1864: General Philip Sheridan, commanding Union cavalry, seizes Old Cold Harbor in Virginia and begins emplacing his troopers while he waits for Union infantry to reinforce him. His men, armed with breech-loading and repeating carbines, easily repulse a Confederate counterattack but, when the rebels fall back in disarray, Union forces miss an opportunity to break through before the Confederates can fortify their own positions. The result: The Battle of Cold Harbor. Please see entry for 3 June 1864.
2
1936: General Antonio Somoza, leading the Nicaraguan National Guard, stages a coup d'etat in that nation, deposing president Juan Sacasa. The Somosas will rule Nicaragua in a less-than-enlightened fashion until 1979, when they in turn will be deposed by the Marxist Sandinistas, who quickly prove themselves to be no more enlightened than their predecessors.
1952: The United States Supreme Court rules that President Truman's executive order placing the nation's steel mills under federal control is illegal. Truman has taken this action to prevent the CIO steel workers from striking, thus imperiling America's strategic resources at the height of the conflict in Korea and the Cold War. Please see entry for 23 June 1952.
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1864: The Battle of Cold Harbor. General Ulysses S. Grant throws three Union corps at the Confederate emplacements here in Virginia. In less than an hour, the Federal assault collapses with 7,000 casualties. It is a Pyrrhic victory for Robert E. Lee, however; his Army of Northern Virginia cannot afford the 1,500 men he loses, while Grant is able to replace his losses. The weight against the Confederacy shifts a little more toward the inevitable conclusion.
1870: A joint United States-British convention denouncing and working to eliminate the slave trade closes. The conference has been instrumental in bringing unity in the two governments' efforts to eliminate that reprehensible institution. Sadly, this fact--much like the fact that the Union forces in this country fought, bled, and died to end slavery--is overlooked today by those who would sponsor rather than eliminate racial separation, as they continue to proclaim to "their" people that non-"African Americans" are and cannot be anything except insensitive to minorities' interests. The thinking person must wonder: Who, really, is the racist here?
4
1805: A treaty ends the hostilities between the United States and Tripoli.
1942: United States naval task forces under the command of Admirals Raymond A. Spruance and Frank Jack Fletcher locate and launch a devastating air strike on the Japanese naval force closing to invade Midway Island in the central Pacific. Although they are heavily outnumbered in surface warships and naval aircraft, a combination of superlative codebreaking, tactical and strategic insight, intuition, luck, and providence enable the Americans to sink four Japanese fleet carriers, although losses in American torpedo planes are extremely heavy. Admiral Yamamoto loses the Akagi, Hiryu, Kaga, and Soryu and hundreds of irreplaceable, trained carrier pilots. The Japanese navy will never recover from this shattering blow.
1944: American troops under General Mark Clark enter Italy, which has been abandoned by its German defenders. The decision to treat Rome as an "open city" spares its architectural, historical, and artistic treasures the brutalities of war. Ironically, after all the casualties sustained in the Italian campaign to date, much of the world's attention to this accomplishment is lost two days later.
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1854: The United States and Canada sign the Elgin Treaty, establishing reciprocity between the two North American nations. The treaty, among other things, negates the need for passports when traveling between the two countries.
1947: Secretary of State George Marshall, speaking at the Harvard commencement, first proposes what comes to be known as the Marshall Plan for providing financial aid to those European nations "willing to assist in the task of recovery." Marshall has been insightful enough to realize that American worldwide economic and industrial supremacy at this stage is largely due to the fact that the rest of the industrialized world was devastated by World War II, and that the Soviet Union is implacable in its intention to dominate Western Europe if not the entire world. By spurring reconstruction in war-torn Europe, and by rebuilding West Germany as an industrial power, the Marshall Plan will be instrumental in preventing the spread of Communism into Western Europe.
1967: Alerted to impending attacks against its territory by Egypt and Syria, Israeli armed forces strike first in the brief but devastating Six Day War. Israeli preemptive air strikes virtually annihilate those Arab nations' air forces and Israeli armored offensives abort Egypt's plans for conquest across the Sinai. The Israelis will seize so-called Arab Jerusalem and continue to hold it to this day. There is one dark element to Israel's otherwise laudable self-defense: Israeli warplanes will attack and sink the United States naval vessel Liberty without provocation. Many believe that Israeli commanders know the Liberty is a friendly vessel but wish to destroy her to prevent Arabs from overhearing her reports to American superiors on the progress of the battle.
