This date in history

[Jimbuna]

1918 Battle of Belleau Wood, 1st US victory of WW I

1939 The ship MS St. Louis, carrying 907 Jewish refugees from Europe, begins sailing back to the continent after it was refused entry into America. Approximately a quarter of those on board would perish in the Holocaust.

1941 1st US Navy vessel constructed as mine layer, USS Terror (CM-5) launched from the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

1944 Operation Overlord: As part of the D-Day landings, the 82nd Airborne Division arrives at the French town of Sainte-Mère-Église.

1944 Operation Overlord: D-Day begins as the 156,000-strong Allied Expeditionary Force lands in Normandy, France, during World War II

1968 Senator Robert F. Kennedy dies from his wounds after he was shot the previous night.

1988 George H. W. Bush makes campaign promise to support reparations for WW II to Japanese-American internees (promise broken, May 1989)

[Aktungbby]

1929: The sovereign state of Vatican came into wpexistance as copies of the Lateran Treaty were exchanged in Rome. The Vatican is thus one of the world's theocracies. It is the only Christian one. The others are Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. BOTTOM LINE: God or Allah better be real, or it's just another case of goddamn government lying to ya!

[Jimbuna]

1929 Vatican City becomes a sovereign state.

1912 US army tests 1st machine gun mounted on a plane.

1939 George VI and Elizabeth become the 1st king and queen of Britain to visit USA

1942 USS Yorktown sinks near Midway Island.

1965 The Supreme Court of the United States decides on Griswold v. Connecticut, effectively legalizing the use of contraception by married couples.

1968 Sirhan Sirhan indicted for the assassination of US Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

[Rockstar]

7 June 1494. Spain and Portugal sign the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the New World between them. Other European countries generally ignore the treaty.

7 June 1753. The British Museum is established by an Act of Parliament after King George II gave his Royal Assent. Sir Hans Sloane had bequeathed his collection to the king for £20,000.

7 June 1776. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia offers a resolution in the Continental Congress stating “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”

7 June 1788. In what is known as The Day of the Tiles occurs in Grenoble, France. Roof tiles and other objects were thrown at royal French troops. Historians credit it as the start of the French Revolution.

[Rockstar]

On this day in 793, Vikings land at Lindisfarne, England and slaughter the inhabitants of the monastery there. The bloodbath signals the beginning of nearly 300 years of Norsemen raids and conquest. "Never before has such terror appeared in Britain," writes one chronicler.

[Rockstar]

8 June 1940. sinking of the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious in the Norwegian Sea. She and her escorting destroyers, HMS Acasta and HMS Ardent, were returning to Scapa Flow after the carrier had embarked Gladiators from 263 Squadron and Hurricanes of 46 Squadron. Funnel smoke from the ships was sighted by the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau at 15:45.

Glorious had received no warning of the presence of German ships in the area. She had traversed the Norwegian Sea without incident several times and was not steaming at high speed, though she was zigzagging as a precaution against U-Boats. Despite Glorious still having some Swordfish and Sea Gladiators on board, no aircraft were on patrol or on deck ready to launch, which remains unexplained. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were finally sighted at 16:00, with ‘action stations’ sounded soon afterwards.

The German ships opened fire at 16:30 and Ardent and Acasta attempted to lay a smokescreen to conceal Glorious, but to no avail. The carrier was hit repeatedly by 11 inch shells, reducing her to a flaming wreck; she sank at 18:30. Despite the hopeless odds, both destroyers made repeated attack runs on the German battlecruisers, even scoring hits with their 4.7 inch guns before being sunk themselves at 17:30 and 18:10. A torpedo from Acasta struck and badly damaged Scharnhorst, killing 51 men; repairs took 6 months. The captains of both Ardent and Acasta were later considered for the Victoria Cross.

Over 1,000 men were now in the water, but the German ships, fearing the arrival of reinforcements, didn’t stop to pick up survivors. Before sinking, Glorious had sent distress signals, but whether they were received intact is still disputed. The cruiser HMS Devonshire was only 50 miles away, but was carrying the King of Norway and was under strict orders to keep radio silence and maintain her course for home. The Admiralty only learned of the sinkings 24 hours later - from a German broadcast. By the time Norwegian vessels arrived to rescue survivors, only 40 were still alive. 1,519 men had lost their lives, the worst British naval death toll of the war from a single incident.

[Rockstar]

8 June 1949. English writer George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, aka 1984, is published by Secker & Warburg. Orwell was his pen name as his given name was Eric Aruthur Blair.

[Jimbuna]

793 Vikings in long ships from modern-day Norway plunder St Cuthbert's monastery on Lindisfarne Island, off the northeast coast of England capturing and killing monks.

1940 Last British troops leave Narvik, Norway.

1960 Argentine government demands release of Adolf Eichmann.

1967 Israel attacks USS Liberty in Mediterranean, killing 34 US crewmen.

1968 The body of assassinated U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy is laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.

