This date in history

[Jimbuna]

1789 George Washington is inaugurated as the first President of the United States of America/

1940 Air New Zealand then known as TEAL makes its inaugural flight with a flight from Auckland to Sydney. Later becomes 1st airline in the world to boil hot water in-flight to offer customers hot tea and coffee.

1942 First submarine built on Great Lakes launched, (Peto), Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

1945 Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce) calls for crusade against the Bolsheviks.

1945 Red Army opens attack on German Reichstag building in Berlin.

1945 Record 48 U-boats sunk by the Allies this month.

1945 Adolf Hitler commits suicide along with his new wife Eva Braun in the Fuhrer bunker in Berlin as the Red Army captures the city.

2008 Two skeletal remains found near Ekaterinburg, Russia, were confirmed by Russian scientists to be the remains of Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia and one of his sisters.

[Jimbuna]

1707 Acts of Union comes into force, uniting England and Scotland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

1919 British naval officer David Beatty is promoted to Admiral of the Fleet.

1923 Adolf Hitler and Ernst Rohm attempt to break up socialist May Day demonstrates, inviting Nazis from as far away as Nuremberg to take part in the violence.

1931 Empire State Building opens in New York City.

1944 Messerschmitt Me 262 Sturmvogel, 1st jet bomber, makes 1st flight.

1945 About 1,000 citizens of Demmin in Germany, commit suicide provoked by occupation by Soviet Red Army.

1945 Admiral Karl Doenitz forms German government.

1960 Russia shoots down Francis Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk.

[Jimbuna]

1945 More than 1,000,000 German soldiers officially surrender to the Western Allies in Italy and Austria.

1945 Battle of Berlin ends as Soviet army takes Berlin and General Weidling surrenders.

1982 Falklands War: Argentine cruiser General Belgrano sunk by British submarine Conqueror, killing more than 350 men.

2011 Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the FBI's most wanted man is killed by US special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

[Jimbuna]

1915 John McCrae writes the poem "In Flanders Fields"

1916 Irish Nationalists Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Thomas Clarke are executed by firing squad following their involvement in the Easter Rising.

1945 German ship "Cap Arcona" laden with prisoners sunk by Royal Air Force in East Sea, 5,800 killed - one of largest maritime losses of life.

1947 Japan's post-war constitution goes into effect, granting universal suffrage, stripping Emperor Hirohito of all but symbolic power and outlawing Japan's right to make war.

[Jimbuna]

1910 Wilfrid Laurier passes the Naval Service Act, which creates the Royal Canadian Navy.

1916 At request of US, Germany curtails its submarine warfare.

1945 German forces in Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands surrender unconditionally to British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery at Luneburg Heath.

1948 The Hague Court of Justice convicts Nazi SS officer in the Netherlands Hans Rauter of Crimes against Humanity (executed 24 March 1949)

1979 Margaret Thatcher becomes the first woman to be elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

[Jimbuna]

1915 German U-20 captures and sinks British schooner Earl of Lathom.

1940 Norwegian government-in-exile forms in London.

1945 World War II: Admiral Karl Dönitz, leader of Germany after Hitler's death, orders all U-boats to cease offensive operations and return to their bases.

1955 West Germany is granted full sovereignty by its three occupying powers.

1980 Siege at Iranian Embassy in London ends as the SAS and police storm the building.

1981 After 66 days on hunger strike, 26 year old Provisional IRA member and British MP Bobby Sands dies in the Maze Prision. Nine more hunger strikers die in the next 3 months.

[Bilge_Rat]

1821: Napoleon dies in exile on St-Helena.

[Jimbuna]

1626 Dutch colonist Peter Minuit organizes the purchase of Manhattan Island from Native Americans for 60 guilders worth of goods, believed to have been Canarsee Indians of the Lenape.

1840 World's first adhesive postage stamp, the "Penny Black", is first used in Great Britain.

1910 George V becomes King of the United Kingdom upon the death of his father, Edward VII

1937 German airship Hindenburg explodes in flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 35 of the 97 on board and 1 on the ground.

[Mr Quatro]

A German U-boat torpedoed the British-owned steamship Lusitania, killing 1,195 people including 128 Americans, on May 7, 1915. The disaster set off a chain of events that led to the U.S. entering World War I.