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1918: United States Marines, attacking against heavy German opposition, seize the strategically vital Belleau Wood in France. They will hold this piece of real estate against determined enemy counterattacks for the next three weeks, emerging the undisputed masters of the contest. Their valor spurs the grateful French to rename the Woods the Bois de la Marines Americaine.
1944: American land, air, and naval forces invade the continent of Europe at Normandy, France, as part of Operation OVERLORD, the D-Day invasion led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The invasion actually begins in the predawn darkness as paratroopers, including soldiers from the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, land to secure crossroads and avenues off the beaches into the hedgerow country ("Bocage") behind it. In the darkness, the drops are scattered, but knots of paratroopers (often from different units) band together and seize their objectives. With the dawn, the largest armada in history begins a massive bombardment before more than 176,000 troops land on five beaches. American forces land at Utah and Omaha Beaches, securing the western half of the invasion zone. Although fighting is light on Utah Beach (unanticipated currents and navigational errors combine fortuitously to deposit the first wave on an undefended stretch of the coast), at Omaha Beach the German commander, Erwin Rommel, has come closest to his goal of impregnable fortifications, and the issue is in doubt until well into the afternoon. Ultimately, determined parties of American troops silence the German resistance on the beach and carve openings toward the interior.
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1776: Richard Henry Lee (1732-1796), acting on the instructions of the Virginia Convention, submits a series of resolutions to the Congress, meeting at Philadelphia. Lee's Resolutions call on the states to form alliances with foreign nations and to form a confederation under a constitution approved by each state. Virginia having told him to urge independence from Great Britain, Lee's Resolutions also include the statement, "That these United States are and of right ought to be free and independent states." Please see entry for 4 July 1776.
1942: Japanese forces invade Attu and Kiska Islands in the Aleutians. It is a poor trade as against the blistering losses they suffered three days earlier in the Battle of Midway. See entry for 4 June 1942.
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1862: Union forces under General John Fremont raid Port Republic in the Shenandoah Valley, capturing Confederate supply trains and nearly capturing Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. This, plus a halfhearted attack by Fremont on Confederate troops at Cross Keys persuades Jackson that Fremont is a threat he must deal with.
1965: Congress authorizes the use of U. S. ground troops in South Vietnam if the South Vietnamese government so requests. Saigon makes the request almost at once. The mission of the Americans in South Vietnam has just changed, from military advisors to soldiers fighting in a war. Please see entry for 28 June 1965.
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1863: Union cavalry under the command of General Albert Pleasanton surprises the Confederate horse troopers led by J.E.B. Stuart at Brandy Station, Virginia. Pleasanton is acting on the orders of the commander of the Army of the Potomac, General Joseph Hooker; Hooker, in turn, is still smarting over his defeat by Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Chancellorsville and wants Pleasanton to determine the whereabouts and movement of Lee's soldiers. Although Stuart eventually masters the battle and causes Pleasanton's men to withdraw, Pleasanton has accomplished his mission; he has learned that the rebels are on the move north. Hooker begins moving the Army of the Potomac north, parallel to Lee's advance, seeking an opportunity to attack him. Meanwhile, the unpleasant surprise Stuart receives from Pleasanton may explain his vainglorious ride around the Union army at the end of the month, an ego-boosting enterprise that deprives Lee of his sorely-needed reconnaissance elements as the Battle of Gettysburg is beginning.
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1898: United States Marines come ashore at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba. The Marines maintain a military base at Guantanamo even today.
1963: Congress votes to guarantee women equal pay for equal work. Thirty years later, in addition to many times well-founded complaints that this law has not been enforced, the feminists raise a new allegation of discrimination with the intellectually dishonest demand for equal pay for "equivalent-value" work.
1964: After seventy-five days, a filibuster by Senators opposed to civil rights legislation ends when the Senate votes cloture. The bill, which becomes the Voting Rights Act of 1965, will pass its vote on 19 June and President Johnson will sign it into law early the following month.
