This date in history

[Jimbuna]

1915 1st military use of poison gas (chlorine, by Germany) in WW I

1916 Karl Spindler scuttles the Aud near Daunt's Rock, to prevent its cargo of 20,000 rifles destined for Irish republicans falling into enemy hands.

1940 Rear Admiral Joseph Taussig testifies before US Senate Naval Affairs Committee that war with Japan is inevitable.

1945 Battle of Berlin: Upon being informed that a planned counter-attack never happened, Adolf Hitler flies into a rage, denounces the German Army and concedes World War II is lost.

1945 SS chief Heinrich Himmler secretly meets with Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, asking him to act as an intermediary for a surrender offer to the Western Allies. The Allies do not take the offer seriously.

1972 An 11-year-old boy killed by a rubber bullet fired by the British Army in Belfast; he was the first to die from a rubber bullet impact.

2016 Paris Agreement on climate change signed in New York binding 195 nations to an increase in the global average temperature to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C

[Aktungbby]

1967: Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov is killed when his Soyuz 1 spacecraft smashed into the Earth after his parachutes failed to deploy properly during re-entry. He was the first human spaceflight casualty.

[Jimbuna]

1184 BC The Greeks enter Troy using the Trojan Horse (traditional date)

1914 A shipment of 35,000 rifles and 5 million rounds of ammunition are landed at Larne for the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF, an Ulster loyalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland.

1915 German army fires chloroform gas in Ypres (Leper)

1916 Easter Rising of Irish republicans against British occupation begins in Dublin.

1953 Winston Churchill knighted by Queen Elizabeth II

1967 Vietnam War: American General William Westmoreland says in a news conference that the enemy had "gained support in the United States that gives him hope that he can win politically that which he cannot win militarily."

1969 Loyalist members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV) explode a bomb at a water pipeline between Lough Neagh and Belfast, Northern Ireland.

1969 Paul McCartney says there is no truth to rumours he is dead.

1990 West & East Germany agree to merge currency & economies on July 1st

1993 The IRA explodes a 1000kg car bomb in Bishopsgate, London, killing a news photographer and injuring 44 others.

[Ostfriese]

April 25th, 1983 (40 years ago): German magazine "Der Stern" holds its most infamous press conference, officially announcing what they thought to be the headline of the century, "We have Hitler's diaries" - 62 volumes.



"Stern" began publishing excerpts from the dieares three days later in their regular (weekly) issue.


Analytic examinations in May 1983 came to the conclusion that the pages were luminecent when hit with UV light, which meant the paper contained optical brighteners, which were only introduced in the 1950s. The rrthreads which held the seals were also coloured with a pigment that hadn't been available before 1956.

The diaries were forgeries, and not even good ones.

[Aktungbby]

1507:...a world map produced by German
cartographer Martin Waldseemueller contained the first recorded use of the term: "America" in honor of Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci...who"s tales of two voyages to a "New World" were widely read. It is unknown if Vespucci was ever aware of the cartographic distinction bestowed upon him...but now I'm living in a country named for an Eyetalian??!!

[Jimbuna]

1792 Guillotine first used in France, executes highwayman Nicolas Pelletier.

1915 First landings at Gaba Tepe and Cape Helles on the Gallipoli Peninsula by ANZAC forces during WWI

1941 Operation Mercury: Adolf Hitler orders the conquest of the island of Crete, the first mainly airborne invasion in military history.

1945 "Elbe Day" - US and Soviet forces meet at Torgau, Germany on the Elbe River during the invasion of Germany in WWII

1945 Last Boeing B-17 attack against Nazi Germany.

1945 Soviet forces complete their encirclement of Berlin, cutting off all access points west of the German capital.

1960 1st submerged circumnavigation of Earth completed by USS submarine Triton in 60 days, 21 hours.

1980 Announcement of US hostage rescue bungle in Iran.

1985 West German Parliament rules it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.

1988 John Demjanjuk (Ivan the Terrible), Nazi concentration camp guard, sentenced to death in Jerusalem.

[Jimbuna]

1915 Italy secretly signs the "Treaty of London" with Britain, France and Russia, bringing Italy into World War I on the Allied side.

1944 1st B-29 attacked by Japanese fighters, one fighter shot down.

1945 Marshal Philippe Pétain, leader of France's Vichy collaborationist regime during World War II, arrested for treason.

1945 World War II: Battle of Bautzen - last successful German tank-offensive of the war and last noteworthy victory of the Wehrmacht.

1986 World's worst nuclear disaster: 4th reactor at Chernobyl nuclear power station in USSR explodes, 31 die, radioactive contamination reaches much of Western Europe.

