re-crossed the fire-swept terrain to his then threatened right flank, exhorted his men and directed murderous fire from the single machinegun at that position. There, in the light of bursting mortar shells, he again closed with the enemy in a hand grenade duel and, after a fierce 30-minute battle, forced the Germans to withdraw leaving another 20 dead. The gallantry and intrepidity of T/Sgt. Everhart in rallying his men and refusing to fall back in the face of terrible odds were highly instrumental in repelling the fanatical enemy counterattack directed at the American bridgehead across the Moselle River.

*SAYERS, FOSTER J.
Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Company L, 357th Infantry, 90th Infantry Division. Place and date: Near Thionville, France, 12 November 1944. Entered service at: Howard, Pa. Birth: Marsh Creek, Pa. G.O. No.: 89, 19 October 1945. Citation: He displayed conspicuous gallantry above and beyond the call of duty in combat on 12 November 1944, near Thionville, France. During an attack on strong hostile forces entrenched on a hill he fearlessly ran up the steep approach toward his objective and set up his machinegun 20 yards from the enemy. Realizing it would be necessary to attract full attention of the dug-in Germans while his company crossed an open area and flanked the enemy, he picked up his gun, charged through withering machinegun and rifle fire to the very edge of the emplacement, and there killed 12 German soldiers with devastating close-range fire. He took up a position behind a log and engaged the hostile infantry from the flank in an heroic attempt to distract their attention while his comrades attained their objective at the crest of the hill. He was killed by the very heavy concentration of return fire; but his fearless assault enabled his company to sweep the hill with minimum of casualties, killing or capturing every enemy soldier on it. Pfc. Sayers’ indomitable fighting spirit, aggressiveness, and supreme devotion to duty live on as an example of the highest traditions of the military service.

*BARNES, JOHN ANDREW III
Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Company C, 1st Battalion, 503d Infantry 173d Airborne Brigade. Place and date: Dak To, Republic of Vietnam, 12 November 1967. Entered service at: Boston, Mass. Born: 16 April 1945, Boston, Mass. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Pfc. Barnes distinguished himself by exceptional heroism while engaged in combat against hostile forces. Pfc. Barnes was serving as a grenadier when his unit was attacked by a North Vietnamese force, estimated to be a battalion. Upon seeing the crew of a machine gun team killed, Pfc. Barnes, without hesitation, dashed through the bullet swept area, manned the machine gun, and killed 9 enemy soldiers as they assaulted his position. While pausing just long enough to retrieve more ammunition, Pfc. Barnes observed an enemy grenade thrown into the midst of some severely wounded personnel close to his position. Realizing that the grenade could further injure or kill the majority of the wounded personnel, he sacrificed his life by throwing himself directly onto the hand grenade as it exploded. Through his indomitable courage, complete disregard for his own safety, and profound concern for his fellow soldiers, he averted a probable loss of life and injury to the wounded members of his unit. Pfc. Barnes’ extraordinary heroism, and intrepidity at the cost of his life, above and beyond the call of duty, are in the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the U.S. Army.

*DIAS, RALPH E.
Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Marine Corps, 3d Platoon, Company D, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division (Rein) FMF. Place and date: Que Son Mountains, Republic of Vietnam, 12 November 1969. Entered service at: Pittsburgh, Pa. Born: 15 July 1950, Shelocta, Indiana County, Pa. Citation: As a member of a reaction force which was pinned down by enemy fire while assisting a platoon in the same circumstance, Pfc. Dias, observing that both units were sustaining casualties, initiated an aggressive assault against an enemy machine gun bunker which was the principal source of hostile fire. Severely wounded by enemy snipers while charging across the open area, he pulled himself to the shelter of a nearby rock. Braving enemy fire for a second time, Pfc. Dias was again wounded. Unable to walk, he crawled 15 meters to the protection of a rock located near his objective and, repeatedly exposing himself to intense hostile fire, unsuccessfully threw several hand grenades at the machine gun emplacement. Still determined to destroy the emplacement, Pfc. Dias again moved into the open and was wounded a third time by sniper fire. As he threw a last grenade which destroyed the enemy position, he was mortally wounded by another enemy round. Pfc. Dias’ indomitable courage, dynamic initiative, and selfless devotion to duty upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the U.S. Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life in the service to his country.


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13 November

1775– U.S. forces under Gen. Richard Montgomery captured Montreal. This was a two-pronged attack on Canada, with the goal of capturing Quebec entrusted to Benedict Arnold, who was leading a force through a hurricane ravaged Maine wilderness.

1776 – Captain John Paul Jones in Alfred with brig Providence captures British transport Mellish, carrying winter uniforms later used by Washington’s troops.

1789 – George Washington, inaugurated as the first president of the United States in April, returns to Washington at the end of his first presidential tour. For four weeks, Washington traveled by stagecoach through New England, visiting all the northern states that had ratified the U.S. Constitution. Washington, the great Revolutionary War hero and first leader of the new republic, was greeted by enthusiastic crowds wherever he went. Major William Jackson, who was Washington’s aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War, accompanied the president, along with a private secretary and nine servants, including several slaves. The group traveled as far north as Kittering, Maine, which was still a part of Massachusetts at the time. Two years later, President Washington embarked on his first presidential visit to the southern states, making a 1,887-mile round-trip journey from his estate at Mount Vernon, Virginia.

1806– Pike’s Peak was discovered, but not climbed, by Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike during an expedition to locate the source of the Mississippi. Explorations by Lt. Zebulon Pike and Kit Carson mapped out much of the state.

1809– John A.B. Dahlgren, US Union Lt Adm and inventor (Civil war Dahlgren cannon), was born. He was born in Philadelphia, PA, and when he turned 16 he joined the U.S. Navy as a midshipman. After many years at sea he was assigned to the navy’s ordnance bureau at Washington, D.C. in 1847. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he became the head of the Washington Navy Yard after Captain Franklin Buchanan resigned that post to enlist in the Confederate cause. In 1862 Dahlgren was promoted to captain and named head of the navy’s Ordnance Bureau. In July of 1863 Dahlgren was promoted to rear admiral and assigned command of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Dahlgren weapons are usually divided into three groups – bronze boat howitzers and rifles, iron smoothbores, and iron rifles. The designer, John A.B. Dahlgren of the U.S. Navy, developed the weapons primarily for use on small boats that patrolled the waterways. The necessity for these weapons was demonstrated by the Navy’s experience during the Mexican War when small launches and other craft were assigned to patrol close to river and creek banks.

Dahlgren was a Lieutenant when he was assigned to the ordnance department at the Washington Navy Yard. The first weapon systems were adopted by the Navy in 1850. These bronze 12- and 24-pounder pieces were specially designed for use on the small launches, but were also included on most naval vessels during the Civil War. His iron smoothbores were adopted in 1850 (9-inch gun) and 1851 (11-inch gun). Although these guns were designed for use against wooden ships, the iron-clad Monitor class ships carried two of these in their turrets. These weapons were later replaced by the 15-inch Dahlgrens in 1862. By the end of the Civil War, John Dahlgren, now a rear admiral, was responsible for the development and design of 12-pounder boat howitzers in several weight classifications (small, medium, and light), 20- and 24-pounder howitzers (some, including the 12-pounders, were rifled); 30-, 32-, 50-, 80-, and 150-pounder rifles; and 8-, 9-, 10-, 11-, 13-, 15-, and 20-inch rifles.

1814– Joseph Hooker (d.1879), Major General (Union volunteers), was born. One of the most immodest and immoral of the high Union commanders, “Fighting Joe” Hooker frequently felt slighted by his superiors and requested to be relieved of duty. The Massachusetts native and West Pointer (1837) had been posted to the artillery but was serving as a staff officer when he won three brevets in Mexico. Unfortunately for his later career he testified against Winfield Scott before a court of inquiry on the Mexican War. After a two-year leave he resigned on February 21, 1853, to settle in California where he was in the farming and land businesses. At the outset of the Civil War he became a colonel of the state militia but soon offered his services to Washington where his anti-Scott testimony came back to haunt him. As a civilian he witnessed the disaster at lst Bull Run and wrote to Lincoln complaining of the mismanagement and advancing his own claim to a commission. Accepted, his assignments included: brigadier general, USV (August 3, 1861, to rank from May 17); commanding brigade, Division of the Potomac (August – October 3, 1861); commanding division, Army of the Potomac (October 3, 1861 -March 13, 1862); commanding 2nd Division, 3rd Corps, Army of the Potomac (March 13 – September 5, 1862); major general, USV (May 5, 1862); commanding 3rd Corps, Army of Virginia (September 6-12, 1862); commanding lst Corps, Army of the Potomac (September 12-17, 1862); brigadier general, USA (September 20, 1862); commanding 5th Corps, Army of the Potomac (November 10-16, 1862); commanding Center Grand Division, Army of the Potomac (November 16, 1862-January 26, 1863); commanding Department and Army of the Potomac (January 26 – June 28, 1863); commanding llth and 12th Corps, Army of the Cumberland (September 25 – April 14, 1863); commanding 20th Corps, Army of the Cumberland (April 14 – July 28, 1864); and commanding Northern Department (October 1, 1864 – June 27, 1865). After leading a brigade and then a division around Washington he went with McClellan’s army to the Peninsula, earning a reputation for looking after his men during the siege operations at Yorktown. His other reputation as a heavy user of alcohol was not so enviable. He was particularly distinguished at Williamsburg and although he felt slighted by his commander’s report he was named a major general of volunteers from the date of the action. Further fighting for Hooker came at Seven Pines and throughout the Seven Days.

Following its close he scored a minor success in the retaking of Malvern Hill from the Confederates. Transferred to Pope with his division, he took part in the defeat at 2nd Bull Run. Given command of a corps for the Maryland Campaign, he fought at South Mountain and was wounded in the foot early in the morning fighting at Antietam. Three days later he was named a regular army brigadier general. Returning to duty, he briefly commanded the 5th Corps before being given charge of the Center Grand Division when Burnside reorganized his army into these two-corps formations. After the defeat at Fredericksburg and the disastrous Mud March, Burnside was relieved. In a letter to the Army of the Potomac’s new commander, Hooker, Lincoln praised the general’s fighting abilities but strongly questioned Hooker’s previous criticism of commanders and feared that this might come back to haunt the new chief. Lincoln was also critical of the general’s loose talk on the need for a military dictatorship to win the war. Once in charge, Hooker’s headquarters were roundly criticized by many as a combination of bar and brothel. When he launched his campaign against Lee, Hooker swore off liquor. This may have hurt more than it helped. After a brilliantly executed maneuver around Lee’s flank and the crossing of two rivers, Hooker lost his nerve and withdrew his forces back into the Wilderness to await reinforcements from John Sedgewick’s command coming from Fredericksburg. Here he felt convinced that Lee was in retreat but was surprised by Jackson’s flank attack, which routed Oliver 0. Howard’s 11th Corps.

To make matters worse Hooker was dazed by the effects of a shell striking a pillar on the porch of his headquarters. He lost control of the army and ordered a withdrawal. Kept in command, he led the army northward in the early part of the Gettysburg Campaign until he resigned on June 28, 1863, over control of the garrison at Harpers Ferry. On January 28, 1864, he received the Thanks of Congress for the beginnings of the campaign. With the Union defeat at Chickamauga, he was given charge of the Army of the Potomac’s 1lth and 12th Corps and sent to the relief of the Army of the Cumberland at Chattanooga. In the battles around that place in November 1863 he did well in keeping open the supply lines and in the taking of Lookout Mountain. However, in Grant’s report his actions were overshadowed by the less distinguished role of Sherman. The next spring the two corps were merged into the new 20th Corps with Hooker at their head. He fought through the Atlanta Campaign but when McPherson was killed before the city and Howard received command of the Army of the Tennessee, he asked to be relieved.

This was granted and he finished the war in the quiet sector of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Brevetted major general in the regular army for Chattanooga, he was mustered out of the volunteers on September 1, 1866, and two years later was retired with the increased rank of major general. Always popular with his men, he lacked the confidence of his subordinate officers and was quarrelsome with his superiors. His nickname, which he never liked, resulted from the deletion of a dash in a journalistic dispatch that was discussing the Peninsula Campaign and “Fighting” was thereafter linked to his name. Popular legend has it that his name was permanently attached to prostitutes from his Civil War actions in rounding them up in one area of Washington. He died in Garden City, New York, on October 31, 1879, and is buried in Cincinnati.

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1835– Texans officially proclaimed Independence from Mexico, and called itself the Lone Star Republic, after its flag, until its admission to the Union in 1845. In 2001 Randy Roberts and James S. Olson authored “A Line in the Sand,” a narrative of the Texas drive for independence.

1851 – The Denny Party lands at Alki Point, before moving to the other side of Elliott Bay to what would become Seattle.

1860– South Carolina’s legislature called a special convention to discuss secession from the Union.

1861 – President Lincoln pays a late night visit to General George McClellan, who Lincoln had recently named general in chief of the Union army. The general retired to his chambers before speaking with the president. This was the most famous example of McClellan’s cavalier disregard for the president’s authority. Lincoln had tapped McClellan to head the Army of the Potomac-the main Union army in the East-in July 1861 after the disastrous Union defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run. McClellan immediately began to build an effective army, and he was elevated to general in chief after Winfield Scott resigned on October 31. McClellan drew praise for his military initiatives but quickly developed a reputation for his arrogance and contempt toward the political leaders in Washington. After being named to the top post, McClellan began openly to cavort with Democratic leaders in Congress and show his disregard for the Republican administration.

To his wife, he wrote that Lincoln was “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon,” and Secretary of State William Seward was an “incompetent little puppy.” Lincoln made frequent evening visits to McClellan’s house to discuss strategy. On November 13, Lincoln, Seward, and Presidential Secretary John Hay stopped by to see the general. McClellan was out, so the trio waited patiently for his return. After an hour, McClellan came in and was told by a porter that the guests were waiting. McClellan headed for his room without a word, and only after Lincoln waited another half-hour was the group informed of McClellan’s retirement to bed. Hay felt that the president should have been greatly offended, but Lincoln casually replied that it was “better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity.” Lincoln made no more visits to the general’s home.

