August 21 in Military History — On This Day

Battle of Lostwithiel

King Charles I cornered the Earl of Essex's Parliamentary army in Cornwall, surrounding it in the Fowey River estuary area. Essex escaped by boat to Plymouth, leaving his infantry to surrender — approximately 6,000 men marched out stripped of their weapons and equipment. The Parliamentary cavalry fought their way out through Royalist lines. It was the worst Parliamentary defeat of the war.

Lostwithiel demonstrated that the Parliamentary war effort under the old nobility was faltering. Essex had walked into a trap and lost his army. The disaster accelerated Parliamentary debates about military reorganization and the creation of a professional national army. Within months the Self-Denying Ordinance would remove MP's from field command and clear the way for the New Model Army under Thomas Fairfax.

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Third Battle of the Taku Forts

An Anglo-French force of 17,000 men delivered the decisive campaign of the Second Opium War. Rather than repeating the failed frontal naval assault, the allied commanders landed infantry to attack the Taku Forts from the landward side while the navy engaged from the river. The Qing garrison was overwhelmed in a coordinated assault. The road to Beijing lay open.

The fall of the Taku Forts for the second time broke all remaining Qing military capacity to defend North China and made the advance on Beijing inevitable. Emperor Xianfeng began preparing to flee the capital.

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⚔️📍 Lawrence, Kansas1863

Quantrill's Raid — Lawrence, Kansas Massacred

Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill led 450 raiders into the Free State town of Lawrence, killing 180 unarmed men and boys and burning 185 buildings. Quantrill had a 'kill list' of abolitionists and targeted men rather than women.

The Lawrence massacre was the worst atrocity of the guerrilla war in Kansas-Missouri and prompted General Order No. 11, which forcibly expelled 20,000 civilians from the Missouri border counties.

Outcome

180 civilians killed; town burned

Casualties

180

Ghouta Chemical Attack

In the pre-dawn hours of August 21, 2013, rockets filled with sarin nerve agent struck two rebel-held suburbs of Damascus — Zamalka and Ein Tarma in Eastern Ghouta, and Moadamiyeh in Western Ghouta — killing between 1,300 and 1,700 civilians in their sleep, including hundreds of children. The attack was the largest use of chemical weapons since Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds of Halabja in 1988. President Obama had declared the use of chemical weapons a 'red line' that would trigger US military action; the Ghouta attack appeared to cross it definitively, and the US Navy positioned destroyers off the Syrian coast. But after the British Parliament voted against military action and facing Congressional opposition at home, Obama accepted a Russian-brokered deal under which Assad agreed to surrender his declared chemical weapons stockpile — a deal critics said rewarded Assad for the attack and shattered US credibility.

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