April 22 in Military History — On This Day

Mehmed's Ships Cross Dry Land

Unable to force his navy through the chain blocking the Golden Horn entrance, Mehmed executed one of the most audacious logistics operations in siege history: he had 70 ships dragged overland on greased wooden rollers, across the Galata hill and down the other side into the Golden Horn. The operation was conducted overnight to maximize surprise. Dawn revealed an Ottoman fleet already assembled within the harbor, threatening the northern walls that had never required serious defense. The Byzantine garrison — already desperately thin — now had to split its forces. A Venetian plan to fire-bomb the transported fleet was betrayed to the Ottomans, and the attack failed.

The ship transport was perhaps the most psychologically devastating act of the entire siege. It demonstrated that Mehmed would not be constrained by conventional military logic. The northern walls of the Golden Horn, never seriously defended before, now required garrison — forces the Byzantines did not have. The city's fate was sealed not by any single military blow but by the accumulated impossibility of defending everywhere at once.

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The Founding of Veracruz and the Scuttling of the Fleet

Landing on Good Friday near modern Veracruz, Cortés founded a town, had its new council elect him captain-general, and thereby legally severed himself from the governor of Cuba who had sent him. He received Moctezuma's envoys and their gifts of gold, and won over the Totonacs of Cempoala — the Aztecs' resentful tributaries — as his first indigenous allies. Then, to end all talk of return, he ran his ships aground.

This was the conquest's founding act of insubordination and commitment in one. By destroying his fleet Cortés bound roughly 500 men to victory or death, and by courting the Totonacs he discovered the strategy that would decide everything: the Aztec empire was an empire of resentful subjects, and those subjects could be turned.

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⚔️📍 Ypres, Belgium1915

First Large-Scale Poison Gas Attack — Second Ypres

Germany released 168 tons of chlorine gas along a 4-mile front at Ypres, creating a yellow-green cloud that drifted into Allied trenches. French and Algerian troops fled in panic, creating a 4-mile gap in the Allied line that German infantry failed to exploit.

The gas attack at Second Ypres inaugurated chemical warfare as a major battlefield weapon and triggered an arms race in poison gas that killed 90,000 soldiers in WWI.

Outcome

German breakthrough; gap not exploited; chemical warfare era begins

Casualties

15,000