1878– New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace offered amnesty to many participants of the Lincoln County War, but not to gunfighter Billy the Kid.

1893– Queen Lili’uokalani met with Albert Willis, the new US Minister to Hawaii, and refused pardon for the Provisional Government.

1941 – The United States Congress amends the Neutrality Act of 1935 to allow American merchant ships access to war zones, thereby putting U.S. vessels in the line of fire. In anticipation of another European war, and in pursuit of an isolationist foreign policy, Congress passed the Neutrality Act in August 1935, forbidding the sale of munitions by U.S. firms to any and all belligerents in any future war. This was a not-so-subtle signal to all governments and private industries, domestic and foreign, that the United States would play no part in foreign wars. Less than two years later, a second Neutrality Act was passed, forbidding the export of arms to either side in the Spanish Civil War. The original 1935 act was made even more restrictive in May 1937, forbidding not only arms and loans to warring nations, but giving the president of the United States the authority to forbid Americans from traveling on ships of any warring nation, to forbid any U.S. ship from carrying U.S. goods, even nonmilitary, to a belligerent, and to demand that a belligerent nation pay for U.S. nonmilitary goods before shipment–a “cash and carry” plan. But such notions of strict neutrality changed quickly once World War II began.

The first amendment to the act came as early as September 1939; President Roosevelt, never happy with the extreme nature of the act, fought with Congress to revise it, allowing for the sale of munitions to those nations under siege by Nazi Germany. After heated debate in a special session, Congress finally passed legislation permitting such sales. Addressing the prospect of direct U.S. intervention in the war, President Roosevelt proclaimed, also in September 1939, that U.S. territorial waters were a neutral zone, and any hostile power that used those waters for the prosecution of the war would be considered “unfriendly” and “offensive.” Finally, when the U.S. destroyer Reuben James was sunk by a German sub in October 1941, the Neutrality Act was destined for the dustbin of history. By November, not only would merchant ships be allowed to arm themselves for self-defense, but they would also be allowed to enter European territorial waters. America would no longer stand aloof from the hostilities.

1942– Lt. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower flew to Algeria to conclude an agreement with French Admiral Jean Darlan. It recognizes Admiral Darlan as the head of French civil government in North Africa. General Giraud is placed in command of the French armed forces. The Admiral was assassinated soon after.

1942 – Off the coast of Guadalcanal, a Japanese convoy of 11 transports carrying 11,000 men and equipment escorted by Admiral Tanaka’s “Tokyo Express” approaches the island. Admiral Abe command two battleships, two cruisers and 14 destroyers to give cover and to bombard Henderson Field airstrip to prevent American attacks. To the north, two further Japanese carriers are within striking range. American Admiral Callaghan, commanding a force of five cruisers and eight destroyers plots an interception course. In the early morning hours, Admiral Callaghan’s force comes upon the Japanese force led by Admiral Abe. In an action lasting about half an hour, two Japanese cruisers are sunk and almost all other vessels suffer damage. The Americans lose two cruisers and four destroyers. The Japanese transport convoy turns back. Later in the day, the battleship Hiei, already badly damaged, is torpedoed by American aircraft and scuttled. After the battle, criticism concerning the effective use of the American radar is leveled. Problems are blamed on mismatched equipment and poor communication between the ships.

1942 – Loss of USS Juneau (CL-52) during Battle of Guadalcanal results in loss of Five Sullivan Brothers. In the aftermath of Juneau’s loss, the Navy notified Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, that all five of their sons were missing in action. Two of the brothers had served previous four-year enlistments in the Navy and so, when all five brothers enlisted together on 3 January 1942, the Navy was the obvious choice. They had also insisted on serving together on the same ship. Although the accepted Navy policy was to separate family members, the brothers had persisted and their request was approved. It was later learned, through survivors’ accounts, that four of the brothers died in the initial explosion. The fifth, George Thomas, despite being wounded the night before, made it onto a raft where he survived for five days before succumbing either to wounds and exhaustion or a shark attack.

The brothers received the Purple Heart Medal posthumously and were entitled to the American Defense Service Medal, Fleet Clasp; Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with four engagement stars and the World War II Victory Medal. They had also earned the Good Conduct Medal. They were survived by their parents, Mr. Thomas F. Sullivan and Mrs. Alleta Sullivan, a sister, Genevieve Sullivan, and by Albert Leo Sullivan’s wife, Katherine Mary Sullivan. Their son, James Thomas, was twenty-two months old at the time of his father’s death. The service record transcripts for the five Sullivan brothers, as written on 16 January 1943 by the Bureau of Naval Personnel follow: Albert Leo Sullivan, Francis Henry Sullivan, George Thomas Sullivan, Joseph Eugene Sullivan, Madison Abel Sullivan.

1943 – Fifth Fleet carriers begin long range night bombing attacks on Japanese positions in Gilberts and Marshalls in preparation for landings. American B-17 Flying Fortresses bomb Tarawa atoll in preparation for the coming landings.

1943 – On Bougainville, the third wave of the US landing force comes ashore. This includes the rest of the US 37th Infantry Division and the 21st Marine Division. Task Force 39 (Admiral Merrill) provides cover. The cruiser Denver is hit by a torpedo during the landing operation. Some fighting takes place on the Numa-Numa trail.

1943 – American General Clark, commanding US 5th Army, indicates to British General Alexander, Commander in Chief of Allied forces in Italy, that he believes attacks by his army should be halted for the present.

1944 – The Coast Guard-manned frigate USS Rockford, in concert with the Navy minesweeper USS Ardent, attacked and sank the Japanese Navy submarine I-12 mid-way between Hawaii and California. There were no survivors. In sinking I-12, Ardent and Rockford unwittingly avenged the atrocity I-12 had perpetrated on 30 October 1944 when, after sinking the Liberty Ship John A. Johnson, the submarine had rammed and sunk the lifeboats and rafts and then machine-gunned the 70 survivors.

1944 – Elements of US 3rd Army have crossed the Moselle River north of Thionville and constructed a bridge at Cattenom. South of Metz, other elements from US 12th Corps are attacking toward Morhange and Falquemont. To the south, German forces withdraw from St. Die under pressure from forces of the US 7th Army. Churchill visits French troops in the Vosges.


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1944 – German U-978 sinks 3 Liberty ships in the English Channel.

1944 – Aircraft from US Task Force 38 (McCain) attack shipping and land targets on Luzon. American planes claim a Japanese cruiser and 4 destroyers sunk.

1950 – Operations Plan 116-50, which outlined the procedures for an emergency evacuation of U.N. forces from the Korean peninsula, was issued.

1955 – FBI agents search the home of John Graham, a chief suspect in the United Airlines plane explosion that killed all 44 people on board on November 1. The jet, which exploded shortly after departing from Denver, contained a hole near the cargo hold and traces of dynamite residue, suggesting that a bomb was responsible for the crash. Within a week, FBI agents began delving into the background of everyone connected to the flight. One of the passengers onboard the flight, Daisie King, was a wealthy woman traveling to visit her daughter. Although the suitcase that she had checked-in had been obliterated by the explosion, her carry-on bag contained a newspaper clipping about her son, John Graham, who had been involved in forgery and theft. When FBI agents questioned Graham on November 10, he told the detectives that his mother had packed shotgun ammunition in her suitcase. Graham’s wife provided more intriguing information: just before Graham took his mother to the airport, he had placed a gift-wrapped package in her luggage, explaining that the present was a jewelry tool kit. Graham denied any knowledge of this gift but the FBI obtained a search warrant to investigate further.

A search of the Graham home turned up the ammunition that Mrs. King had allegedly packed, a small roll of copper wire, and a life insurance policy for Mrs. King, naming Graham as the designated beneficiary. Graham’s wife later revealed that he had ordered her to claim that she had been mistaken about the gift package. Faced with mounting evidence against him, Graham suddenly confessed to planting a bomb in his mother’s suitcase. He told the agents that he had taken a job in an electronics store to learn how to construct the bomb, which consisted of 25 sticks of dynamite, a battery, and a timer. At his televised trial, Graham retracted his confession but was found guilty. He was executed in the gas chamber in January 1957. Graham was a criminal and not a terrorist, but his actions exposed vulnerabilities and trail blazed tactics and methods that would be used by future terrorists.

1957 – First firing of Regulus II bombardment missile.

1967 – President Lyndon Johnson is briefed on the situation in Vietnam by Gen. William Westmoreland, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, and Robert W. Komer, the head of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program. They painted an optimistic picture that led Johnson to state on television on November 17 that, while much remained to be done, “We are inflicting greater losses than we’re taking…We are making progress.” Such pronouncements haunted President Johnson and his advisers only two months later, when the communists launched a massive offensive during the Tet New Year holiday in January 1968.

1971– The U.S. space probe Mariner 9 went into orbit around Mars. NASA’s Mariner 9 circled Mars and revealed dried beds of rivers that flowed billions of years ago.

1982– Near the end of a weeklong national salute to Americans who served in the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated in Washington after a march to its site by thousands of veterans of the conflict. The long-awaited memorial was a simple V-shaped black-granite wall inscribed with the names of the 57,939 Americans who died in the conflict, arranged in order of death, not rank, as was common in other memorials. The designer of the memorial was Maya Lin, a Yale University architecture student who entered a nationwide competition to create a design for the monument. Lin, born in Ohio in 1959, was the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Many veterans’ groups were opposed to Lin’s winning design, which lacked a standard memorial’s heroic statues and stirring words. However, a remarkable shift in public opinion occurred in the months after the memorial’s dedication.

Veterans and families of the dead walked the black reflective wall, seeking the names of their loved ones killed in the conflict. Once the name was located, visitors often made an etching or left a private offering, from notes and flowers to dog tags and cans of beer. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial soon became one of the most visited memorials in the nation’s capital. A Smithsonian Institution director called it “a community of feelings, almost a sacred precinct,” and a veteran declared that “it’s the parade we never got.” “The Wall” drew together both those who fought and those who marched against the war and served to promote national healing a decade after the divisive conflict’s end.

1986– US president Reagan confessed to weapon sales to Iran.

1990– Secretary of State James A. Baker III told reporters in Hamilton, Bermuda, the Persian Gulf crisis threatened world recession and the loss of American jobs. Members of Congress demanded a larger role in US Gulf policy following President Bush’s decision to send more US troops to the region.

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1990 – President George H. W. Bush extends the initial mobilization of all Reserve Component units called in support of Operation Desert Shield from 90-days to 180-days (soon to be increased to 360-days) as the mission changes from defending Saudi Arabia from Iraqi invasion to compelling the Iraqi Army to withdraw from Kuwait. Along with this announcement came his decision to send an additional 200,000 troops (all branches) to the Southwest Asia theater. As the American build up of forces in Saudi Arabia changed from defensive to offensive, among the Air Force units deployed were two Air Guard fighter units, both flying F-16 ‘Flying Falcon’ fighters. These were South Carolina’s 169th Tactical Fighter Group and New York’s 174th Tactical Fighter Wing. This images shows one of the F-16’s for the 169th preparing for take off. The unit’s nickname is the “Swamp Foxes” after Revolutionary War militia guerilla leader Francis Marion, known as the ‘Swamp Fox.’

1993 – GIs kill a Somali armed with a grenade launcher near the Embassy Compound.

1995– A car bomb killed 7 people, including five Americans, and injured about 60 at a military training facility in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

1996– Sgt. Loren B. Taylor, a drill sergeant who’d had sex with three women recruits at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., was given five months in prison and a bad-conduct discharge in the first sentencing of the burgeoning Army sex scandal.

1997– Iraq expelled 6 Americans on a UN weapons inspection team. The United Nations decided to withdraw all weapons inspectors from Iraq after Saddam Hussein ordered Americans on the U.N. team out.

1999– The Navy recovered the cockpit voice recorder from EgyptAir Flight 990, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean October 31st with the loss of all 217 people aboard.

2000– The vote count in Florida was set to conclude though absentee ballots remained. Lawyers for George W. Bush failed to win a court order barring manual recounts of ballots in Florida. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris announced she would end the recounting at 5 p.m. the next day – prompting an immediate appeal by lawyers for Al Gore.

2000– Two US F-16 military jets collided over waters off of northern Japan. One pilot was rescued and the other was missing.

2001– Pres. Bush issued an order to try int’l. terrorists by a special military tribunal.

2001– President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin met at the White House, where they pledged to slash Cold War-era nuclear arsenals by two-thirds but remained at odds over American plans to develop a missile defense shield.

2001– Kabul falls. The night of November 12, Taliban forces fled from the city of Kabul, leaving under cover of darkness. By the time Northern Alliance forces arrived the next afternoon only bomb craters, burned foliage, and the burnt out shells of Taliban gun emplacements and positions were there to greet them. A group of about twenty hardline Arab fighters hiding in the city’s park were the only remaining defenders. This Taliban group was killed in a brief 15-minute gun battle, being heavily outnumbered and having had little more than some shrub to shield them. After these forces were neutralized Kabul was in the hands of the US/NATO forces and the Northern Alliance. The fall of Kabul marked the beginning of a collapse of Taliban positions across the map. Within 24 hours, all of the Afghan provinces from the Iranian border, and the city of Herat, to northeastern Afghanistan, and the city of Jalalabad. Taliban holdouts in the north, comprised of mainly Pakistani volunteers, fell back to the northern city of Kunduz to make a stand.

2001– Eight foreign aid workers, two Americans, two Australians and four Germans, held captive in Afghanistan for three months were freed from a prison by anti-Taliban fighters.

2001– An anthrax tainted letter was received by a pediatrician in Santiago. It was postmarked from Switzerland and marked for return to Florida. It was actually mailed from NY through a NY-based subsidiary of the Swiss Post office. The letter was later believed to have been contaminated in a lab.

2001– Spanish police arrested 11 people with suspected links to Osama bin Laden.

2001 – Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces, possibly including bin Laden, were concentrating in Tora Bora, 50 kilometers (31 mi) southwest of Jalalabad. Nearly 2,000 al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters fortified themselves in positions within bunkers and caves.