1982 Falklands War: Royal Fleet Auxiliary Sir Gahalad attacked in San Carlos Water ("Bomb Alley") by Argentine aircraft: 48 soldiers and crewman were killed.

1987 New Zealand's Labour government legislates against nuclear weapons and nuclear powered vessels in NZ. Only nation to legislate against nuclear power.

[Jimbuna]

68 Roman Emperor Nero commits suicide, imploring his secretary Epaphroditos to slit his throat to evade a Senate-imposed death by flogging.

1915 US President Woodrow Wilson sends second Lusitania note to Germany protesting sinking of the Lusitania and refuting German claim British blockade illegal.

1940 General Charles de Gaulle's 1st meeting with Winston Churchill.

1977 Silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain celebrated with fireworks.

[Rockstar]

9 June 1973. Secretariat, nicknamed Big Red, wins the Triple Crown, winning the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes. It was the first horse since Citation in 1948 to accomplish this. He won the Belmont Stakes by an incredible 31 lengths.

1946, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin issues a secret order to denounce General Georgy Zhukov.

1943: Future President George H. W. Bush is commissioned as an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserves, making him the youngest naval pilot to that date.

1920, The Imperial War Museum is opened by King George V at the Crystal Palace. The museum now has five branches located throughout England.

1914. Honus Wagner, age 40, gets his 3,000th hit, a double. He was the second person to get 3,000 hits. His lifetime batting average was an incredible .329.

[Rockstar]

I can’t Gitmo satisfaction

10 June 1898, U.S. Marines capture Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Since 1959, Havana's communist government has protested the presence of U.S. troops on Cuban soil.

[Rockstar]

10th June, 1944. 94 P-38 Lightnings of the Fifteenth Air Force took off from airfields in Italy to strike the oil refineries at Ploiesti in Romania. Despite previous raids by heavy bombers, these still produced up to 15% of the Axis fuel supply. It was hoped that a low altitude attack by the P-38s could achieve surprise before smoke generators obscured the target. Meanwhile, their speed, small size and agility would give some protection from the lethal flak defences. Unfortunately, the reality was rather different.

It was one of the longest fighter-bomber missions flown during the Second World War, a 1,300 mile round trip. 48 P38s of the 82nd Fighter Group carried a single 1,000lb bomb and a 300 litre drop tank. They were escorted by the same number of Lightnings from the 1st Fighter group, but on the outbound leg 17 aircraft from the formation had to abort the mission, mostly with engine trouble. Another crash landed in Yugoslavia.

German radar and Romanian observers detected the raid well in advance of its arrival at Ploiesti and the defences were ready. The formation began to split at a turning point and some P-38s broke off to engage 6 German Dornier 217s. At this point, a group of 23 Romanian IAR-81s attacked, shooting down 9 of the escorting Lightnings and losing 3 of their own number. A mixed force of German and Romanian aircraft continued to engage the formation.

25 P-38s of the 82nd made it to the refineries, but the smokescreen was already well established and flak was intense. The Germans had recently shipped in more anti-aircraft guns, from 20 and 37mm cannon up to 88, 105 and even 128mm weapons. Taking their visual cues from surrounding landmarks, the Lightnings dropped their bombs without being able to see the results in most cases. Several aircraft limped away with damage and would not make it back to base.

The final analysis was not encouraging. 14 P-38s from the 1st Fighter Group and 9 from the 82nd had been shot down flak and fighters, a loss rate similar to the infamous low-level B-24 raid the previous August. Some damage was done to one refinery, but production resumed within days. Lessons had been learned, however; there would be no more low-level attacks. A series of heavily escorted conventional daylight USAAF raids, with some RAF bombing by night, eventually halted fuel production by mid-August 1944.

[Aktungbby]

1935: Alcoholics Anonymous is founded in Akron, Ohio by Dr. Holbrook Smith and William Griffith Wilson.

[Rockstar]

10 June 1854. The first class of Navy cadets at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland graduate.

[Jimbuna]

1940 German "Dutch" Q-ship Atlantis sinks Norwegian tanker.

1940 Norway surrenders to Nazi Germany after 62 days of fighting.

1942 Nazis kill all inhabitants of Lidice, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now Czech Republic) which had been implicated in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi controller of Bohemia and Moravia, to “teach the Czechs a final lesson of subservience and humility”; over 170 adult men were executed by firing squad on site, women and children were sent to concentration camp gas chambers, and the village was burned down and plowed under.

1943 FDR becomes 1st US President to visit a foreign country during wartime.

1943 Heinrich Himmler orders the final liquidation of Lodz ghetto in occupied Poland.

1944 Nazi forces carry out a massacre of 642 civilians in the French village Oradour-sur-Glane.

1945 US destroyer William D Porter ("Willie Dee") sunk by kamikaze.

1980 8 Provisional Irish Republican Army prisoners escape from Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast using handguns smuggled into prison.

1999 Kosovo War: NATO suspends its air strikes after Slobodan Milošević agrees to withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo.