1943: The U.S. Fifth Army begins its attack across the Sangro River in Italy. Its objective, and the lynchpin to the German line, is the rugged Monte Cassino, a high hill in the cross-peninsular mountain chain that dominates the river crossings. Leading the way is the Texan 36th Infantry Division. American forces will press heavy attacks against dogged German resistance until 15 January 1944, but they will make only limited gains. The cost in American casualties will be extremely high; particularly hard hit will be the Texas Division.
2
1859: John Brown is convicted of treason for his armed attack on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. He goes to the gallows unrepentant, convinced that his plan to seize federal arms and arm Negro slaves in order to lead an uprising against slavery was ordained by God. Though federal authorities properly keep the moral issue of slavery separate from the legal issue of his insurrection, Brown's actions are one of many triggers in what, within two years, will lead to the American Civil War.
1952: President Dwight Eisenhower fulfills a campaign pledge and travels to Korea to observe personally the situation American troops face in the continuing Korean War. He finds American troops far better equipped, better trained and led, and in much superior spirits than the American press has been reporting. News reporters have been clamoring shrilly about the "Chinese hordes" ever since Communist China entered the fray on behalf of their nearly-defeated North Korean vassals, and with their typical level of patriotism (i.e., almost none), the reporters have painted a grim picture of American arms fighting futilely against mass attacks of seemingly endless numbers of soldiers. Asked about the "Chinese hordes," one private tells the President, "I ran into a horde yesterday. I killed both of them."
1970: Congress authorizes the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Within five years it will be the lasgest regulatory agency in the federal government, with a budget of over $2,000,000.00 per day. It is also one of the most intrusive agencies in the federal government. Thank you, thank you, Congress.
3
1952: The United Nations adopts an Indian proposal for an armistice in the Korean War. Please see entry for 15 December 1952.
4
1833: Abolitionists, including James Mott, form the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia. It will play a significant role in shepherding escaped slaves from slave-owning states, and in fostering the abolitionist movement into a political force that will be one of the catalysts of the American Civil War.
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1946: The United Nations General Assembly selects New York City as the permanent site for the United Nations. Although it receives a substantial ($8,500,000.00) gift from John D. Rockefeller nine days later toward purchase of the building site, the U.N. will become and continue to be a major expenditure for the United States to bear. Unpopular as it may be among politically correct liberals in this new era of American arms being subordinated to U.N. "peacekeeping" commanders, the idea continues with considerable merit that the U.N. has not accomplished its laudatory goals and serves, instead, a variety of geopolitical agendae that have, sadly, little to do with American security, let alone world peace.
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1941: Kido Butai reaches its launch point in the Central Pacific, barely a hundred miles north of the island of Oahu. It has traveled undetected from Japan. Admiral Yamamoto's plan for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor is now ready to proceed. In Hawaii and the United States, although there have been many indications of impending Japanese hostilities, intelligence experts fail either to consider that Japanese plans will involve the stronghold of Pearl Harbor or to recognize its vital strategic importance. The cost of this failure will be plain the next day.
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1941: "A date which will live in infamy!" This is how President Franklin Roosevelt describes the events of this day in addressing an emergency session of the Senate and House of Representatives. On this Sunday, the tensions that have grown steadily between the United States and Imperial Japan over nearly a decade turn into war with all its savagery. At 7:40 a.m., local time, the first wave of 189 Japanese warplanes arrive over the American anchorage on Oahu. They find the island almost completely undeserted, as American forces are still operating on a peacetime level of alertness despite several warnings, some more cryptic than others, that Japanese attacks on American possessions are imminent. The Japanese aircraft have virtually free reign over the strategic facilities and the warships lying at anchor below them. A second wave of aircraft arrives at 8:50 and meets more effective resistance, but they enjoy almost total air supremacy nonetheless. The attackers bomb and strafe ships, airfields, and dock facilities. When the Japanese finally withdraw at 9:45, four American battleships--Arizona, Oklahoma, Utah, West Virginia--are sinking, and the remaining five--California, Maryland, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Tennessee--are all heavily damaged. Almost all American warplanes have been destroyed, and three thousand men are dead or dying. Japanese losses are a mere twenty-nine aircraft and three midget submarines. Miraculously, the American aircraft carriers are at sea at the time of the attack and the Japanese also miss the huge oil tank farms at Pearl Harbor. As the strike force pulls away from Hawaii, Admiral Yamamoto is moody and does not join in his officers' celebration of the surprise attack. He understands what they do not--that the attack will couple America's almost limitless industrial and war-making potential with a righteously vengeful resolve to carry the war, whatever the cost, to Japan. This is especially true because the Japanese, through bureaucratic fumbling, failed to deliver Japan's declaration of war to Secretary of State Cordell Hull until several hours after the surprise attack. The next day, Congress votes almost unanimously (the Senate 82 - 0, the House 388 - 1) to declare war on Japan. The sole opponent to the vote, Jeannette Rankin, also voted against the United States entering World War I.
