This date in history

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

1944 British and Canadian sailors board abandoned German U-boat U-774 seeking the Enigma code machine, but are forced to scuttle the sub when efforts to tow it fail.

U-744 was forced to surface on 6 March 1944 after a 31 hour pursuit by ships of C-2 Support Group. The crew abandoned ship. Scuttling charges, set by the Chief Engineer, detonated but did not sink the boat. HMCS Chilliwack and St. Catherines put over boarding parties, HMCS Chilliwack's reaching U-744 first. Code books, signal publications and equipment were removed from the boat. Supposedly, the bulk of these materials were lost during the transfer between the U-Boat and the destroyers. It is unclear what materials were recovered from the boat. U-744 was sunk by torpedo from HMS Icarus after unsuccessful attempts to tow her to port.

Gotta love the color of the Conning tower(9th flotilla) emblem!

[Jimbuna]

1774 King George III charges colonists in Boston with attempting to injure British commerce, paving the way for the closing of the port to punish colonists for the Boston Tea Party.

1936 German dictator Adolf Hitler breaks the Treaty of Versailles by sending troops into the then demilitarized Rhineland.

1942 15 Mk-VB Spitfires reach Malta.

1942 1st cadets graduated from flying school at Tuskegee, Alabama.

1946 Bikini Atoll islanders are evacuated by the US government to make way for a nuclear testing site.

1968 The BBC broadcasts the news for the first time in color on television.

1974 "USS Monitor", Union Ship sunk in 1862 during US Civil War, restored at Cape Hatteras.

[Jimbuna]

1973 The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) undertakes its first operation in Great Britain, planting four car bombs in London. Ten members of PIRA are later arrested at Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the country.

2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 with 239 people loses contact and disappears, prompting the most expensive search effort in history and one of the most enduring aviation mysteries.

[Jimbuna]

1841 US Supreme Court rules the kidnapped slaves from the Spanish schooner the Amistad are free.

1918 Russian Bolshevik Party becomes the Communist Party.

1935 Adolf Hitler publicly announces the creation of a new air force, the Luftwaffe.

1945 334 US B-29 Superfortresses attack Tokyo with 120,000 fire bombs.

1951 Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam submit a classified paper at the Los Alamos lab, in which they proposed their revolutionary new design, staged implosion, for a practical megaton-range hydrogen bomb.

1953 Joseph Stalin's funeral is held in Moscow after four days of national mourning.

1959 Barbie makes her debut at the American Toy Fair in New York. Over a billion have been sold worldwide since.

1961 Soviet flight Sputnik 9 carries and returns from orbit a dog named Chernushka (Blackie), frogs and a guinea pig.

1971 Three off-duty Scottish soldiers are killed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army; 4000 shipyard workers take to the streets to demand internment in response.

1972 Four members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) die in a premature explosion at a house in Clonard Street, Lower Falls, Belfast.

1974 Last Japanese soldier, a guerrilla operating in the Philippines, surrenders, 29 years after World War II ended.

1994 IRA launch 1st of 3 mortar attacks on London's Heathrow Airport.

[Jimbuna]

1783 USS Alliance under Captain Barry fights and wins the last naval battle of the US Revolutionary War off Cape Canaveral.

1920 Home Rule Act passed by the British Parliament, dividing Ireland into two parts; it is rejected by the southern counties, where the Ango-Irish war continues for a year.

1944 U-575 sinks British corvette HMS Asphodel in the Atlantic Ocean killing 92 of the 97 men aboard.

1945 Deadliest air raid of World War II sets Tokyo on fire after night time B-29 bombings, more than 100,000 people die, mostly civilians.

1970 Members of the Stormont Parliament of Northern Ireland given police protection.

1971 Three members of the Royal Highland Fusiliers (a regiment of the British Army) are killed by members of the Irish Republican Army.

[Jimbuna]

1708 Queen Anne withholds Royal Assent from the Scottish Militia Bill, the last time a British monarch vetoes legislation.

1895 Spanish cruiser Reina Regente sinks in Straits of Gibraltar, over 400 die.

1915 The British declare a blockade of all German ports.

1935 Hermann Goering officially creates the Luftwaffe (German Air Force)

1941 FDR signs Lend-Lease Bill, allowing US to provide material support to Great Britain's war effort in return for future use of land for US military bases in England.

1985 Mikhail Gorbachev replaces Konstantin Chernenko as Soviet leader.

2018 China's National People's Congress approves removal of term limits for a leader, allowing Xi Jinping to be presidency for life.

2020 COVID-19 declared a pandemic by the head of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, after 121,564 cases worldwide and 4,373 deaths.

1997 Beatle Paul McCartney is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II

[Jimbuna]

1916 French airship mistakenly attacks and sinks British submarine D3 with loss of all hands.

1917 A German submarine sinks an unarmed US merchant ship, the 'Algonquin' on the same day that US President Woodrow Wilson gives executive order to arm US merchant ships.

1918 Fearing foreign invasion Vladimir Lenin shifts revolutionary Russia's capital from Petrograd (St. Petersburg) to Moscow.