2001 – In the first such act since World War II, US President George W. Bush signs an executive order allowing military tribunals against foreigners suspected of connections to terrorist acts or planned acts on the United States.

2002– Irv Rubin (57), Jewish Defense League leader, died nine days after what federal authorities said was a suicide attempt in jail.

2002– Iraq accepted a tough new U.N. resolution that will return U.N. weapons inspectors to the country after nearly four years.

2002– Philippine Muslim gunmen linked to the al Qaeda network have demanded a ransom of 16 million pesos ($300,000) for their seven Indonesian and Filipino hostages kidnapped in June and August.

2003– Pres. Bush said the US wants Iraqis to take more responsibility for governing their troubled country and said coalition forces are determined to prevail over terrorists.

2009 – NASA claims to have discovered water after the LCROSS satellite crashes near the South Pole of the Moon.

2013 – One World Trade Center becomes the tallest building in the United States.

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Congressional Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day

*CALLAGHAN, DANIEL JUDSON
Rank and organization: Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy. Born: 26 July 1892, San Francisco, Calif. Appointed from: California. Entered service at: Oakland, Calif. Other Navy award: Distinguished Service Medal. Citation: For extraordinary heroism and conspicuous intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty during action against enemy Japanese forces off Savo Island on the night of 12-13 November 1942. Although out-balanced in strength and numbers by a desperate and determined enemy, Rear Adm. Callaghan, with ingenious tactical skill and superb coordination of the units under his command, led his forces into battle against tremendous odds, thereby contributing decisively to the rout of a powerful invasion fleet, and to the consequent frustration of a formidable Japanese offensive. While faithfully directing close-range operations in the face of furious bombardment by superior enemy fire power, he was killed on the bridge of his flagship. His courageous initiative, inspiring leadership, and judicious foresight in a crisis of grave responsibility were in keeping with the finest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life in the defense of his country.

McCANDLESS, BRUCE
Rank and organization: Commander, U.S. Navy, U.S.S. San Francisco. Place and date: Battle off Savo Island, 1213 November 1942. Entered service at: Colorado. Born: 12 August 1911, Washington, D.C. Other Navy award: Silver Star. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and exceptionally distinguished service above and beyond the call of duty as communication officer of the U.S.S. San Francisco in combat with enemy Japanese forces in the battle off Savo Island, 1213 November 1942. In the midst of a violent night engagement, the fire of a determined and desperate enemy seriously wounded Lt. Comdr. McCandless and rendered him unconscious, killed or wounded the admiral in command, his staff, the captain of the ship, the navigator, and all other personnel on the navigating and signal bridges. Faced with the lack of superior command upon his recovery, and displaying superb initiative, he promptly assumed command of the ship and ordered her course and gunfire against an overwhelmingly powerful force. With his superiors in other vessels unaware of the loss of their admiral, and challenged by his great responsibility, Lt. Comdr. McCandless boldly continued to engage the enemy and to lead our column of following vessels to a great victory. Largely through his brilliant seamanship and great courage, the San Francisco was brought back to port, saved to fight again in the service of her country.

SCHONLAND, HERBERT EMERY
Rank and organization: Commander, U.S. Navy, U.S.S. San Francisco Place and date: Savo Island, 12-13 November 1943. Entered service at. Maine. Born: 7 September 1900, Portland, Maine. Citation: For extreme heroism and courage above and beyond the call of duty as damage control officer of the U.S.S. San Francisco in action against greatly superior enemy forces in the battle off Savo Island, 12-13 November 1942. In the same violent night engagement in which all of his superior officers were killed or wounded, Lt. Comdr. Schonland was fighting valiantly to free the San Francisco of large quantities of water flooding the second deck compartments through numerous shell holes caused by enemy fire. Upon being informed that he was commanding officer, he ascertained that the conning of the ship was being efficiently handled, then directed the officer who had taken over that task to continue while he himself resumed the vitally important work of maintaining the stability of the ship. In water waist deep, he carried on his efforts in darkness illuminated only by hand lanterns until water in flooded compartments had been drained or pumped off and watertight integrity had again been restored to the San Francisco. His great personal valor and gallant devotion to duty at great peril to his own life were instrumental in bringing his ship back to port under her own power, saved to fight again in the service of her country.

*SCOTT, NORMAN
Rank and organization: Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy. Born: 10 August 1889, Indianapolis, Ind. Appointed from: Indiana. Citation: For extraordinary heroism and conspicuous intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty during action against enemy Japanese forces off Savo Island on the night of 11-12 October and again on the night of 12-13 November 1942. In the earlier action, intercepting a Japanese Task Force intent upon storming our island positions and landing reinforcements at Guadalcanal, Rear Adm. Scott, with courageous skill and superb coordination of the units under his command, destroyed 8 hostile vessels and put the others to flight. Again challenged, a month later, by the return of a stubborn and persistent foe, he led his force into a desperate battle against tremendous odds, directing close-range operations against the invading enemy until he himself was killed in the furious bombardment by their superior firepower. On each of these occasions his dauntless initiative, inspiring leadership and judicious foresight in a crisis of grave responsibility contributed decisively to the rout of a powerful invasion fleet and to the consequent frustration of a formidable Japanese offensive. He gallantly gave his life in the service of his country.

SPURRIER, JUNIOR J.
Rank and organization: Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army, Company G, 134th Infantry, 35th Infantry Division. Place and dare: Achain, France, 13 November 1944. Entered service at: Riggs, Ky. Birth: Russell County, Ky. G.O. No.: 18, 15 March 1945. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy at Achain, France, on 13 November 1944. At 2 p.m., Company G attacked the village of Achain from the east. S/Sgt. Spurrier armed with a BAR passed around the village and advanced alone. Attacking from the west, he immediately killed 3 Germans. From this time until dark, S/Sgt. Spurrier, using at different times his BAR and Ml rifle, American and German rocket launchers, a German automatic pistol, and handgrenades, continued his solitary attack against the enemy regardless of all types of small-arms and automatic-weapons fire. As a result of his heroic actions he killed an officer and 24 enlisted men and captured 2 officers and 2 enlisted men. His valor has shed fresh honor on the U.S. Armed Forces.

*GRANT, JOSEPH XAVIER
Rank and organization: Captain (then 1st Lt.), U.S. Army, Company A, 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division. Place and date: Republic of Vietnam, 13 November 1966. Entered service at: Boston, Mass. Born: 28 March 1940, Cambridge, Mass. G.O. No.: 4, 29 January 1968. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Company A was participating in a search and destroy operation when the leading platoon made contact with the enemy and a fierce fire-fight ensued. Capt. Grant was ordered to disengage the 2 remaining platoons and to maneuver them to envelop and destroy the enemy. After beginning their movement, the platoons encountered intense enemy automatic weapons and mortar fire from the front and flank. Capt. Grant was ordered to deploy the platoons in a defensive position. As this action was underway, the enemy attacked, using “human wave” assaults, in an attempt to literally overwhelm Capt. Grant’s force. In a magnificent display of courage and leadership, Capt. Grant moved under intense fire along the hastily formed defensive line repositioning soldiers to fill gaps created by the mounting casualties and inspiring and directing the efforts of his men to successfully repel the determined enemy onslaught. Seeing a platoon leader wounded, Capt. Grant hastened to his aid, in the face of the mass of fire of the entire enemy force, and moved him to a more secure position.

During this action, Capt. Grant was wounded in the shoulder. Refusing medical treatment, he returned to the forward part of the perimeter, where he continued to lead and to inspire his men by his own indomitable example. While attempting to evacuate a wounded soldier, he was pinned down by fire from an enemy machine gun. With a supply of hand grenades, he crawled forward under a withering hail of fire and knocked out the machine gun, killing the crew, after which he moved the wounded man to safety. Learning that several other wounded men were pinned down by enemy fire forward of his position, Capt. Grant disregarded his painful wound and led 5 men across the fire-swept open ground to effect a rescue. Following return of the wounded men to the perimeter, a concentration of mortar fire landed in their midst and Capt. Grant was killed instantly. His heroic actions saved the lives of a number of his comrades and enabled the task force to repulse the vicious assaults and defeat the enemy. Capt. Grant’s actions reflect great credit upon himself and were in keeping with the finest traditions of the U.S. Army.

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14 November

1846 – Naval forces capture Tampico, Mexico. This will be a staging point for the coming action against Vera Cruz.

1862 – President Lincoln approves of General Ambrose Burnside’s plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia. This was an ill-fated move, as it led to the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, in which the Army of the Potomac was dealt one of its worst defeats at the hands of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Lincoln approved Burnside’s plan just five days after Burnside assumed command of the army. The general had replaced George McClellan, who led the force for more than a year. McClellan’s tenure was marked by sharp disagreements with the administration and sluggishness in the field. Although McClellan was successful against Lee at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, Lincoln removed him from command because of McClellan’s reluctance to attack the Confederate army in Virginia. After McClellan was removed, Burnside stepped up to take his shot at Lee.

His plan called for the Army of the Potomac to move 40 miles to Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock River. From there, his troops would advance south to the Confederate capital of Richmond. Lincoln appreciated the fact that Burnside’s plan protected Washington, D.C. In spring 1862, McClellan had sailed the army down the Chesapeake Bay and landed it on the James Peninsula for an attempt on Richmond, a move that left the Union capital dangerously exposed. However, Lincoln and general in chief Henry Halleck were concerned that Burnside was focused solely on capturing Richmond; they believed that the goal should be to destroy Lee’s army. However, Burnside’s plan was an improvement over McClellan’s operations. Lincoln approved the plan but warned Burnside that action needed to be taken quickly. By early December, Burnside had the army in motion. When the Yankees reached Fredericksburg, however, they experienced delays in crossing the Rappahannock, which allowed Lee to move his forces into place above the city. On December 13th, Burnside made a series of doomed attacks and the Army of the Potomac suffered one of the most costly and demoralizing defeats of the war.

1863 – General Nathan Bedford Forrest was assigned to command of West Tennessee.

1863 – There was a skirmish at Danville, Mississippi.

1881 – Charles J. Guiteau went on trial for assassinating President Garfield. Guiteau was convicted and hanged the following year.

1908 – Joseph McCarthy was born. He became an anti-Communist Senator from Wisconsin who gave the name “McCarthyism” to his communist witch-hunts.

1910 – Civilian Eugene Ely, was the first to take off in an airplane from the deck of a ship, USS Birmingham (CL-2) . He flew from the Birmingham at Hampton Roads to Norfolk. It was a Curtiss plane flown by Eugene Ely, a company exhibition pilot, that made the first successful takeoff from a Navy ship.

1921 – The Cherokee Indians asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review their claim to 1 million acres of land in Texas.

1930 – Edward H White II, San Antonio Texas, Lt Col USAF, astronaut (Gemini 4), was born. He received flight training in Florida and Texas, following his graduation from West Point. He then spent 3-1/2 years in Germany with a fighter squadron, flying F-86’s and F-100’s. He attended the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California, in 1959. White was later assigned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, as an experimental test pilot with the Aeronautical Systems Division. In this assignment he made flight tests for research and weapons systems development, wrote technical engineering reports, and made recommendations for improvement in aircraft design and construction. He logged more than 3,000 hours flying time, including more than 2,200 hours in jet aircraft. White was named as a member of the astronaut team selected by NASA in September 1962. He was pilot for Gemini 4, which was a 66-revolution, 4-day mission that began on June 3, and ended on June 7, 1965.

During the third revolution, he carried out the first extra vehicular activity in the United States manned space flight program. He was outside Gemini 4 for 21 minutes, and became the first man to control himself in space during EVA with a maneuvering unit. Other highlights of the mission included cabin depressurization, opening of cabin doors, and 12 scientific and medical experiments. He received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and the U.S. Air Force Senior Astronaut Wings for this Flight. On March 21, 1966, he was named as one of the pilots of the AS-204 mission, the first 3-man Apollo flight. Lieutenant Colonel White died on January 26, 1967, in the Apollo spacecraft flash fire during a launch pad test at Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

1935 – President Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine Islands a free commonwealth. Manuel Luis Quezon was sworn in as the first Filipino president, as the Commonwealth of Philippines was inaugurated.

1941 – Order to withdraw Marines at Shanghai, Peiping, and Tientsin, China.

1942 – Off the coast of Guadalcanal, Admiral Tanaka turns south with his destroyers and transports and comes under heavy air attack from both Henderson Field and planes from the USS Enterprise. Seven of the transports and two warships are lost. He continues his advance throughout the night and manages to sail his remaining transports to Tassafaronga. However, more of the Japanese troops are killed by air attack while disembarking. Meanwhile, the second battle of Guadalcanal gets underway shortly before midnight. The Japanese covering force supporting the convoy, led by Admiral Kondo ( with the battleship Kirishima, four cruisers and nine destroyers), encounters US Task Force 64, under the command of Admiral Lee ( with the battleships Washington and South Dakota and four destroyers). The battle begins with damage to the South Dakota. It is forced from the battle. A seven minute burst of fire from the USS Washington sinks the Kirishima. Control of the seas around Guadalcanal is passing to the Americans. Supply problems are mounting for the Japanese, who will now be forced to make considerable use of submarines to transport supplies. Already many of the Japanese troops are ill and hungry.

1942 – French General Barre, begins the movement of his troops away from the coastal towns in preparation for switching to the Allied side.

1943 – An American torpedo was mistakenly fired at the U.S. battleship Iowa, which was carrying President Roosevelt and his joint chiefs to the Tehran conference; the torpedo exploded harmlessly in the Iowa’s wake.

1943 – On Bougainville the American divisions push back the Japanese along the jungle tracks. A few American tanks are available for support.

1944 – Carrier aircraft attack Japanese shipping in Philippines sinking five ships and damaging one.