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1941: Japanese air and naval forces attack Wake Island, one of America's many scattered island outposts linking the mainland United States to its holdings in the Western Pacific, especially the Philippines. At the same time, they attack American air and naval units in the Philippines and on Guam, as well as British and other Allied installations in Malaya and Hong Kong. General MacArthur's forces on the Philippines have received warning of the near-simultaneous attack at Pearl Harbor (it is 8 December in the Philippines because of the International Date Line), yet the Japanese still manage to catch his air force on the ground, destroying 150 vital fighters and B-17 bombers. Over the next two days, almost ceaseless Japanese air attacks will all but eliminate American air power over the Philippines. Amphibious landings will be next.
1987: President Reagan and Soviet leader Gorbachev sign the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the first agreement between the superpowers not just to control, but to reduce, their arsenals of strategic thermonuclear weapons. The press priases Gorbachev for this; they conveniently ignore that it was President Reagan's initiative.
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1941: Japanese aircraft find and sink the British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse, thus sweeping the sea approaches to the Malay peninsula of any Allied warships. Singapore is doomed; the British just don't know it yet.
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1862: General Ambrose Burnside, commanding the Union Army of the Potomac, throws pontoon bridges over the Rappahannock River at and southeast of Fredericksburg, Virginia. The army begins crossing the bridges, which engineers complete under accurate and murderous fire from Confederate sharpshooters in Fredericksburg. By nightfall, Burnside has the bulk of his army--120,000 men in two so-called "grand divisions"--across the river and facing Robert E. Lee's 45,000 rebel soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia. Please see entry for 13 December 1862.
1941: Japanese troops land at Vigan and Aparri on Luzon, the chief island of the Philippines. MacArthur executes the approved War Plan Orange, which is to fight a delaying action down the island and into the Bataan Peninsula while awaiting the arrival of the United States Navy to secure the area. The only problem is that the United States Navy, at this moment, consists of a pair of aircraft carriers, several submarines (which have been executing "unrestricted warfare" against Japan almost since the moment of the attack on Pearl Harbor), various small warships, and a number of badly damaged, temporarily unserviceable battleships. Plan Orange is dead before the starting gun fires.
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1964: President Johnson announces a large increase in American military assistance to South Vietnam "to restrain the mounting infiltration of men and equipment by the Hanoi regime in support of the Vietcong." Thus begins the main American involvement in the Vietnam War, a conflict still the subject of much debate. Although factions disagree strongly today on whether the United States should or should not have involved itself, one thing is clear to all soldiers and veterans: Johnson's policy of sending more and more troops to Vietnam while hamstringing them with incredibly and unreasonably restrictive rules of engagement plays a significant part in sabotaging both American military effectiveness in Vietnam and in giving North Vietnam any incentive to seek peace.
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1787: Pennsylvania ratifies the United States Constitution.
1941: Romania, led by its fascist government that is allied with Nazi Germany, declares war on the United States.
1941: Japanese forces land at Legaspi, on the southeastern tip of Luzon. They have MacArthur's forces trapped in a slowly closing vice.
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1862: Beginning at 11:00 a.m., General Burnside launches the first of three furious assaults on the Confederate positions outside Fredericksburg, ultimately hurling over 45,000 men--a third of his army--at the defenders commanded by Lee. The Confederates occupy well fortified positions at the top of Marye's Heights, a ridge dominating Fredericksburg from the south. The weather is bitterly cold, so cold that much of the ground has frozen, making the hasty digging of shelter next to impossible. By 4:00 p.m., Burnside's glorious offensive is over. More than 10,000 Union soldiers lie dead or dying on the frozen ground, seventy percent of them at the foot of Marye's Heights. Confederate casualties reach 5,000, but Lee's army is intact and its fortified positions are secure. The next day, Burnside's army will begin retreating over the Rappahannock. Please see entry for 20 January 1863.