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1947: The U.S. government ends sugar rationing, which has been in effect since America's entry into World War II.
1979: John Wayne dies of cancer at the age of seventy-two. Ironically, and perhaps intentionally, in his last film, The Shootist, he portrays an aging gunfighter dying of cancer. Some have ridiculed him as always playing himself, but America and the world has lost a hero, if only a fictional one. Considering the trend in film-making today to provide non-heroes, people of "different lifestyles," and dysfunctional loonies as role models, perhaps the critics should have shut up and applauded a man who gave posterity Brannigan, Sergeant Ryker, and Big Jake. He, Maureen O'Hara, and a number of other contemporaries all have two things in common: All have died of cancer, and all worked together in the 1950's on a series of Westerns in the desert of the American Southwest, in relatively close proximity to the regions where the Atomic Energy Commission carried out many tests of nuclear weapons.
12
1944: The U.S. VII Corps under General Collins begins driving westward out of the Utah beachhead. Its objective is to sever the Cherbourg peninsula, trapping the German troops holding that Channel port, then turn north and take the city itself. VII Corps will secure Cherbourg on 27 June, but by then the Germans will have demolished the port facilities so thoroughly that it will be early August before the Allies can use the port to land badly needed supplies for their forces in Europe.
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1864: General Robert E. Lee, commanding the rebel Army of Northern Virginia, wakes up at Cold Harbor, where his army has faced the Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant for some two weeks. In the morning light, Lee is amazed to see the Union entrenchments empty. Scouts quickly bring word that the Union forces are marching around Lee's right flank, attempting once again to slip between him and the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia. Grant has realized what Lee has not: That though the key to the war is not capturing the rebel capital, the threat of such capture will prompt Lee into battles and positions he cannot afford to take. The Civil War enters its final phase. Lee manages to get his subordinate, General Beauregard, to shift troops in front of Petersburg, Virginia, south of Richmond, in time to halt the Union advance, but the writing is on the wall. As rebel troops dig in for their last and most bitter defense, Union forces, constantly reinforced, will extend and amplify the siege almost unbearably for their enemies. It will be a winter of great discontent for Lee, as supply problems, Union tactical and strategic superiority, and the steady loss of his troops through desertion, Union mortars, and Union sharpshooters slowly grind his army into a pale ghost of its former self. Please see entry for 31 March 1865.
1942: President Roosevelt creates the Office of War Information. its first director is CBS commentator and writer Elmer Holmes Davis.
1942: President Roosevelt orders the formation of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Its wartime head is William "Wild Bill" Donovan. The O.S.S. sends numerous teams into Axis-occupied territories to conduct sabotage, espionage, guerrilla warfare, and other covert operations against the Axis powers.
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1775: Boston physician Joseph Warren is named general of the Continental militia. He will fight only one major engagement at Bunker Hill. See entry for 17 June 1775.
1948: The United States joins the United Nations' World Health Organization.
1954: President Dwight Eisenhower modifies the Pledge of Allegiance. That which formerly recited, "One nation, indivisible," now recites, "one nation, under God, indivisible . . . ."
15
1836: Arkansas is admitted into the Union. The election in 1992 of one of its residents--an individual with no experience in foreign policy other than draft-dodging--will lead many to wonder whether Arkansas' admission was a good thing.
1940: On the day following the entry of German troops into Paris, the French government, now on the run, appeals to the United States for immediate military aid. President Franklin Roosevelt, lacking sufficient support in Congress to override America's neutrality in the growing World War II and knowing that our nation's military is still woefully inadequate to the looming task, must decline the appeal. The French government will fall the following day and the new head of state, Marechal Petain, will seek an armistice with the invading Germans. It will be more than four long years before American forces begin the liberation of France. Please see entry for 6 June 1944.
1944: Marines of the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions land on the Pacific island of Saipan in Operation FORAGER. Japanese forces of the Thirty-Fifth Army on the island contest the landings bitterly, and continuing heavy resistance prompts the Americans to land the U.S. Army's 27th Infantry Division on 17 June. Resistance finally ends on 9 July 1944. U.S. casualties are 3,126 dead; virtually all of the Japanese garrison of 27,000 are killed in the fighting.