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1951 – United States and Yugoslavia signed a military aid pact. In a surprising turn of events, President Harry Truman asks Congress for U.S. military and economic aid for the communist nation of Yugoslavia. The action was part of the U.S. policy to drive a deeper wedge between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia ended World War II with the communist forces of Josip Broz Tito in control. The United States supported him during the war when his group battled against the Nazi occupation. In the postwar period, as Cold War hostilities set in, U.S. policy toward Yugoslavia hardened. Tito was viewed as simply another tool of Soviet expansion into eastern and southern Europe. In 1948, however, Tito openly broke with Stalin, though he continued to proclaim his allegiance to the communist ideology. Henceforth, he declared, Yugoslavia would determine and direct its own domestic and foreign policies without interference from the Soviet Union. U.S. officials quickly saw a propaganda opportunity in the fallout between the former communist allies. Although Tito was a communist, he was at least an independent communist who might prove a useful ally in Europe. To curry favor with Tito, the United States supported Yugoslavia’s efforts in 1949 to gain a seat on the prestigious Security Council at the United Nations.

In 1951, President Truman asked Congress to provide economic and military assistance to Yugoslavia. This aid was granted. Yugoslavia proved to be a Cold War wild card, however. Tito gave tacit support to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, but harshly criticized the Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. While the United States admired Tito for his independent stance, he could sometimes be a bit too independent. During the 1950s and 1960s he encouraged and supported the nonalignment movement among Third World nations, a policy that concerned American officials who were intent on forcing those nations to choose sides in the East-West struggle. Relations between the United States and Yugoslavia warmed considerably after Tito’s denunciation of the Czech intervention, but cooled again when he sided with the Soviets during the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1973. Tito died in 1980.

1952 – Thirty-seven service members returning from rest and recuperation leave in Japan and seven crew members were killed in the crash of a C-119 transport near Seoul.

1960 – President Dwight Eisenhower ordered U.S. naval units into the Caribbean after Guatemala and Nicaragua charged Castro with starting uprisings.

1960 – OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), formed.

1961 – President Kennedy increased the number of American advisors in Vietnam from 1,000 to 16,000.

1965 – In the first major engagement of the war between regular U.S. and North Vietnamese forces, elements of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) fight a pitched battle with Communist main-force units in the Ia Drang Valley of the Central Highlands. On this morning, Lt. Col. Harold G. Moore’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry conducted a heliborne assault into Landing Zone X-Ray near the Chu Pong hills. Around noon, the North Vietnamese 33rd Regiment attacked the U.S. troopers. The fight continued all day and into the night. American soldiers received support from nearby artillery units and tactical air strikes. The next morning, the North Vietnamese 66th Regiment joined the attack against the U.S. unit. The fighting was bitter, but the tactical air strikes and artillery support took their toll on the enemy and enabled the 1st Cavalry troopers to hold on against repeated assaults. At around noon, two reinforcing companies arrived and Colonel Moore put them to good use to assist his beleaguered soldiers.

By the third day of the battle, the Americans had gained the upper hand. The three-day battle resulted in 834 North Vietnamese soldiers confirmed killed, and another 1,000 communist casualties were assumed. In a related action during the same battle, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was ambushed by North Vietnamese forces as it moved overland to Landing Zone Albany. Of the 500 men in the original column, 150 were killed and only 84 were able to return to immediate duty; Company C suffered 93 percent casualties, half of them deaths. Despite these numbers, senior American officials in Saigon declared the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley a great victory. The battle was extremely important because it was the first significant contact between U.S. troops and North Vietnamese forces. The action demonstrated that the North Vietnamese were prepared to stand and fight major battles even though they might take serious casualties.

Senior American military leaders concluded that U.S. forces could wreak significant damage on the communists in such battles–this tactic lead to a war of attrition as the U.S. forces tried to wear the communists down. The North Vietnamese also learned a valuable lesson during the battle: by keeping their combat troops physically close to U.S. positions, U.S. troops could not use artillery or air strikes without risking injury to American troops. This style of fighting became the North Vietnamese practice for the rest of the war.

1965 – US government sent 90,000 soldiers to Vietnam.

1967 – Maj. Gen. Bruno Hochmuth, commander of the 3rd Marine Division, is killed when the helicopter in which he is travelling is shot down. He was the most senior U.S. officer to be killed in action in the Viet Nam war to date.

1969 – Apollo 12, the second manned mission to the surface of the moon, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with astronauts Charles Conrad, Jr.; Richard F. Gordon, Jr.; and Alan L. Bean aboard. President Richard Nixon viewed the liftoff from Pad A at Cape Canaveral. He was the first president to attend the liftoff of a manned space flight. Thirty-six seconds after takeoff, lightning struck the ascending Saturn 5 launch rocket, which tripped the circuit breakers in the command module and caused a power failure. Fortunately, the launching rocket continued up normally, and within a few minutes power was restored in the space craft.

On November 19, the landing module Intrepid made a precision landing on the northwest rim of the moon’s Ocean of Storms. About five hours later, astronauts Conrad and Bean became the third and fourth humans to walk on the surface of the moon. During the next 32 hours, the two astronauts made two lunar walks, where they collected lunar samples and investigated the Surveyor 3 spacecraft, an unmanned U.S. probe that soft-landed on the moon in 1967. On November 24, Apollo 12 successfully returned to Earth, splashing down only three miles from one of its retrieval ships, the USS Hornet.

1971 – Mariner 9 enters orbit around Mars. Mariner 9 (Mariner Mars ’71 / Mariner-I) was an unmanned NASA space probe that contributed greatly to the exploration of Mars and was part of the Mariner program. Mariner 9 was launched toward Mars on May 30, 1971 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and became the first spacecraft to orbit another planet — only narrowly beating the Soviet’s Mars 2 and Mars 3, which both arrived within a month. After months of dust storms it managed to send back clear pictures of the surface. Mariner 9 returned 7329 images over the course of its mission, which concluded in October 1972.

1972 –One week after his re-election, President Richard Nixon extends to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu his “absolute assurance” that the United States will “take swift and severe retaliatory action” if Hanoi violates the pending cease-fire once it is in place. Thieu responded with a list of 69 amendments that he wanted added to the peace agreement being worked out in Paris. Nixon instructed Henry Kissinger to present Le Duc Tho, the senior North Vietnamese negotiator in Paris, with Thieu’s amendments. Kissinger protested that the changes were “preposterous” and might destroy chances for the treaty. Despite Kissinger’s concerns, the indication that the peace accords were near completion resulted in the Dow Jones closing above 1,000 for first time. In the end, however, Kissinger was correct and the peace talks became deadlocked and were not resumed until after Nixon ordered the December bombing of North Vietnam.

1979 – US President Jimmy Carter issues Executive order 12170, freezing all Iranian assets in the United States in response to the hostage crisis.

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1984 – The Space Shuttle Discovery crew rescued a second satellite.

1986 – White House acknowledges CIA role in secretly shipping weapons to Iran.

1987 – A bomb hidden in a box of chocolates exploded in the lobby of Beirut’s American University Hospital, killing seven people, including the woman who was carrying it.

1989 – The U.S. Navy, alarmed over a recent string of serious accidents, ordered an unprecedented 48-hour stand-down.

1990 – President Bush told congressional leaders he had no immediate plans to go to war in the Persian Gulf.

1990 – PSU 302, staffed by Coast Guard reservists from Cleveland, Ohio, arrived in the Persian Gulf in support of operation Desert Shield. They were stationed in Bahrain.

1991 – U.S. and British authorities announced indictments against two Libyan intelligence officials in connection with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

1993 – Residents of Puerto Rico voted in a plebiscite to maintain the island’s existing U.S. commonwealth status, derailing the efforts of those favoring statehood.

1994 – President Clinton, in Indonesia, met one-on-one with the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea, winning pledges to keep the pressure on North Korea to freeze its nuclear weapons program.

1994 – U.S. experts visited North Korea’s main nuclear complex for the first time under an accord aimed at opening such sites to outside inspections.

1997 – A jury in Fairfax, Va., decided that Pakistani national Mir Aimal Kasi should get the death penalty for gunning down two CIA employees outside agency headquarters. Kasi was sentenced to death in January 1998.

1997 – Sara Lister, assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs, resigned in the wake of political pressure after she called Marines “extremists” and made fun of their uniforms.

1998 – Iraq backed down and agreed to submit to UN weapons inspections as US forces were poised for attack.

1999 – UN sanctions against Afghanistan went into effect following the Taliban refusal to turn over Osama bin Laden. Int’l. flights were banned and overseas assets were frozen.

2001 – President Bush welcomed President Putin to his Prairie Chapel Ranch. They continued their talks a day after the two leaders agreed at the White House to reduce their countries’ nuclear stockpiles.

2001 – Attorney Gen. Ashcroft unveiled an overhaul of the INS. Law enforcement and service operations would be split.

2001 – The rout of the Taliban in Afghanistan accelerated with the Islamic militia losing control of Jalalabad in the east, once-loyal Pashtun tribesmen joining in the revolt in the south, and many of their fighters fleeing into the mountains to evade U.S. airstrikes.

2001 – A Special Forces team was inserted north of Kandahar, near the village of Tarin Kowt. There, they linked up with Hamid Karzai and a small number of his followers. Karzai, a charismatic Pashtun tribal leader born near Kandahar, was both pro-western and anti-Taliban, a rare combination. As such, he was vital to U.S. plans for establishing an anti-Taliban front in the region.

2001 – United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1378 which included “Condemning the Taliban for allowing Afghanistan to be used as a base for the export of terrorism by the al-Qaeda network and other terrorist groups and for providing safe haven to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and others associated with them, and in this context supporting the efforts of the Afghan people to replace the Taliban regime”. The United Nations World Food Programme temporarily suspended activities within Afghanistan at the beginning of the bombing attacks but resumed them after the fall of the Taliban.

2001 – Britain pledged 5,000 more troops to Afghanistan in addition to 4,500 already in the war zone.

2002 – Pakistani Aimal Khan Kasi was put to death by injection at a prison in Jarratt, Va., for the slayings of two CIA employees in 1993.

2002 – Diplomats from the United States, European Union, South Korea and Japan decided to cut off the shipments of oil to North Korea in response to its violation of a 1994 nuclear agreement.

2003 – Near Tikrit, Iraq, an Apache helicopter attacked and killed 7 people believed to have been preparing a rocket attack on a US base.

2008 – General Ann E. Dunwoody becomes the first female four-star general in the history of the United States Army.


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Congressional Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day


CAVANAUGH, THOMAS
Rank and organization: Fireman First Class, U.S. Navy. Born: 10 May 1869, Ireland. Accredited to: New York. G.O. No.: 503, 12 December 1898. Citation: On board the U.S.S. Potomac during the passage of that vessel from Cat Island to Nassau, 14 November 1898. Volunteering to enter the fire room which was filled with steam, Cavanaugh, after repeated attempts, succeeded in reaching the auxiliary valve and opening it, thereby relieving the vessel from further danger.

JARDINE, ALEXANDER
Rank and organization: Fireman First Class, U.S. Navy. Born: 19 March 1873, Inverness, Scotland. Accredited to: Ohio. G.O. No.: 503, 13 December 1898. Citation: On board the U.S.S. Potomac during the passage of that vessel from Cat Island to Nassau, 14 November 1898. Volunteering to enter the fireroom which was filled with steam, Jardine, after repeated attempts, succeeded in reaching the auxiliary valve and opening it, thereby relieving the vessel from further danger.

*BAUER, HAROLD WILLIAM
Rank and organization: Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps. Born: 20 November 1908. Woodruff, Kans. Appointed from: Nebraska. Citation: For extraordinary heroism and conspicuous courage as Squadron Commander of Marine Fighting Squadron 212 in the South Pacific Area during the period 10 May to 14 November 1942. Volunteering to pilot a fighter plane in defense of our positions on Guadalcanal, Lt. Col. Bauer participated in 2 air battles against enemy bombers and fighters outnumbering our force more than 2 to 1, boldly engaged the enemy and destroyed 1 Japanese bomber in the engagement of 28 September and shot down 4 enemy fighter planes in flames on 3 October, leaving a fifth smoking badly. After successfully leading 26 planes on an over-water ferry flight of more than 600 miles on 16 October, Lt. Col. Bauer, while circling to land, sighted a squadron of enemy planes attacking the U.S.S. McFarland. Undaunted by the formidable opposition and with valor above and beyond the call of duty, he engaged the entire squadron and, although alone and his fuel supply nearly exhausted, fought his plane so brilliantly that 4 of the Japanese planes were destroyed before he was forced down by lack of fuel. His intrepid fighting spirit and distinctive ability as a leader and an airman, exemplified in his splendid record of combat achievement, were vital factors in the successful operations in the South Pacific Area.

CAPTAIN ED W. FREEMAN United States Army; for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty: Captain Ed W. Freeman, United States Army, distinguished himself by numerous acts of conspicuous gallantry and extraordinary intrepidity on 14 November 1965 while serving with Company A, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). As a flight leader and second in command of a 16-helicopter lift unit, he supported a heavily engaged American infantry battalion at Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley, Republic of Vietnam. The unit was almost out of ammunition after taking some of the heaviest casualties of the war, fighting off a relentless attack from a highly motivated, heavily armed enemy force. When the infantry commander closed the helicopter landing zone due to intense direct enemy fire, Captain Freeman risked his own life by flying his unarmed helicopter through a gauntlet of enemy fire time after time, delivering critically needed ammunition, water and medical supplies to the besieged battalion.

His flights had a direct impact on the battle’s outcome by providing the engaged units with timely supplies of ammunition critical to their survival, without which they would almost surely have gone down, with much greater loss of life. After medical evacuation helicopters refused to fly into the area due to intense enemy fire, Captain Freeman flew 14 separate rescue missions, providing life-saving evacuation of an estimated 30 seriously wounded soldiers — some of whom would not have survived had he not acted. All flights were made into a small emergency landing zone within 100 to 200 meters of the defensive perimeter where heavily committed units were perilously holding off the attacking elements. Captain Freeman’s selfless acts of great valor, extraordinary perseverance and intrepidity were far above and beyond the call of duty or mission and set a superb example of leadership and courage for all of his peers. Captain Freeman’s extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit and the United States Army.