1935 Britain establishes 30 MPH speed limit for towns & villages.

1940 Finland signs the Moscow Peace Treaty in Moscow, surrendering to Russia and ceding 11% of their pre-WWII territory, ending the "Winter War"

1971 Thousands of Belfast shipyard workers march demanding the introduction of Internment for members of the Irish Republican Army.

[Jimbuna]

1905 Mata Hari first performs her dance act at the Guimet Museum, Paris.

1943 Failed assassin attempt on Adolf Hitler during Smolensk-Rastenburg flight.

1943 Nazis liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Kraków; Oskar Schindler with advance information, saves his workers by keeping them in his factory overnight.

1945 Dutch monarch Queen Wilhelmina returns to Netherlands at Eede, after five years in exile in the UK

[Jimbuna]

1757 On board HMS Monarch (his own flagship), British Admiral John Byng is executed by firing squad for failing to come to aide of besieged British garrison.

1915 German cruiser Dresden scuttled off Más a Tierra, Chile, having been pursued by the Royal Navy after the Battle of the Falkland Islands, with her engines worn out and virtually no coal.

1967 JFK's body moved from temporary grave to a permanent memorial.

1973 Future US senator John McCain is released after spending over five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp.

1984 Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Féin, is seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in central Belfast.

2013 Xi Jinping named the new President of the People's Republic of China.

[Jimbuna]

44 BC Julius Caesar is stabbed to death by Brutus, Cassius and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March in Rome.

1916 Dutch merchant ship Tubantia torpedoed by German submarine & sinks in North Sea.

1923 Vladimir Lenin suffer his 3rd stroke.

1939 Adolf Hitler summons Czech President Emil Hácha to a meeting in Berlin and informs him of the impending attack by Germany; Hácha suffers a heart attack and later capitulates. Germany occupies and annexes Czechoslovakia reneging on the Munich Agreement.

1940 Hermann Goering says 100-200 church bells enough for Germany, smelt the rest.

1972 Two British soldiers killed when attempting to defuse a bomb in Belfast; an RUC officer is also killed in an IRA attack in Coalisland, County Tyrone.

[Jimbuna]

1830 London's re-organised police force (Scotland Yard)

1830 New York Stock Exchange slowest day ever (31 shares traded)

1861 Edward Clark becomes Governor of Texas, replacing Sam Houston, who is evicted from the office for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy (US Civil War)

1882 U.S. Senate ratifies the Geneva Convention of 1864, legitimatizing the International Red Cross and the American Red Cross.

1915 British battle cruisers Inflexible & Irresistible hit mines in Dardanelles.

1935 Adolf Hitler orders German rearmament in violation of The Treaty of Versailles.

1943 Ships Elin K (Norway) and Zaanland (Netherlands) torpedoed by German U-boats and sink.

1944 French Vichy Internal minister Pierre Pucheu sentenced to death for treason.

1945 Würzburg, Germany is 90% destroyed, with 5,000 dead, in only 20 minutes by British bombers.

1955 President Eisenhower upholds the use of atomic weapons in case of war.

1968 My Lai massacre occurs when American soldiers kill ~400 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, in one of the most controversial incidents of the Vietnam War.

1988 North Ireland Protestant fires on Catholic funeral, 3 killed.

[Jimbuna]

1932 German police raid Adolf Hitler's Nazi headquarters.

1942 US General Douglas MacArthur arrives in Australia to become supreme commander.

1960 US President Eisenhower forms anti-Castro-exile army under the CIA

1965 Beatles announce their second film is titled "8 Arms to Hold You" ; later changed to "Help!"

1966 US submarine locates missing hydrogen bomb on the Mediterranean sea floor.

1976 4 Catholic civilians (including 2 children) are killed and twelve wounded when the Ulster Volunteer Force explode a car bomb at Hillcrest Bar, Dungannon.

[Jimbuna]

1915 French battleship Bouvet explodes, 640 killed.

1940 Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler meet at Brenner Pass where the Italian dictator agrees he will, in due course, join Germany's impending war effort in the west.

1942 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9102, creating the War Relocation Authority, which was charged with overseeing the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II

1943 British merchant vessel "Canadian Star" is torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic by German U-boat U-221, 34 die with 54 survivors.

1965 Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov leaves his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes and becomes the first person to conduct a spacewalk.

[Eisenwurst]

2 days late I know but I've been sick.... and the dates are a bit elastic.

Poor Baldwin died on the 16th March 1185. By all accounts a good king.

[Jimbuna]

1918 S Potter becomes 1st US pilot to shoot down a German seaplane.

1920 US Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles for the second time, refusing to ratify the League of Nations' covenant and maintains a policy of isolation.

1945 800 killed as Kamikaze attacked USS Franklin off Japan.

1945 Adolf Hitler issues "Nero Decree" to destroy all German factories.

1982 Falklands War: Argentinian forces land on South Georgia Island, precipitating war with the U.K.

1985 US Senate votes 55-45 to authorize production of the MX "Peacekeeper" intercontinental ballistic missile.

1988 Two British Army corporals are attacked during a funeral procession, beaten and shot dead by the Provisional IRA in Belfast, North Ireland.

1989 Boeing V-22 Osprey VTOL aircraft makes maiden flight.

2003 Airstrikes by an American and British-led coalition signal the beginning of the Invasion of Iraq, without United Nations support and in defiance of world opinion.