1951: Congress votes to loan India more than a hundred million dollars to buy United States grain. Think about the economics of that for a moment.
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1812: The British Orders of Council, the subject of much bitterness and dispute between England and the United States, are withdrawn. The news does not reach the United States in time, however. Please see entry for 18 June 1812.
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1775: General Joseph Warren's Continental militia engages British regulars at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Tactically, the fight is a British victory, but the redcoats lose 1,150 troops, including the well-known Major Pitcairn. Among the 411 American dead is General Warren. It is at this battle that General Israel Putnam gives the remembered command, "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes."
1775: George Washington is appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army. He leaves Philadelphia to take command of his troops at Cambridge, Massachusetts twelve days later.
1967: Communist China detonates its first hydrogen bomb. To date, this communist nation remains the only admitted nuclear power on the globe that has not signed any significant treaty for the reduction or elimination of its weapons of mass destruction.
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1812: The War of 1812 begins, the United States being unaware that the casus belli, the British Orders of Council, have been withdrawn.
1931: Canada imposes a series of new and extremely punitive tariffs, intending to curb imports of American goods. It works; the imposts reduce American imports by more than half. It also damages the Canadian consumer in the depths of the Great Depression. See? Bureaucratic silliness knows no national boundaries.
19
1862: Congress abolishes slavery in all territories of the United States. In some parts of the United States--notably states still in rebellion and calling themselves the Confederate States of America--it will be as many as three years before this information reaches the slaves. "Juneteenth Day" is still a major celebration in many of the southern states today.
1944: The Battle of the Philippine Sea ends in a decisive victory for American forces. The dwindling Japanese air arm loses 402 planes; the Americans lose only 27. Japanese air and naval power is now all but extinct, and increasingly, the aircraft available to the Japanese will be committed to kamikaze suicidal operations in a desperate effort to inflict unacceptable casualties on American forces.
20
1863: Responding to its citizens' desires not to be part of the rebel Confederate States of America, Congress admits the artificially-constructed West Virginia into the United States. This state has been created largely by military fiat, as Union military forces have held the northwestern reaches of Virginia since 1861. Underpopulated and lacking both agricultural and commercial bases, West Virginia is the poorest state in the war-torn Union. It remains the poorest state today.
1898: United States Army troops under Major General Shafter arrive at Santiago, Cuba. They land two days later with the Rough Riders of Colonel Wood and Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt.
1931: As the Great Depression, already stultifying to American business and commerce, spreads and has even more disastrous effects abroad, particularly in unstable, war-ravaged Europe, President Herbert Hoover proposes a one-year moratorium on payment of war debts and reparations. British and French powers reject the proposal, still desiring to punish Germany for World War I. Their closed-mindedness makes it all the easier for Adolf Hitler and his band of murderous hooligans to sell National Socialism to the German people with their harangues against "the crimes of Versailles."
21
1788: The United States Constitution becomes operative as our Republic's highest law when New Hampshire ratifies it by a vote of 57 to 47. The process of amending the Constitution begins almost immediately, and it continues to this day.
22
1933: As the Illinois Waterway opens, it is now possible for vessels to travel from the Great Lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi River.
1944: Congress votes into law the G.I. Bill of Rights (the Serviceman's Readjustment Act). This bill finances college education for millions of U.S. war veterans. It continues in effect, albeit in a highly modified and unfairly diminished form, today.
23
1780: General Christopher Greene defeats a British army at Springfield, New Jersey.
1952: American aircraft destroy North Korean hydroelectric plants. Communist China accuses the United States of using biological weapons in the attack. Evidently Peking cannot differentiate between "germ warfare" and high explosive.
1952: 600,000 CIO steel workers walk out, commencing a strike that will last nearly two months and cripple American steel production during the height of the Korean War. This selfless, patriotic act is but one of many that, through the decades, has earned labor unions their well-deserved image.
24
1898: Joseph Wheeler, Leonard Wood, and Theodore Roosevelt, who have pushed ahead of other American troops with 1,000 regular soldiers and the Rough Riders, fight the Battle of Las Guasimas. This first land battle of the Spanish-American war is a defeat for the Spanish forces opposing the Americans. Spain, heavily outclassed on land and sea, will never win a major engagement in this war.