MARM, WALTER JOSEPH, JR.
Rank and organization: First Lieutenant (then 2d Lt.), U.S. Army, Company A, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). place and date: Vicinity of la Drang Valley, Republic of Vietnam, 14 November 1965. Entered service at: pittsburgh, pa. Born: 20 November 1941, Washington, pa. G.O. No.: 7, 15 February 1967. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty. As a platoon leader in the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), 1st Lt. Marm demonstrated indomitable courage during a combat operation. His company was moving through the valley to relieve a friendly unit surrounded by an enemy force of estimated regimental size. 1st Lt. Marm led his platoon through withering fire until they were finally forced to take cover. Realizing that his platoon could not hold very long, and seeing four enemy soldiers moving into his position, he moved quickly under heavy fire and annihilated all 4. Then, seeing that his platoon was receiving intense fire from a concealed machine gun, he deliberately exposed himself to draw its fire.

Thus locating its position, he attempted to destroy it with an antitank weapon. Although he inflicted casualties, the weapon did not silence the enemy fire. Quickly, disregarding the intense fire directed on him and his platoon, he charged 30 meters across open ground, and hurled grenades into the enemy position, killing some of the 8 insurgents manning it. Although severely wounded, when his grenades were expended, armed with only a rifle, he continued the momentum of his assault on the position and killed the remainder of the enemy. 1st Lt. Marm’s selfless actions reduced the fire on his platoon, broke the enemy assault, and rallied his unit to continue toward the accomplishment of this mission. 1st Lt. Marm’s gallantry on the battlefield and his extraordinary intrepidity at the risk of his life are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.

CRANDALL, BRUCE P.
Rank and Organization: Major, U.S. Army, Company A, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Place and dates: Ia Drang Valley, Republic of Vietnam, 14 November 1965. Place and date of birth: Olympia, Washington, 1933. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty: Major Bruce P. Crandall distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism as a Flight Commander in the Republic of Vietnam, while serving with Company A, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). On 14 November 1965, his flight of sixteen helicopters was lifting troops for a search and destroy mission from Plei Me, Vietnam, to Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley. On the fourth troop lift, the airlift began to take enemy fire, and by the time the aircraft had refueled and returned for the next troop lift, the enemy had Landing Zone X-Ray targeted. As Major Crandall and the first eight helicopters landed to discharge troops on his fifth troop lift, his unarmed helicopter came under such intense enemy fire that the ground commander ordered the second flight of eight aircraft to abort their mission. As Major Crandall flew back to Plei Me, his base of operations, he determined that the ground commander of the besieged infantry battalion desperately needed more ammunition. Major Crandall then decided to adjust his base of operations to Artillery Firebase Falcon in order to shorten the flight distance to deliver ammunition and evacuate wounded soldiers.

While medical evacuation was not his mission, he immediately sought volunteers and with complete disregard for his own personal safety, led the two aircraft to Landing Zone X-Ray. Despite the fact that the landing zone was still under relentless enemy fire, Major Crandall landed and proceeded to supervise the loading of seriously wounded soldiers aboard his aircraft. Major Crandall’s voluntary decision to land under the most extreme fire instilled in the other pilots the will and spirit to continue to land their own aircraft, and in the ground forces the realization that they would be resupplied and that friendly wounded would be promptly evacuated. This greatly enhanced morale and the will to fight at a critical time. After his first medical evacuation, Major Crandall continued to fly into and out of the landing zone throughout the day and into the evening. That day he completed a total of 22 flights, most under intense enemy fire, retiring from the battlefield only after all possible service had been rendered to the Infantry battalion. His actions provided critical resupply of ammunition and evacuation of the wounded. Major Crandall’s daring acts of bravery and courage in the face of an overwhelming and determined enemy are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army.

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15 November

1626 – The Pilgrim Fathers, who settled in New Plymouth, bought out their London investors.

1763 – Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon began surveying Mason-Dixon Line between Pennsylvania and Maryland.

1777 – After 16 months of debate, the Continental Congress, sitting in its temporary capital of York, Pennsylvania, agrees to adopt the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. In 1781, with the Revolutionary War still raging, the last of the 13 states ratified the agreement. In 1777, Patriot leaders, stinging from British oppression, were reluctant to establish any form of government that might infringe on the right of individual states to govern their own affairs. The Articles of Confederation provided for only a loose federation of American states. Congress was a single house, with each state having one vote, and a president would be elected to chair the assembly. Although Congress did not have the right to levy taxes, it did have authority over foreign affairs and could regulate a national army and declare war and peace.

Amendments to the Articles required approval from all 13 states. On March 2, 1781, following final ratification by the 13th state, the Articles of Confederation became the law of the land. By 1786, defects in the Articles were apparent, such as the lack of central authority over foreign and domestic commerce, and the United States was in danger of breaking apart. In 1787, Congress endorsed a plan to draft a new constitution that would establish a more centralized and effective government. On March 4, 1789, the modern United States was established when the U.S. Constitution formally replaced the Articles of Confederation.

1805 – Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and their party reached the mouth of the Columbia River, completing their trek to the Pacific.

1806 – Approaching the Colorado foothills of the Rocky Mountains during his second exploratory expedition, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike spots a distant mountain peak that looks “like a small blue cloud.” The mountain was later named Pike’s Peak in his honor. Pike’s explorations of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory of the United States began before the nation’s first western explorers, Lewis and Clark, had returned from their own expedition up the Missouri River. Pike was more of a professional military man than either Lewis or Clark, and he was a smart man who had taught himself Spanish, French, mathematics, and elementary science. When the governor of Louisiana Territory requested a military expedition to explore the headwaters of the Mississippi, General James Wilkinson picked Pike to lead it. Although Pike’s first western expedition was only moderately successful, Wilkinson picked him to lead a second mission in July 1806 to explore the headwaters of the Red and Arkansas Rivers. This route took Pike across present-day Kansas and into the high plains region that would later become the state of Colorado. When Pike first saw the peak that would later bear his name, he grossly underestimated its height and its distance, never having seen mountains the size of the Rockies. He told his men they should be able to walk to the peak, climb it, and return before dinner.

Pike and his men struggled through snow and sub-zero temperatures before finally taking shelter in a cave for the night, without even having reached the base of the towering mountain. Pike later pronounced the peak impossible to scale. The remainder of Pike’s expedition was equally trying. After attempting for several months to locate the Red River, Pike and his men became hopelessly lost. A troop of Spanish soldiers saved the mission when they arrested Pike and his men. The soldiers escorted them to Santa Fe, thus providing Pike with an invaluable tour of that strategically important region, courtesy of the Spanish military. After returning to the United States, Pike wrote a poorly organized account of his expedition that won him some fame, but little money. Still, in recognition of his bravery and leadership during the western expeditions, the army appointed him a brigadier general during the War of 1812. He was killed in an explosion during the April 1813 assault on Toronto.

1827 – Creek Indians lost all their property in US. The Creek Indians consisted of more than one tribe of Indians. They were a confederacy of tribes banded together for the good of all members. The Creek culture is thought to have started as a defensive strategy against the other larger Indian tribes of the region. The confederacy was always changing in size; it would gain and lose land and people as small tribes joined and withdrew. At the start of the 1500’s the Creeks occupied nearly all of what is the southeast United States. That came to an end in the 1600’s when the Cherokee, and later the Europeans, drove them west to Alabama and finely to what is now Oklahoma. The Creek problem started with a battle in Lumpkin County near Slaughter Gap. It was the first of many defeats that forced the Creeks farther west.

A later battle for which Cherokee County is now named, forced the Creeks south and west to the Chattahoochee and Coose Rivers. This is why the names upper and lower were added to the new separate Creek tribes. The fighting only became more intense after the Red sticks, a small faction of Creeks, slaughtered 250 men, women, and children at Fort. Mims, Alabama. The battle started the Creek War. The fitting gave the Democratic party more support to drive the Creeks out. Gov. George Troup finally did just that after the treaty of Indian Springs was singed. By 1827 the Creeks were gone from Georgia.

1862 – President Lincoln, with Secretaries Seward and Chase, drove to the Washington Navy Yard to view the trial of the Hyde rocket. Captain Dahlgren joined the group for the experiment. Though a defective rocket accidentally exploded, the President escaped injury.

1863 – Fort Moultrie opened a heavy, evening bombardment on Union Army positions at Cumming’s Point, Morris Island. Brigadier General Gillmore immediately turned to Rear Admiral Dahlgren for assistance. “Will you have some of your vessels move up, so as to prevent an attack by boats on the sea face of the point,” he wired late at night. The Admiral answered “at once” and ordered the tugs on patrol duty to keep “a good lookout.” U.S.S. Lehigh, Commander Andrew Bryson, grounded while covering Cumming’s Point and was taken under heavy fire the next morning before U.S.S. Nahant, Lieutenant Commander John J. Cornwell, got her off.

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1864 – Union General William T. Sherman begins his expedition across Georgia by torching the industrial section of Atlanta and pulling away from his supply lines. For the next six weeks, Sherman’s army destroyed most of Georgia before capturing the Confederate seaport of Savannah, Georgia. Sherman captured Atlanta in early September after a long summer campaign. He recognized that he was vulnerable in the city, however, as his supply lines stretched all the way from Nashville, Tennessee. Confederate raiders such as Nathan Bedford Forrest threatened to cut his lines, and Sherman had to commit thousands of troops to protect the railroads and rivers that carried provisions for his massive army. Sherman split his army, keeping 60,000 men and sending the rest back to Nashville with General George Thomas to deal with the remnants of General John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee, the force Sherman had defeated to take Atlanta. After hearing that President Lincoln had won reelection on November 8, Sherman ordered 2,500 light wagons loaded with supplies.

Doctors checked each soldier for illness or injuries, and those who were deemed unfit were sent to Nashville. Sherman wrote to his general in chief, Ulysses S. Grant, that if he could march through Georgia it would be “proof positive that the North can prevail.” He told Grant that he would not send couriers back, but to “trust the Richmond papers to keep you well advised.” Sherman loaded the surplus supplies on trains and shipped them back to Nashville. On November 15, the army began to move, burning the industrial section of Atlanta before they left. One witness reported “immense and raging fires lighting up whole heavens … huge waves of fire roll up into the sky; presently the skeleton of great warehouses stand out in relief against sheets of roaring, blazing, furious flames.” Sherman’s famous destruction of Georgia had begun.

1882 – LCDR French Chadwick reports to American Legation in London as first Naval Attache.

1906 – Curtis E. Le May, air force general and VP candidate, was born. Curtis Emerson Le May graduated from Ohio State University in 1928. He received his pilots wings at the Air Corps Flying School in 1929, the beginning of a thirty-eight year military career from a pilot in the elite First Pursuit Croup to Chief of Staff United States Air Force. “Curt” Le May was respected throughout his service for his vision, high order of discipline, and the professionalism he demanded of himself and his commands. From fighter pilot to bombardment pilot in the mid-1930’s, he pioneered and became a leading expert in aerial celestial navigation. He proved his thesis on the 1938 B-17 Goodwill Flight to South America and the intercept of the ocean liner Rex, 800 miles off the U.S. coast in 1940. As Commander of the 305th Bombardment Group in England in 1942 and later as Commander of the 3rd Air Division, he developed the novel tactic of low altitude, non-evasive bombing. This was to become a major technique of World War II strategic air operations. In 1944, he assumed command of the struggling 20th Air Force B-29 operations in China. Later in 1945, he moved to the Marianas Islands in the Pacific to lead the 21st Air Force B-29’s in low altitude operations in the final air assault on Japan. After the war, he was Deputy Chief of Staff for Research and Development and then Commander U.S. Air Forces in Europe where he organized the historic Berlin Airlift in 1947, employing air power for humanitarism. He led the Strategic Air Command from 1948 to 1957, when he became Vice Chief and then Chief of Staff of the Air Force in 1961. He led the Air Force through its transformation into an all jet force of great mobility, missiles, and high professionalism. General Le May retired from active service in 1965.

1919 – The US Senate 1st invoked cloture to end a filibuster over the Versailles Treaty. Cloture is the only procedure by which the Senate can vote to place a time limit on consideration of a bill or other matter, and thereby overcome a filibuster. Under the cloture rule (Rule XXII), the Senate may limit consideration of a pending matter to 30 additional hours, but only by vote of three-fifths of the full Senate, normally 60 votes.

1920 – Forty-one nations opened the first League of Nations session in Geneva.

1936 – Nazi Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Komintern pact. The Anti-Komintern, ostensibly a defensive treaty opposed to Communism, would define the Axis powers.

1937 – The 1st US congressional session in air-conditioned chambers took place.

1939 – President Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

1940 – The first 75,000 men were called to Armed Forces duty under peacetime conscription.

1940 – US flying boats begin patrols from bases in Bermuda.

1942 – Although U.S. lost several ships in Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, Naval Force under Rear Admiral Willlis Lee, USS Washington (BB-56), turns back Japanese transports trying to reinforce Guadalcanal. The Japanese never again try to send large naval forces to Guadalcanal.

1942 – US Paratroops take the airfield at Youks les Bains near Tebessa, Algeria.

1943 – British General Alexander calls off the US 5th Army assault on the German-held Reinhard Line. Casualties have been heavy. A determined German defense combined with rugged terrain and poor weather contribute to the decision to end the attack. To the east, elements of the British 8th Army achieve tenuous crossings over the Sangro River.

1944 – Forces of the US 3rd Army advance around Metz. To the south of the city, the Metz-Sarrebourg rail line is cut. To the right, the US 7th Army advances along the line north of St. Die.

1944 – In the Mapia Atoll a regiment of the US 31st Division lands and eliminates the small Japanese garrison. Naval support is provided by an Anglo-American force commanded by British Admiral Lord Ashbourne.

1944 – A number of senior armed forces commanders are promoted to the new ranks of General of the Army and Admiral of the Fleet. The new ranks are identified by a five star insignia.