1941: Bulgaria, also ruled by allies of the Nazis, declares war on the United States. Before the end of 1944, both Bulgaria and Romania will have withdrawn from the Axis as Soviet troops rampage across their countries, and they will end up declaring war on their former Nazi allies. Politics makes strange bedfellows; war even more so.
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1941: Incessant Japanese air attacks have reduced United States air strength in the beleaguered Philippines to a handful of worn-out fighters. Their aircraft having been destroyed or withdrawn to Australia, MacArthur's forces must now fight without air support.
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1952: Communist China rejects the United Nations' proposal for peace in Korea.
1965: The AFL-CIO gives its "unstinting support" to American efforts in Vietnam.
1989: Panamanian dictator and drug trafficker Manuel Noriega declares war on the United States after our nation indicts him for his role in the drug trade.
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1944: Much against his generals' better judgment, and despite the desperate need for mobile reserves on the tottering Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler launches Wacht am Rhein, the code name for his surprise counterattack against American troops in the Ardennes Forest. The principal forces for this onslaught are the Fifth Panzer Army and the Sixth SS Panzer Army, whose formerly shattered formations have been brought up to strength by draconian measures that have included denuding almost all other theaters of their stockpiles of equipment, especially tanks and armored fighting vehicles. Hitler's goal is to strike a sudden, shattering blow, drive through to the port city of Antwerp, and thus split the American and British armies. This, he believes, will lead to such bickering and divisiveness in the Allied camp that they will at the least stop attacking Germany, and may even sever their alliance against the Nazis. He will be bitterly disappointed; American troops are far better than he wishes to believe, and the American lines will bend, but not break. It is a measure of how strategically unprepared German arms are to carry out this attack that it must be executed in the worst possible weather, in order to prevent Allied aircraft from slaughtering the attacking forces. Even more problematical is Germany's acute fuel shortage; the plans depend on capturing American fuel stockpiles. It will not happen.
1989: Panamanian military troops kill an unarmed American serviceman in Panama.
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1944: The initial German attacks in the Ardennes now look more threatening than a mere spoiling attack. Further, there are rumors that German assassination teams, dressed and equipped as Americans, are infiltrating the lines with missions to capture or kill General Eisenhower. Eisenhower calls a conferences of his army and corps commanders, in concert with their British counterparts, to plan a solution to the growing Ardennes crisis. One commander, General George Patton, stands out in not using weather, supplies, or fatigue as excuses for a slow reaction. He promises to shift his axis of attack and launch an attack north into the German salient within twenty-four hours, using at least three divisions. His colleagues think he promises the impossible. Twenty-four hours later, three of his divisions are attacking north. They will continue attacking despite stiff German resistance and abysmal weather, until they relieve the American defenders at the vital transportation hub of Bastogne.
18
1865: The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution goes into effect, prohibiting slavery in any form in the United States.
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1944: American forces, demonstrating a resilience and professionalism that many German commanders discounted and that Hitler himself refuses to acknowledge, pull themselves together after the shocking attacks they have suffered and begin mounting a cohesive resistance in the Ardennes. The Battle of the Bulge is slowing down and German mechanized units are beginning to suffer fuel and ammunition shortages. The 101st Airborne Division is rushed to Bastogne, the nexus of the major highway system running through the region. This last-minute assignment of the paratroopers will play havoc with the German offensive.
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1989: President Bush sends American troops and Marines to Panama in an airborne assault. Some foreign governments and many American reporters denounce the operation, but the Panamanians, whose rebellion against dictator Noriega, enjoy liberation as a result, despite tragically high civilian casualties. Noriega flees to the Vatican where he gains ten days of political asylum before surrendering to American law enforcement authorities.
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1908: Wilbur Wright wins the Michelin Cup in France by flying 77 miles in two and a half hours.
1928: Congress passes the Boulder Dam Project Act, committing the federal government to the development of widespread electrical power in the United States. The Boulder Dam, its sister the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, and other major construction wonders of the 1930's will have great impact in curbing and reversing the Great Depression in America.
22
1864: A telegram from General William Tecumseh Sherman to President Lincoln: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah." The shrinking Confederate States of America are now being parceled back to the United States as one major city after another falls to the Union offensives.
1944: German troops continue to try and batter their way into Bastogne, a vital crossroads town in Belgium. The 101st Airborne Division and elements of the 10th Armored Division have held the town against all attacks despite being surrounded and cut off from all American reinforcement and resupply. Seeking a quick end to the problem, the German commander sends General Anthony MacAuliffe a brusque and arrogant demand that the Americans surrender. MacAuliffe's reply? "Nuts." Upon hearing of MacAuliffe's reply, General Patton tells his division commanders to renew their relief drive, saying that a man that eloquent must be saved.