25
1950: Communist North Korean forces invade South Korea, shattering the South Korean army and quickly capturing the capital, Seoul. This invasion sparks the 3-year-long Korean War, which ultimately involves American military forces and troops from fifteen other nations against the North Koreans and their allies, the Communist Chinese.
1990: The United States Supreme Court holds that a state may require a pregnant minor to inform her parents before receiving an abortion. Despite nearly twenty years of judicial and legislative intervention, this highly charged moral and emotional issue remains completely unresolved among the American people. Tragically, politicians of both the pro-life and pro-abortion factions continue to believe that legislation somehow will resolve this deeply divisive conflict.
26
1863: Confederate soldiers under General Jubal Early marching north into Pennsylvania encounter and scatter Pennsylvania militia. This is the first serious opposition to Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in its march north into Union territory after the Battle of Chancellorsville. Other Federal militia, withdrawing across the Susquehanna River at Wrightsville, burn the bridge behind them and accidentally set fire to the town. Confederate general John Gordon's men help save the town from immolation. Early reaches York and demands $100,000.00 from the town in United States currency, but settles for $28,000.00 readily at hand. Lee's army, and George Meade's Union Army of the Potomac, begin drawing closer to one another. They will meet on 1 July at Gettysburg.
27
1864: The Battle of Kenesaw Mountain in Georgia is a setback for Union General William Tecumseh Sherman. He loses 1,999 troops as against 270 Confederate casualties. Sherman is soon moving forward again, however, driving inexorably for the seacoast at Savannah. His troops destroy rail and other essential facilities as they march to split the Confederacy into severed segments that can no longer support one another.
1927: U.S. Army lieutenants Lester Maitland and Albert Hergenberger become the first to fly from San Francisco to Honolulu, Hawaii.
1950: President Truman orders United States military forces to "give the Korean government troops cover and support." The only troops immediately available are part of the U.S. occupational force in Japan. These formations are understrength, poorly equipped, and often untrained. They are quickly sent to Korea and suffer appalling casualties, literally buying time for the Allies with their lives.
28
1776: Patriots at Fort Moultrie off Charleston, South Carolina, repulse a British fleet under General Clinton. Fort Moultrie will still be in existence at the beginning of the Civil War, and it will play its part in the fighting between Union and Confederate forces around Charleston during that bloody conflict.
1942: Eight German spies, landed by U-boat on the Atlantic coast, are captured by the F.B.I. The subject of many fictional movies, in reality German espionage in the United States is a dismal failure.
1965: American forces begin the first United States offensive in Vietnam. Two things are immediately clear: (1) If allowed to practice their trade, our soldiers can dominate any battlefield and obliterate any North Vietnamese force put against them; (2) Congress, reveling in its own desires of running foreign policy yet having no understanding of how a war must be fought, will not permit our fighting men to practice their trade unmolested by Washington-politician-imposed regulations. Thus begins the war of the ROE, the Rules of Engagement, including such mental wonders as the rule that forbids U.S. pilots from attacking SAM (surface to air missile) sites until after they have fired on our aircraft.
1983: The United States Supreme Court rules that a sentence of life imprisonment with no opportunity for parole is unconstitutional. A decade later, the opposite view will hold.
29
1950: Douglas MacArthur visits Korea and resolves to drive the Communists from that country. He will be commander of American forces, and thus de facto commander of the Allied effort to liberate Korea until his disagreements with President Truman and his position concerning what to do about the Communist Chinese, after they intervene on North Korea's side, lead the President to relieve him of his command. He will be succeeded by General Matthew B. Ridgway.
30
1776: British general Howe lands his forces at Staten Island in New York harbor. He establishes a common pattern for the early years of the Revolutionary War. British forces, with their professional navy and their command of the sea, have little trouble controlling the principal ports, particularly along the upper part of the American seaboard. In the southern states, and even more so in the interiors, however, it is another story. The rebellion never quite seems to go away, and over time, the American forces develop the skill necessary to face and defeat the British, who until then has been considered the foremost military power on the planet.
1940: With its latest appropriation of $42,800,000,000.00 (that's forty-two point eight billion dollars) for the Army, Congress is now spending $150,000,000.00 per day on World War II.
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