1957 – US sentenced Soviet spy Rudolf Ivanovich Abel to 30 years and $3,000 fine. William Fischer, better known as Rudolf Abel, was one of the top Soviet spies during the Cold War. In 1948 he entered the United States and immediately began to set up networks of informants. Abel was primarily in charge of atomic spy operations and worked closely with Cohens and the Rosenbergs, all of whom were prominent spies. Abel had contacts within Los Alamos, a nuclear testing facility. Abel’s espionage likely had a huge impact on the Soviet nuclear program. Abel also set up large sabotage networks throughout the US and Latin America. The FBI finally arrested Abel in June of 1957, largely due to information provided by Reino Hayhanen, a Soviet defector. The US sentenced Abel to thirty years in prison. Abel was released in 1960, in exchange for the release of American spy Gary Powers, who was shot down over the Soviet Union. Abel was possibly the most important Soviet spy during the Cold War and his espionage had a great impact on both the US and USSR.

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1957 – In a long and rambling interview with an American reporter, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev claims that the Soviet Union has missile superiority over the United States and challenges America to a missile “shooting match” to prove his assertion. The interview further fueled fears in the United States that the nation was falling perilously behind the Soviets in the arms race. The interview elicited the usual mixture of boastful belligerence and calls for “peaceful coexistence” with the West that was characteristic of Khrushchev’s public statements during the late 1950s. He bragged about Soviet missile superiority, claiming that the United States did not have intercontinental ballistic rockets; “If she had,” the Russian leader sneered, “she would have launched her own sputnik.” He then issued a challenge: “Let’s have a peaceful rocket contest just like a rifle-shooting match, and they’ll see for themselves.”

Speaking about the future of East-West relations, Khrushchev stated that the American and Soviet people both wanted peace. He cautioned, however, that although the Soviet Union would never start a war, “some lunatics” might bring about a conflict. In particular, he noted that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had created “an artificial war psychosis.” In the case of war, it “would be fought on the American continent, which can be reached by our rockets.” NATO forces in Europe would also be devastated, and Europe “might become a veritable cemetery.” While the Soviet Union would “suffer immensely,” the forces of communism would ultimately destroy capitalism. Khrushchev’s remarks came just a few days after the Gaither Report had been leaked to the press in the United States. The report supported many of the Russian leader’s contentions, charging that the United States was falling far behind the Soviets in the arms race. Critics of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s foreign policy, particularly from the Democratic Party, went on the attack. The public debate concerning the alleged “missile gap” between U.S. and Soviet rocket arsenals continued through the early 1960s and was a major issue in the 1960 presidential campaign between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.

1960 – The first submarine with nuclear missiles, the USS George Washington, took to sea from Charleston, South Carolina.

1962 – Cuba threatened to down U.S. planes on reconnaissance flights over its territory.

1963 – A US military spokesman in Saigon reports that 1,000 US servicemen will be withdrawn from South Vietnam beginning 3 December.

1965 – In the second day of combat, regiments of the 1st Cavalry Division battle on Landing Zone X-Ray against North Vietnamese forces in the Ia Drang Valley.

1966 – The flight of Gemini 12 ended successfully as astronauts James A. Lovell and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Junior splashed down safely in the Atlantic. Primary object was rendezvous and docking and to evaluate EVA. Secondary objective included: Tethered vehicle operation, perform 14 experiments, rendezvous and dock in 3rd revolution, demonstrate automatic reentry, perform docked maneuvers, practice docking, conduct system tests and to park Gemini Agena target vehicle GATV-12 in 555.6 km (300nm) orbit.

1967 – The only fatality of the North American X-15 program occurs during the 191st flight when Air Force test pilot Michael J. Adams loses control of his aircraft which is destroyed mid-air over the Mojave Desert.

1969 – The Soviet submarine K-19 collides with the American submarine USS Gato in the Barents Sea.

1971 – Intel releases the world’s first commercial single-chip microprocessor, the 4004.

1979 – A package bomb aboard a commercial flight from Chicago exploded and forced an emergency landing at Dulles Airport. It was later attributed to the Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski.

1983 – U.S. Navy CAPT George Tsantes was shot and killed while on his way to work in Athens. His chauffeur also died in the attack. The Greek terrorist organization “November 17” subsequently took credit for the killings.

1985 – A research assistant is injured when a package from the Unabomber addressed to a University of Michigan professor explodes.

1986 – A government tribunal in Nicaragua convicted American Eugene Hasenfus of charges related to his role in delivering arms to Contra rebels, and sentenced him to 30 years in prison. He was pardoned a month later.

1990 – The space shuttle “Atlantis” was launched on a secret military mission. Launch originally scheduled for July 1990. However, liquid hydrogen leak found on orbiter Columbia during STS-35 countdown prompted three precautionary tanking tests on Atlantis at pad June 29, July 13 and July 25. Tests confirmed hydrogen fuel leak on external tank side of external tank/orbiter 17-inch quick disconnect umbilical. Could not repair at pad and Atlantis rolled back to VAB August 9, demated and transferred to OPF. During rollback, vehicle parked outside VAB about a day while COLUMBIA/STS-35 stack transferred to pad for launch. Outside, Atlantis suffered minor hail damage to tiles during thunderstorm.

After repairs made in OPF, Atlantis transferred to VAB for mating October 2. During hoisting operations, platform beam that should have been removed from aft compartment fell and caused minor damage which was repaired. Vehicle rolled out to Pad A October 12. Fourth mini-tanking test performed October 24, with no excessive hydrogen or oxygen leakage detected. At Flight Readiness Review, launch date set for November 9. Launch reset for November 15 due to payload problems. Liftoff occurred during classified launch window lying within launch period extending from 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. EST, November 15, 1990. Launch Weight: Classified.

1991 – A federal appeals panel threw out former National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter’s felony convictions in the Iran-Contra affair, saying his immunized testimony to Congress was improperly used against him.

1995 – The space shuttle “Atlantis” docked with the orbiting Russian space station “Mir.”

2001 – President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to resolve their dispute over U.S. missile shield plans but pledged to fight terrorism and deepen U.S.-Russian ties as their summit, which began at the White House then shifted to Bush’s Texas ranch, came to a close.

2001 – Investigators in Florida said anthrax was found throughout the 68,000-square-foot America Media building in Boca Raton, where the 1st case was identified.

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2001 – Day 40 of the attack on Afghanistan: Osama bin Laden’s Brigade 055 dispersed into the mountains of Afghanistan. US planes struck Taliban positions outside Kunduz, where as many as 20,000 Taliban fighters gathered. Kandahar went under siege by opposition forces. Jalalabad was reported to be under Yunis Khalis of the Northern Alliance. Mullah Omar in a BBC radio interview warned of a larger strategy: the “destruction of America.”

2001 – Two al-Qaeda computers were acquired by a Wall Street journalist in Kabul for $1,100 following US bombing. They were found to contain over 1,750 text and video files of al Qaeda activities including weapons programs. One file contained the names of 170 al Qaeda members.

2001 – The U.S. was able to track and kill al-Qaeda’s number three, Mohammed Atef with a bomb at his Kabul home between 14–16 November 2001, along with his guard Abu Ali al-Yafi’i and six others.

2002 – The FBI warned that al-Qaida may be planning a “spectacular” terrorist attack intended to damage the U.S. economy and inflict large-scale casualties.

2002 – US aircraft exchanged fire with Iraqi ground forces near An Najaf, about 85 miles south of Baghdad.

2003 – The Iraqi Governing Council said the US-led occupation administration in Iraq will end by June after a transitional government is selected and assumes sovereignty.

2003 – Two US Army Black Hawk helicopters collided under fire and crashed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, killing at least 17 soldiers.

2003 – In Iraq insurgents and looters overran US bases in Samara when soldiers left in an effort to let Iraqis handle security.

2006 – The battle of Turki began after Lt. Col. Andrew Poppas, commander of the 5th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry, a unit of the 82nd Airborne Division, and other soldiers flew over the area on a reconnaissance mission on November 12. From the helicopters, they spotted a white car covered by shrubbery and a hole in the ground that appeared to be a hiding place. The colonel dropped off an eight-man team and later sent other soldiers to sweep the area. Gunfire erupted on November 15 when C Troop paratroopers ran into an ambush near the village of Turki. Several insurgents feigned surrender to lure American troops out of their up-armored humvees and onto the ground. This tactic would be repeated to draw in members from A and B Troops in other locations. Officers said that in this battle, unlike the vast majority of engagements in Diyala, insurgents stood and fought, even deploying a platoon-sized unit that showed remarkable discipline and that one captain said was in “perfect military formation.”

Insurgents throughout Iraq usually avoid direct confrontation with the Americans, preferring to use hit-and-run tactics and melting away at the sight of American armored vehicles. The insurgents had built a labyrinth network of trenches in the farmland, with sleeping areas and significant weapons caches. Two anti-aircraft guns had been hidden away. The fighting eventually became so intense that the Americans called in airstrikes, provided by both helicopter gunships and F16s. American commanders said they called in 12 hours of airstrikes while soldiers shot their way through a reed-strewn network of canals in extremely close combat. The fighting lasted for more than 40 hours. High level terrorist leaders were thought to have been present. The stiff resistance from insurgent fighters was believed to have given these leaders time to escape. In the end the 5th Squadron managed to destroy the insurgent trench system established in the area. Six insurgent weapons caches were also uncovered during the battle. The caches included more than 400,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition, 15,000 rounds of heavy machine gun ammunition, five mortar bipods, three heavy machine guns, three anti-tank weapons, two recoilless rifles and numerous mortar rounds, grenades, flares and other artillery rounds. But many more insurgent training camps remain in the area. An American captain and a lieutenant, both West Point graduates, were killed in the battle along with 72 insurgents and 20 insurgents were captured.

2007 – The United States Treasury freezes all assets of the Tamils Rehabilitation Organization, claiming that it acts as a “front to facilitate fundraising” for the Tamil Tigers.

2008 – Mission STS-126 commences with the launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour. The spacecraft will deliver equipment required to increase the crew capacity of the International Space Station from three to six members.


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Congressional Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day



BONG, RICHARD 1. (Air Mission)

Rank and organization: Major, U.S. Army Air Corps. Place and date: Over Borneo and Leyte, 10 October to 15 November 1944. Entered service at: Poplar, Wis. Birth: Poplar, Wis. G.O. No.: 90, 8 December 1944. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action above and beyond the call of duty in the Southwest Pacific area from 10 October to 15 November 1944. Though assigned to duty as gunnery instructor and neither required nor expected to perform combat duty, Maj. Bong voluntarily and at his own urgent request engaged in repeated combat missions, including unusually hazardous sorties over Balikpapan, Borneo, and in the Leyte area of the Philippines. His aggressiveness and daring resulted in his shooting down 8 enemy airplanes during this period.

BALDONADO, JOE R.

Rank and Organization: Corporal, U.S. Army, Company B, 187th Airborne Infantry Regiment. Place and Date: November 15, 1950. Kangdong, Korea. Born: August 28, 1930, Colorado. Departed: Yes (11/25/1950). Entered Service At: Santa Clara, CA. G.O. Number: . Date of Issue: 03/18/2014. Accredited To: . Citation: Baldonado distinguished himself on Nov. 25, 1950, while serving as a machine-gunner in the vicinity of Kangdong, Korea. Baldonado’s platoon was occupying Hill 171 when the enemy attacked, attempting to take their position. Baldonado held an exposed position, cutting down wave after wave of enemy troops even as they targeted attacks on his position. During the final assault by the enemy, a grenade landed near Baldanado’s gun, killing him instantly. His remains still have not been found.

*JORDAN, MACK A.

Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Company K 21st Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division. Place and date: Near Kumsong, Korea, 15 November 1951. Entered service at: Collins, Miss Born: 8 December 1928, Collins, Miss. G.O. No.: 3, 8 January 1953 Citation: Pfc. Jordan, a member of Company K, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and indomitable courage above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy. As a squad leader of the 3d Platoon, he was participating in a night attack on key terrain against a fanatical hostile force when the advance was halted by intense small-arms and automatic-weapons fire and a vicious barrage of hand grenades. Upon orders for the platoon to withdraw and reorganize, Pfc. Jordan voluntarily remained behind to provide covering fire. Crawling toward an enemy machine gun emplacement, he threw 3 grenades and neutralized the gun. He then rushed the position delivering a devastating hail of fire, killing several of the enemy and forcing the remainder to fall back to new positions. He courageously attempted to move forward to silence another machine gun but, before he could leave his position, the ruthless foe hurled explosives down the hill and in the ensuing blast both legs were severed. Despite mortal wounds, he continued to deliver deadly fire and held off the assailants until the platoon returned. Pfc. Jordan’s unflinching courage and gallant self-sacrifice reflect lasting glory upon himself and uphold the noble traditions of the infantry and the military service.


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16 November

1676 – 1st colonial prison was organized at Nantucket Massachusetts.

1766 – Indians surrendered to British in Indian War of Chief Pontiac. By 1763, the British had control of much of northeastern North America. Most of the Indians were displeased by their treatment from the British. The main concern of the Indians was the continued settlement of people along the western frontier, which in 1763, included Ohio. Chief Pontiac began organizing many Indian tribes together to rebel against the British. Pontiac’s message of united Indian resistance was accepted among many groups, including the Delawares, Hurons, Illinois, Kickapoos, Miamis, Potawatomies, Senecas, Shawnees, Ottawas, and Chippewas. After a final council in 1763, warfare began. Pontiac’s goal was to drive the British back to the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains. The Indians had success waging war on frontier settlements that were not well protected. The British had many small forts on the frontier that were easily overrun by the Indians. Many British soldiers were killed in the attacks. The Indians attacked Fort Detroit and Fort Pitt but were unsuccessful in capturing the forts. The Indians were counting on French support against the British in order to take these two forts. The French support never came.

As winter was getting close, many of the Indians who were fighting were also concerned about their families. Many went home to take care of their families and crops. Without controlling Fort Pitt or Detroit, the Indians had no real chance of driving the British out of the western frontier. Smaller battles continued for several years. In 1766, Pontiac signed a peace treaty at Oswego, New York. As one of the conditions of the treaty, Pontiac was considered not guilty of any wrong and was allowed to return home to his family who were living on the Maumee River. There were farther reaching consequences, however. This war worsened Britain’s financial health and resulted in the Proclamation of 1763, preventing colonial settlement farther to the West. This will be a grievance that leads into the American Independence movement.