1982 Argentina surrenders to Great Britain on South Georgia Island, near the Falkland Islands.

[Jimbuna]

1865 Steamboat "SS Sultana" explodes in the Mississippi River, killing up to 1,800 of the 2,427 passengers in the greatest maritime disaster in United States history. Most were paroled Union POWs on their way home.

1916 The British renew their assault on the Irish Volunteer position in Mount Street; shelling also sets the buildings on fire.

1933 Adolf Hitler authorizes creation of Ministry of Aviation, in part to revive the German Luftwaffe, under Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering.

1940 Himmler orders establishment of Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

1943 Witold Pilecki escapes from Auschwitz after having voluntarily been imprisoned there to gain information about the Holocaust.

1945 Italian partisans capture Benito Mussolini at Dongo (Lake Como)

2018 Historic Korean summit, the North's Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in of South Korea agree to officially end Korean war and rid peninsula of nuclear weapons.

[Aktungbby]

1952: the war with Japan officially ends as a treaty signed in San Francisco the year before took effect. 5-star general, Dwight D. Eisenhower resigned as Supreme Allied commander in Europe; succeeded by General Matthew B. Ridgeway. 1986: the Siviet union informs the world of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl...

[Jimbuna]

1770 British Captain James Cook, aboard the Endeavour, lands at Botany Bay in Australia.

1789 Fletcher Christian leads a mutiny on HMS Bounty against its captain William Bligh in the South Pacific.

1939 Adolf Hitler claims German-Polish non-attack treaty still in effect.

1940 SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) Rudolf Höss (not Hess, different Nazi) becomes commandant of concentration camp Auschwitz.

1942 Nightly "dim-out" begins along US East Coast.

1944 Exercise "Tiger" ends with 750 US soldiers dead in D-Day rehearsal after their convoy ships were attacked by German torpedo boats off Slapton Sands, Devon.

1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower resigns as Supreme Commander of NATO

1967 Muhammad Ali refuses induction into army & stripped of boxing title.

1967 The Douglas Aircraft Company behind schedule with deliveries of the DC-8 and DC-9 and close to bankruptcy agrees to merge with the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation to form McDonnell Douglas.

1969 Charles de Gaulle resigns as president of France.

1994 Aldrich Ames, former CIA officer and his wife Rosario plead guilty to spying for the Soviet Union and Russia.

1996 In Australia's worst massacre in modern history, Martin Bryant shoots and kills 35 in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Leads to a compulsory gun buy back program and major changes to gun control laws.

[Platapus]

Douglas Seymour Mackiernan (April 25, 1913 – April 29, 1950) was the first officer of the CIA to be killed in the line of duty.


He was killed trying to exfiltrate China after collecting information about, then, Soviet nuclear testing.



His death was the first to be memorialized on the Agency's Book of Honor and with the first memorial star.

[Jimbuna]

1916 Irish republicans abandon the post office in Dublin and surrender unconditionally, marking the end of the Easter Rising.

1945 US Army liberates 31,601 people from the Dachau Nazi concentration camp in Germany.

1945 Conscientious objector Desmond Doss saves 75 wounded soldiers in the Battle of Okinawa at Hacksaw Ridge. Later depicted in the Oscar-winning film "Hacksaw Ridge".

1946 28 former Japanese leaders indicted in Tokyo as war criminals.

1975 Vietnam War: US begins to evacuate its citizens from Saigon in Operation Frequent Wind in response to advancing North Vietnamese forces, bringing an end to US involvement in the war.

1990 Wrecking cranes began tearing down the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate.

[Jimbuna]

1789 George Washington is inaugurated as the first President of the United States of America at Federal Hall in NYC

1920 The British Government ends military conscription.

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 1st submarine built on Great Lakes launched, (Peto), Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

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

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

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

1945 Soviet Army frees Ravensbruck concentration camp.

1975 North Vietnamese troops capture Saigon, ending the Vietnam War.

[Aktungbby]

2010: the US navy officially ends a ban on women serving in submarines, saying the first women would be reporting
for duty by 2012.

[Jimbuna]

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

1840 "Penny Black", the world's first adhesive postage stamp issued by Great Britain.

1915 British liner Lusitania leaves NY for Liverpool on it's last fateful journey.

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.

1939 Batman first appears in Detective Comics #27

1943 German plane sinks the British ship SS Erinpura in the Mediterranean with the loss of 799 lives.

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

1945 Admiral Karl Doenitz forms German government.

1946 Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery appointed British supreme commander.

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

1986 Russian news agency Tass reports Chernobyl nuclear power plant mishap.

2003 In what becomes known as the "Mission Accomplished" speech, U.S. President George W. Bush declares that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" on board the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California.