[Jimbuna]

1867 Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel Patents Dynamite in England, the first of three patents he would receive for the explosive material.

1915 RMS Lusitania sunk by German submarine off the southern coast of Ireland; 1198 lives lost.

1919 A draft of the Versailles Treaty is shown to Germany.

1941 British House of Commons votes for Winston Churchill (477-3)

1945 Unconditional German surrender to the Allies signed by General Alfred Jodl at Rheims.

1948 Nazi collaborator V-Mann Antonius van de Waals sentenced to death.

1960 USSR announces Francis Gary Powers confesses to being a CIA spy.

2017 Emmanuel Macron wins France's presidential election defeating Marine Le Pen.

[Jimbuna]

1895 China cedes Taiwan to Japan under Treaty of Shimonoseki.

1916 German munitions bunker in Fort Douaumont explodes killing 679 German soldiers.

1916 Irishmen Eamon Kent, Michael Mallin, Con Colbert and Sean Houston are executed by British authorities following the Easter Rising at Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin.

1919 Edward George Honey first proposes the idea of a moment of silence to commemorate The Armistice of World War I, leads to the creation of Remembrance Day.

1941 German Q-ship Pinguin sinks in Indian Ocean.

1942 Aircraft carrier USS Lexington sunk by Japanese air attack in Coral Sea.

1943 Admiral Cunningham of British fleet: "Sink, burn & destroy; let nothing pass"

1945 V-E Day: World War II ends in Europe after Germany signs an unconditional surrender.

1947 Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki, who had volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz to gain information about the Holocaust, is arrested by Polish communist police.

1958 "Dracula" film starring Christopher Lee as the eponymous vampire, directed by Terence Fisher is the first Hammer Horror film released.

1962 Oskar Schindler and his wife Emilie Schindler are honored for saving 1200 Jews during WWII, in a ceremony on the Avenue of the Righteous, Jerusalem.

1967 Muhammad Ali is indicted for refusing induction in US Army.

[Jimbuna]

1386 Treaty of Windsor between Portugal and England (oldest diplomatic alliance in the world still in force)

1865 President Andrew Johnson issues a proclamation declaring armed resistance in the South is virtually at an end; this is the commonly accepted end date of the American Civil War.

1941 British intelligence at Bletchley Park breaks German spy codes after capturing Enigma machines aboard the weather ship Muenchen.

1945 Norwegian Nazi collaborators Vidkun Quisling arrested.

1945 Hermann Goering is captured by the United States Army.

1955 German Federal Republic (West Germany) joins NATO

1956 War Reparations and Peace Settlement between Philippines and Japan was finally signed at Malacañang Palace under Magsaysay administration.

[Jimbuna]

1797 First US Navy ship, the "United States," is launched.

1801 First Barbary War: The Barbary pirates of Tripoli declare war on the United States of America (1st US foreign war)

1857 Indian mutiny against rule by the British East India Company begins with the revolt of the Sepoy soldiers in Meerut.

1915 Canadian physician Cluny MacPherson first presents his gas mask invention to the British War Office.

1917 Atlantic ships get destroyer escorts to stop German attacks.

1918 HMS Vindictive sunk to block entrance of Ostend Harbour.

1940 Germany invades the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.

1940 Winston Churchill succeeds Neville Chamberlain as British Prime Minister.

1940 The first German bombs of the war fall on England at Chilham and Petham, in Kent.

1941 Adolf Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess escapes to Britain to open secret negotiations with the Allies, parachuting into Scotland.

1960 US atomic submarine USS Triton completes first submerged circumnavigation of the globe.

[Jimbuna]

1941 First Messerschmidt 109F shot down above England.

1953 Winston Churchill criticizes US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' domino theory.

1960 Israeli soldiers capture Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires.

1969 British comedy troupe Monty Python forms, made up of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin.

[Jimbuna]

1797 Nore Mutiny: British Royal Navy sailors mutiny on the Thames, England and blockade London.

1916 James Connolly and Sean McDermott are executed following their involvement in the Easter Rising in Dublin.

1940 Nazi blitzkrieg and conquest of France begins with the crossing of the Muese River.

1941 Martin Bormann succeeds Rudolf Hess as Adolf Hitler's deputy.

1943 Axis forces in North Africa surrender.