1776 – During the Revolutionary War, Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Knyphausen and a force of 3,000 Hessian mercenaries lay siege to Fort Washington on Long Island. Throughout the morning, Knyphausen met stiff resistance from the Patriot riflemen inside, but by the afternoon the Americans were overwhelmed, and the garrison commander, Colonel Robert Magaw, surrendered. Three thousand Americans were taken prisoner, and valuable ammunition and supplies were lost to the Hessians. Two weeks earlier, William Demont had deserted from the Fifth Pennsylvania Battalion and given British intelligence agents information about the Patriot defense of New York, including information about the location and defense of Fort Washington. Demont was the first traitor to the Patriot cause, and his treason contributed significantly to Knyphausen’s victory.

1776 – Margaret Corbin and her husband, crews one of two cannons in defense of Fort Washington and 600 other defenders. When her husband falls, Margaret takes his place at his cannon and continues firing until she is seriously wounded. She later becomes first woman in U.S. history to receive a pension from Congress for military service.

1776 – First salute to an American flag (Grand Union flag) flying from Continental Navy ship Andrew Doria, by Dutch fort at St. Eustatius, West Indies.

1798 – Kentucky became the 1st state to nullify an act of Congress. The Kentucky Resolution was passed in opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts by the Kentucky legislature,written by Thomas Jefferson. The Virginia legislature would follow suit on December 24, 1798, the measure written by James Madison. The resolutions attacked the Federalist interpretation of the Constitution which extended the powers of the national government over the states. The resolutions declared that the Constitution only established an agreement and that the federal government had no right to exercise powers not specifically delegated to it; should the federal government assume such powers, its acts under them would be void. It was the right of the states to decide as to the constitutionality of such acts. The resolutions were submitted to other states for approval but with no real result. Their importance lies in that they were later considered to be the first statements of the States’ Rights theory, and led to the concept of nullification. They were also useful later to the Confederate side of the American Civil War, which used the ideas presented in these documents as justification for seceding.

1798 – The British boarded the U.S. frigate Baltimore and impressed a number of crewmen as alleged deserters, a practice which contributed to the War of 1812.

1813 – The British announced a blockade of Long Island Sound, leaving only the New England coast open to shipping.

1821 – Missouri Indian trader William Becknell arrives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sells his goods at an enormous profit, and makes plans to return the next year over the route that will become known as the Santa Fe Trail. Pure luck made Becknell the first businessman to revive the American trade with Santa Fe. Fearing American domination of the region, the Spanish had closed their Southwest holdings to foreigners following the Pike expedition more than a decade earlier. They threw the few traders who violated the policy into prison and confiscated their goods. However, Becknell and other merchants continued to trade with the Indians on the American-controlled eastern slope of the southern Rockies. While on such an expedition in the fall of 1821, Becknell encountered a troop of Mexican soldiers.

They informed Becknell that they had recently won their independence in a war with Spain, and the region was again open to American traders. Becknell immediately sped to Santa Fe, where he found a lucrative market for his goods, and his saddlebags were heavy with Mexican silver when he returned to his base in Franklin, Missouri. The next summer Becknell traveled to Santa Fe again, this time with three wagonloads of goods. Instead of following the old route that passed over a dangerous high pass, however, Becknell blazed a shorter and easier cutoff across the Cimarron Desert. Thus, while much of the route he followed had been used by Mexican traders for decades, Becknell’s role in reopening the trail and laying out the short-cut earned him the title of “Father of the Santa Fe Trail.” It became one of the most important and lucrative of the Old West trading routes; merchants and other travelers continued to follow the trail blazed by Becknell until the arrival of trains in the late 1870s.

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1831 – Karl von Clausewitz (51), Prussian strategist (Campaign 1813), died. Carl Phillip Gottlieb von Clausewitz (b. June 1, 1780) was a Prussian military thinker. His Father was a Prussian Officer and he entered the army at the age of 12. He attained the rank of Major-General in the Prussian Military, and is famous for writing the military strategy book Vom Kriege (On War), first published in 1832. Despite his death before quite completing On War, his ideas have been widely influential in military theory. One idea, that actual war includes “friction” which deranges, to a greater or lesser degree, all prior arrangements, has become common currency in other fields as well (i.e. business strategy).

1846 – General Zachary Taylor took Saltillo, Mexico. General, cried Brig. Gen. John Wool in despair, we are whipped! I know it, replied Maj. Gen. Zachary Taylor, but the volunteers don’t know it. Let them alone; we’ll see what they do.

1861 – Confederate Secretary of the Navy Mallory advertised for plans and bids for building four seagoing ironclads capable of carrying four heavy guns each.

1863 – At the Battle of Campbell’s Station, Ten., Confederates under General James Longstreet fail to defeat a Union force under General Ambrose Burnside near Knoxville, Tennessee. After the Battle of Gettysburg in early July, Army of Northern Virginia commander General Robert E. Lee allowed Longstreet to take two divisions to reinforce General Braxton Bragg’s army around Chattanooga. The Confederate leadership realized that they were losing the war in the West, and relief was needed. Longstreet arrived just in time to execute a crucial attack in the Confederate victory at Chickamauga in northern Georgia. He stayed to help Bragg in the siege of Chattanooga, but the two men quarreled frequently. In late October, Union troops drove Longstreet’s force away from Brown’s Ferry, allowing the beleaguered Union troops in Chattanooga to resume shipping supplies via the Tennessee River. This led to a permanent split between the Confederate generals, and Bragg allowed Longstreet to head for eastern Tennessee in an attempt to secure that area for the Confederates.

Campbell Station was the first engagement of his attempt to capture Knoxville, an area of intense anti-Confederate sentiment. Burnside had only about 5,000 men in his command, but he hoped to keep Longstreet moving away from Chattanooga, where Union forces were pinned inside of a Confederate semicircle. Burnside allowed the Rebels to cross the Tennessee River but then realized that Longstreet could trap him along the river. He began a mad race to the strategic crossroads at Campbell Station, even abandoning many of his supply wagons in order to move more quickly. The Yankees reached the intersection first, and Burnside planned to fight a delaying action. Longstreet caught up with him by the late afternoon, and a short battle ensued. A poorly coordinated attack by the Confederates failed to turn Burnside’s flank, and the Union repulsed them with ease. The fighting ended at nightfall, and Burnside escaped into the defenses around Knoxville. The Union lost 318 men killed and wounded; the Confederates lost 174.

1863 – The effect of the Union’s western successes was severely felt by the Confederate effort in the east. Commander John K. Mitchell wrote Secretary Mallory that there was a critical shortage of fuels for manufacturing purposes and naval use. “The occupation of Chattanooga by the enemy in August has effectually cut off the supply from the mines in that region, upon which the public works in Georgia and South Carolina and the naval vessels in the waters of those States were dependent. Meager supplies have been sent to Charleston from this place [Richmond] and from the Egypt mines in North Carolina. . . .” He reported that there was a sufficient amount of coal in the Richmond area to supply the Confederate ships operating in Virginia waters and rivers, and he felt that wood was being successfully substituted for coal at Charleston and Savannah. Mitchell paid tribute to the thoroughness of the Union blockade when he wrote of the economic plight of the Confederate States: “The prices of almost all articles of prime necessity have advanced from five to ten times above those ruling at the breaking out of the war, and, for many articles, a much greater advance has been reached, so that now the pay of the higher grades of officers, even those with small families, is insufficient for the pay of their board only; how much greater, then, must be the difficulty of living in the case of the lower grades of officers, and, the families of enlisted persons. This difficulty, when the private sources of credit and the limited means of most of the officers become exhausted, must soon, unless relief be extended to them by the Government, reach the point of destitution, or of charitable dependence, a point, in fact, already reached in many instances.”

1863 – U.S.S. Monongahela, Commander Strong, escorted Army transports and covered the landing of more than a thousand troops on Mustang Island, Aransas Pass, Texas. Monongahela’s sailors manned a battery of two howitzers ashore, and the ship shelled Confederate works until the out-numbered defenders surrendered. General Banks wrote in high praise of the “great assistance” rendered by Monongahela during this successful operation.

1856 – Barrier Forts reduction began at Canton China. On 22 October 1856, the sloop Portsmouth, under the command of Andrew H. Foote, was lying off Whampoa (in the Canton area) when it received a message from the American consul at Canton that American interests were in imminent danger. Commander Foote responded to the message and sent a landing force, including Lieutenant William W. Kirkland with 18 Marines, to assist the consul. On 27 October, Marines and sailors from the Levant were sent to reinforce the Portsmouth’s landing force. Later, on 12 November, Commodore James Armstrong arrived in the area on board his flagship, the San Jacinto, and sent additional reinforcements to the detachment in Canton, under the command of Captain John D. Simms. Shortly after Simms arrived at his destination and assumed command of the entire Marine force, Armstrong withdrew his flagship and left Foote in command at Canton. With warlike acts on the part of the Chinese increasing and negotiations deteriorating, Foote was given authority to proceed with operations against the hostile forces. During the engagement, which began in the early morning, a force of approximately 287 officers, sailors, and Marines met more than 4,000 Chinese troops and defeated them in every action. After three days of hard fighting, the Marines and sailors under Foote’s command had captured four strongly defended forts, killed an estimated 500 Chinese, and routed an army of thousands. American losses were recorded at seven killed and 32 wounded or injured. As a result of this engagement against a numerically superior Chinese force, the Secretary of the Navy in his Annual Report for 1857, gave praise to all of those who had fought the “Battle of the Barrier Forts.”

1902 – A cartoon appeared in the Washington Star, prompting the Teddy Bear Craze, after President Teddy Roosevelt refused to kill a captive bear tied up for him to shoot during a hunting trip to Mississippi.

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1907 – Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory collectively enter the United States as Oklahoma, the 46th state. Oklahoma, with a name derived from the Choctaw Indian words okla, meaning “people,” and humma, meaning “red,” has a history of human occupation dating back 15,000 years. The first Europeans to visit the region were Spanish explorers in the 16th century, and in the 18th century the Spanish and French struggled for control of the territory. The United States acquired Oklahoma from France in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase. After the War of 1812, the U.S. government decided to remove Indian tribes from the settled eastern lands of the United States and move them west to the unsettled lands of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. In 1828, Congress reserved Oklahoma for Indians and in 1834 formally ceded it to five southeastern tribes as Indian Territory. Many Cherokees refused to abandon their homes east of the Mississippi, and so the U.S. Army moved them west in a forced march known as the “Trail of Tears.”

The uprooted tribes joined Plains Indians that had long occupied the area, and Indian nations with fixed boundaries and separate governments were established in the region. During the American Civil War, most tribes in Indian Territory supported the South. With the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, the territory was placed under U.S. military rule. White cattlemen and settlers began to covet the virgin ranges of Oklahoma, and after the arrival of the railroad in the 1870s, illegal white incursion into Indian Territory flourished. Most of these “Boomers” were expelled, but pressure continued until the federal government agreed in 1889 to open two million acres in central Oklahoma for white settlement. At noon on April 22, 1889, a pistol shot signaled the opening of the new land, and tens of thousands of people rushed to stake claims. Those who had already made illegal entry to beat the starting gun were called “Sooners,” hence Oklahoma’s state nickname.

The following year, the region was divided into Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory. In 1907, Congress decided to admit Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory into the Union as a single state, with all Indians in the state becoming U.S. citizens. Representatives of the two territories drafted a constitution, and on September 17, 1907, it was approved by voters of the two territories. On November 16, Oklahoma was welcomed into the United States by President Theodore Roosevelt. Oklahoma initially prospered as an agricultural state, but the drought years of the 1930s made the state part of the Dust Bowl. During the Depression, poor tenant farmers known as “Okies” were forced to travel west seeking better opportunities. In the 1940s, prosperity returned to Oklahoma, and oil production brought a major economic boom in the 1970s.

1914 – The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States officially opens.

1933 – The United States and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations. President Roosevelt sent a telegram to Soviet leader Maxim Litvinov, expressing hope that U.S.-Soviet relations would “forever remain normal and friendly.”

1940 – New York City’s “Mad Bomber” George Metesky places his first bomb at a Manhattan office building used by Consolidated Edison.

1942 – Navy’s first Night Fighter squadron (VMF(N)-531) established at Cherry Point, NC.

1943 – American bombers strike a hydro-electric power facility and heavy water factory in German-controlled Vemork, Norway.

1944 – Allied air strikes support offensives of US 9th and 1st Armies; about 10,000 tons of bombs are dropped by some 1200 US 8th Air Force planes and 1100 RAF bombers with the goal of obliterating the fortified towns of Duren, Julich and Heinsberg as well as the German defensive position west of Duren. The US 9th Army advances toward Geilenkirchen and Eschweiler with the objective of reaching the Roer River. To the right, the US 1st Army attacks toward Duren, east of Aachen.

1945 – Eighty-eight German scientists, holding Nazi secrets, arrived in the U.S. In a move that stirs up some controversy, the United States ships 88 German scientists to America to assist the nation in its production of rocket technology. Most of these men had served under the Nazi regime and critics in the United States questioned the morality of placing them in the service of America. Nevertheless, the U.S. government, desperate to acquire the scientific know-how that had produced the terrifying and destructive V-1 and V-2 rockets for Germany during WWII, and fearful that the Russians were also utilizing captured German scientists for the same end, welcomed the men with open arms. Realizing that the importation of scientists who had so recently worked for the Nazi regime so hated by Americans was a delicate public relations situation, the U.S. military cloaked the operation in secrecy. In announcing the plan, a military spokesman merely indicated that some German scientists who had worked on rocket development had “volunteered” to come to the United States and work for a “very moderate salary.” The voluntary nature of the scheme was somewhat undercut by the admission that the scientists were in “protective custody.”