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1783: George Washington resigns as commander of the Continental Army.
1941: General MacArthur, realizing he cannot defend the entire island of Luzon, orders his forces to withdraw into the mountainous, more defensible Bataan Peninsula. On this same day, American resistance on Wake Island finally comes to an end. Among the many American prisoners are a number of nurses. Japanese military tradition disdains surrender and views those who offer it as dishonorable. The conquerors rape the nurses. News of this violation of international law and of common decency will further inflame Americans against Japan. Sadly, fifty years later, when Iraqi troops savagely rape female American prisoners, the American news media dishonorably downplay the abuse almost to the point of non-existence.
1948: Hideki Tojo, wartime Prime Minister of Japan, is hanged for his war crimes in the Second World War.
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1814: The United States and England sign the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812. Please see entry for 8 January 1815.
1941: Nearly 100,000 Japanese troops land at Lingayen Gulf on western central Luzon and drive for Manila, the capital city.
1979: Supposedly invited by president Amin, huge numbers of Soviet troops invade Afghanistan by air and land. Soviet designs on the region are not that new; historically, Russia has always sought an avenue to the Indian Ocean. The "invitation" fools no one, and even President Carter has the resolve to describe the invasion for what it is: Undisguised aggression against a relatively helpless state. Please see entry for 27 December 1979.
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1837: Seminole Indians, trapped in the Florida swamps after their leader, Osceola, has been captured and imprisoned, are roundly defeated by Army forces under General Zachary Taylor. Taylor's brilliant handling of this first major guerrilla war earns him the sobriquet "Rough and Ready." Thus, essentially, ends the Second Seminole War.
1944: Skies finally begin clearing over the Ardennes Forest, and massive Allied air power can now deploy against the slowly starving German counteroffensive.
1978: Vietnamese troops invade Cambodia as one Communist state turns against another. The invasion merely replaces one form of corruption with another.
26
1944: Forces from the United States Third Army under General Patton punch through the last German resistance around Bastogne, relieving the "Screaming Eagles" of the 101st Airborne Division and the units of the 10th Armored Division that have held the town against all Nazi attacks since mid-December. In their final push to relieve Bastogne, Patton's men have traveled 150 miles under heavy fire in nineteen hours.
27
1941: General MacArthur declares Manila an open city, hoping to spare it the destruction of forced conquest. His decision spares the city's facilities, but not its inhabitants, who now suffer the same cruelties Japanese troops have been inflicting on Allied prisoners throughout the Pacific.
1979: A Soviet-directed "revolutionary tribunal" executes Afghan president Amin and his family for "crimes against the state." The invading Soviets install a puppet government led by one of their Afghan vassals, Babrak Karmal. For the next nine years, Soviet troops will enjoy their own version of the Vietnam War, as Afghan rebels, supplied by the United States, progressively reclaim the country until, at the end, the Soviets are little more than prisoners in Afghanistan, sheltering inside heavily fortified enclaves, and controlling only that land they have troops and tanks upon--and then, often only by daylight. One secondary event related to this invasion will be President Carter's decision to have the United States boycott the 1980 Olympic games, to be held in Moscow.
28
1835: Seminole Indians under Osceola, having killed their chief who signed a peace treaty with the United States in 1832, attack and massacre Major Francis Dade and his 103 soldiers. The Seminoles also happen to own black slaves, whom they order to join in the attack. This attack is typical of the violence in the Second Seminole War in Florida. Inevitably, though, the Seminoles will be unable to stand against the massive firepower the United States Army will bring into the swamps, with the result that, today, the only lasting memorial to that era in the region is the name Dade County.
29
1778: British forces seize the port city of Savannah, Georgia. It is one of the last significant British gains in the War for Independence.
1845: The Republic of Texas votes to join the United States of America. Texas is unique among the states of this nation in that it was an independent, sovereign state that agreed to the proposed annexation. This is the reason why the famous amusement park is "Six Flags Over Texas"--those flags are those of Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate States of America, and the United States.
30
1923: Communists establish the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on paper. It will not become a reality until the following July. Until its demise in the early 1990's, the U.S.S.R. will be the major enemy the United States and other western democracies will have.
31
1887: United States telephone listings hit the unheard-of number of 20,000.
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