Upon their arrival in the United States on November 16th, newsmen and photographers were not allowed to interview or photograph the newcomers. A few days later, a source in Sweden claimed that the scientists were members of the Nazi team at Peenemeunde where the V-weapons had been produced. The U.S. government continued to remain somewhat vague about the situation, stating only that “certain outstanding German scientists and technicians” were being imported in order to “take full advantage of these significant developments, which are deemed vital to our national security.” The situation pointed out one of the many ironies connected with the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union, once allies against Germany and the Nazi regime during World War II, were now in a fierce contest to acquire the best and brightest scientists who had helped arm the German forces in order to construct weapons systems to threaten each other.

1948 – President Harry S. Truman rejected four-power talks on Berlin until the blockade was removed. Truman relied heavily on Dean Acheson for his most significant foreign policy achievements.

1950 – US Pres. Truman proclaimed an emergency crisis caused by communist threat. President Truman reassured China and other nations that he had never had any intention of carrying the hostilities into China. There was a lull in the fighting.

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1950 – A dedication of the monument erected in Arlington National Cemetery on the gravesite of those who lost their lives on the night of 29 January 1945, when USS Serpens was destroyed off Lunga Beach, Guadalcanal. This was the largest single disaster suffered by the US Coast Guard in World War II.

1955 – Big Four talks, taking place in Geneva on German reunification, ended in failure.

1961 – President John F. Kennedy decides to increase military aid to South Vietnam without committing U.S. combat troops. Kennedy was concerned at the advances being made by the communist Viet Cong, but did not want to become involved in a land war in Vietnam. He hoped that the military aid would be sufficient to strengthen the Saigon government and its armed forces against the Viet Cong. Ultimately it was not, and Kennedy ended up sending additional support in the form of U.S. military advisors and American helicopter units. By the time of his assassination in 1963, there were 16,000 U.S. soldiers in South Vietnam.

1963 – President John F. Kennedy on USS Observation Island witnesses launch of Polaris A-2 missile by USS Andrew Jackson (SSBN-619).

1965 – In the last day of the fighting at Landing Zone X-Ray, regiments of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division repulsed NVA forces in the Ia Drang Valley. Joe Galloway served at LZ X-ray. He later received the Bronze Star for his actions during the epic battle. Based on that and his subsequent actions in Vietnam, Galloway came to be regarded by the military leadership and the GIs alike as a journalist who was fair, objective, and who could be trusted to get the story right. He co-authored with Lt. Gen. Hal More “We Were Soldiers Once…Any Young.”

1967 – Haiphong shipyard in North Vietnam was hit by U.S. planes for the first time.

1968 – Operation Tran Hung Dao began in Mekong Delta. The SVN operation under the direction of the Joint General Staff employed six RVN Marine Corps, four Ranger, and five Airborne battalions to defend the Saigon area during the Tet offensive. It claimed 953 known enemy casualties.

1970 – South Vietnamese Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, speaking at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, says Cambodia would be overrun by communist forces “within 24 hours” if South Vietnamese troops currently operating there are withdrawn. Ky described the Cambodian operation of the previous spring (the so-called “Cambodian Incursion,” in which President Nixon had sent U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers into Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese base camps) as the “turning point” of the war. He said that as a result of that operation, the enemy had been forced to revert to low-level guerrilla warfare. Ky also reported that his government was concerned that the Nixon administration might be yielding to the “pressure of the antiwar groups” and pulling out the remaining U.S. troops too quickly.

1971 – As the fighting gets closer to Phnom Penh, the United States steps up its air activities in support of the Cambodian government. U.S. helicopter gunships struck at North Vietnamese emplacements at Tuol Leap, 10 miles north of Phnom Penh.

1973 – President Nixon signed the Alaska Pipeline measure into law. Oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay in 1968. A pipeline was considered the only viable system for transporting the oil to the nearest ice-free port, over 800 miles (1,280 km) away at Valdez. The oil companies with exploitation rights grouped together as the Alyeska consortium to create a company to design, build and then operate the pipeline. US President Richard Nixon signed the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act into law on November 16, 1973, which authorized the construction of the pipeline. Although the pipeline is actually about 799 miles long, it is usually referred to as 800 miles long. The 799 mile route presented special challenges. As well as the harsh environment, the need to cross three mountain groups and many rivers and streams, the permafrost of Alaska meant that almost half of the pipeline’s length had to be elevated rather than buried as normal to prevent the ground melting and shifting.

There were five years of surveying and geological sampling before construction began. The single 48 inch (1.22 m) diameter pipeline was built between March 27, 1975 and May 31, 1977 at a cost of around $8 billion. The pipe was constructed in six sections by five different contractors employing 21,000 people at the peak of work, 31 were killed in accidents during construction. There are twelve pump stations, each with four pumps. Usually only around seven stations are active at one time. Some parts of the pipeline have radiators that disperse heat from the oil. It emerges from the ground at up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit (80 degrees Celsius). Without the radiators, the heat could melt the permafrost, causing the pipeline to sink and possibly sustain damage. Oil began flowing on June 20, 1977. Since then over 13 billion barrels (2 km³) have been pumped, peaking at 2.1 million barrels (330,000 m³) per day in 1988. Around 16,000 tankers have been loaded at the Marine Terminal at Valdez. The terminal has berths for four tankers and cost almost $1.4 billion to build. The first tanker to leave the terminal was the ARCO Juneau on August 1, 1977.

1973 – Launch of Skylab 4 under command of LTC Gerald P. Carr, USMC. The missions lasted 84 days and included 1,214 Earth orbits. Recovery by USS New Orleans (LPH-11). Last of the Skylab missions. The crew had problems during activation of the workshop that earlier crews had not faced. One of its first tasks was to unload and stow within Skylab thousands of items needed for their lengthy mission. The schedule for the activation sequence dictated lengthy work periods with a large variety of tasks to be performed. The crew soon found themselves tired and behind schedule. As the activation progressed, the astronauts complained of being pushed too hard. Ground crews disagreed; they felt that the flight crew was not working long enough or hard enough. By the end of their mission, the third crew had completed even more work than had been planned before launch. Thanksgiving Day, Gibson and Pogue accomplished a 6 1/2 hour spacewalk. The first part of their spacewalk was spent replacing film in the solar observatory. The remainder of the time was used to repair a malfunctioning antenna. The crew reported that the food was good, but slightly bland. The crew would have preferred to use more condiments to enhance the taste of the food. The amount of salt they could use was restricted for medical purposes. The quantity and type of food consumed was rigidly controlled because of their strict diet.

Seven days into their mission, a problem developed in the Skylab attitude control gyroscope system, which threatened to bring an early end to the mission. Skylab depended upon three large gyroscopes, sized so that any two of them could provide sufficient control and maneuver Skylab as desired. The third acted as a backup in the event of failure of one of the others. The gyroscope failure was attributed to insufficient lubrication. Later in the mission, a second gyroscope showed similar problems, but special temperature control and load reduction procedures kept the second one operating, and no further problems occurred. The crew spent many hours looking at the Earth. Carr and Pogue alternately manned controls, operating the sensing devices which measured and photographed selected features on the Earth’s surface. When not otherwise occupied, they watched through the workshop window as the Earth rolled steadily beneath them. Solar observations were made, with about 75 000 new telescopic images of the Sun recorded. Images were taken in the X-ray, ultraviolet, and visible portions of the spectrum.

As the end of their mission drew closer, Gibson continued his watch of the solar surface. On January 21, 1974, an active region on the Sun’s surface formed a bright spot which intensified and grew. Gibson quickly began filming the sequence, as the bright spot erupted, he had filmed the birth of a solar flare from space, the first recording in history. On December 13, the crew sighted Comet Kohoutek and trained the solar observatory and hand-held cameras on it. They continued to photograph it as it approached the Sun. On December 30, as it swept out from behind the Sun, Carr and Gibson spotted it as they were performing a spacewalk. Skylab 4 completed 1,214 Earth orbits and four EVAs totalling 22 hours, 13 minutes. They traveled 34.5 million miles (55,500,000 km) in 84 days, 1 hour and 16 minutes in space.

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1982 – The Space Shuttle Columbia completed its first operational flight. STS-5, the first operational mission, also carried the largest crew up to that time — four astronauts — and the first two commercial communications satellites to be flown. The fifth launch of the orbiter Columbia took place at 7:19 a.m. EST, Nov. 11, 1982. It was the second on-schedule launch. The crew included Vance Brand, commander; Robert F. Overmyer, pilot; and the first mission specialists to fly the Shuttle — Joseph P. Allen and William B. Lenoir. The two communications satellites were deployed successfully and subsequently propelled into their operational geosynchronous orbits by booster rockets. Both were Hughes-built HS-376 series satellites — SBS-3 owned by Satellite Business Systems, and Anik owned by Telesat of Canada. In addition to the first commercial satellite cargo, the flight carried a West German-sponsored microgravity GAS experiment canister in the payload bay. The crew also conducted three student experiments during the flight. A planned spacewalk by the two mission specialists had to be cancelled — it would have been the first for the Shuttle program — when the two space suits that were to be used developed problems.

1992 – United Nations Security Council voted to authorize a naval blockade on the Danube River and the Adriatic coast to tighten economic sanctions on Yugoslavia.

1995 – Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadzic and Gen’l. Ratko Mladic were again indicted for genocide by the UN War Crimes Tribunal for ordering the slaughter of Muslims after the takeover of Srebrenica.

1997 – In Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said Baghdad would allow US arms inspectors if Security Council permanent members had equal representation on the UN teams. The proposal was rejected.

2000 – A US Air Force F-16 collided with a small plane near Sarasota, Fla. The pilot of the Cessna was killed, the fighter pilot ejected safely.

2000 – In Colombia police and US Secret Service cracked a billion dollar counterfeiting operation. One man was arrested. The operation was believed to be master-minded by Ramiro Sepulveda.

2001 – An anthrax laced letter was found in quarantined congressional mail addressed to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.). It was found to contain billions of spores, enough to kill 100,000 people.

2001 – A University of Georgia football fan rushing to catch his flight ran past guards and through a passenger exit at Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport, forcing officials to halt flights; the man, Michael Lasseter, was later sentenced to five weekends or 10 days in jail and 500 hours of community service.

2001 – The Taliban’s last stronghold in northern Afghanistan was under siege. Nearly 10,000 Taliban fighters, led by foreign fighters, continued to resist. By then, the Taliban had been forced back to their heartland in southeastern Afghanistan around Kandahar.

2001 – The U.S. began bombing the mountain redoubt of Tora Bora. Around the same time, CIA and Special Forces operatives were at work in the area, enlisting local warlords and planning an attack.

2002 – In an open letter to the Iraqi Parliament, Pres. Saddam Hussein said he had no choice but to accept a tough new UN weapons inspection resolution because the US and Israel had shown their “claws and teeth” and declared unilateral war on the Iraqi people.

2007 – Marne Courageous was launched, targeting key AQI supply depots in the Yusufiyah area of the Euphrates River Valley, south east of Baghdad. It began with a major air assault conducted by 450 soldiers of the 3BCT/101st Airborne Division, 150 Iraqi soldiers and 70 Concerned Local Citizens near the villages of Owesat and al-Betra.

2009 – NASA launches Space Shuttle Atlantis on STS-129 at 1928 UTC (2:28pm EST), bringing supplies and the first two ExPRESS Logistics Carriers to the International Space Station.

2011 – Two bullets are found to have been fired at the White House in Washington, DC., one into a window that was stopped by bullet-proof glass.

2014 – ISIL claims to have executed American hostage Peter Kassig.

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Congressional Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day

BRANDLE, JOSEPH E.
Rank and organization: Private, Company C, 17th Michigan Infantry. Place and date: At Lenoire, Tenn., 16 November 1863. Entered service at: Colon, Mich. Born: 1839, Seneca County, Ohio. Date of issue: 20 July 1897. Citation: While color bearer of his regiment, having been twice wounded and the sight of one eye destroyed, still held to the colors until ordered to the rear by his regimental commander.

GILE, FRANK S.
Rank and organization: Landsman, U.S. Navy. Born: 1845, Massachusetts. Accredited to: Massachusetts. G.O. No.: 32, 16 April 1864. Citation: On board the U.S.S. Lehigh, Charleston Harbor, 16 November 1863, during the hazardous task of freeing the Lehigh, which had been grounded, and was under heavy enemy fire from Fort Moultrie. After several previous attempts had been made, Gile succeeded in passing in a small boat from the Lehigh to the Nahant with a line bent on a hawser. This courageous action while under severe enemy fire enabled the Lehigh to be freed from her helpless position.

IRVING, THOMAS
Rank and organization: Coxswain, U.S. Navy. Born: 1842, England. Accredited to: New York. G.O. No.: 32, 16 April 1864. Citation: Served on board the U.S.S. Lehigh, Charleston Harbor, 16 November 1863, during the hazardous task of freeing the Lehigh, which had grounded, and was under heavy enemy fire from Fort Moultrie. Rowing the small boat which was used in the hazardous task of transferring hawsers from the Lehigh to the Nahant. Irving twice succeeded in making the trip, while under severe fire from the enemy, only to find that each had been in vain when the hawsers were cut by hostile fire and chaffing.

LELAND, GEORGE W.
Rank and organization: Gunner’s Mate, U.S. Navy. Born: 1834, Savannah, Ga. Accredited to: Georgia. G.O. No.: 32, 16 April 1864. Citation: Serving on board the U.S.S. Lehigh, Charleston Harbor, 16 November 1863, during the hazardous task, of freeing the Lehigh, which had grounded, and was under heavy enemy fire from Fort Moultrie. Rowing the small boat which was used in the hazardous task of transferring hawsers from the Lehigh to the Nahant, Leland twice succeeded in making the trip, only to find that each had been in vain when the hawsers were cut by enemy fire and chaffing.

STARKINS, JOHN H.
Rank and organization: Sergeant, 34th New York Battery. Place and date: At Campbell Station, Tenn., 16 November 1863. Entered service at:——. Birth: Great Neck, N.Y. Date of issue: 30 July 1896. Citation; Brought off his piece without losing a man.

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