📅 On This Day in Military History
2 events across history
Union forces made costly frontal assaults against Confederates dug in on Marye's Heights. Lee famously remarked 'It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.'
A devastating Union defeat that shattered army morale and led to calls for Lincoln's resignation. Burnside was replaced by Hooker.
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After Shanghai fell, Japanese forces advanced rapidly up the Yangtze River toward China's capital. Chiang Kai-shek evacuated the government to Wuhan and then Chongqing, ordering General Tang Shengzhi to defend the city. Tang's defense collapsed within days. On December 13, 1937, Japanese forces entered Nanjing and began six weeks of systematic murder, rape, and destruction that the world came to call the Rape of Nanjing.
The fall of Nanjing forced the Chinese government into a brutal inland retreat that would define the war's character — a vast continental stalemate fought across China's interior. The subsequent massacre transformed the war's moral dimension and galvanized Chinese resistance, even as it demonstrated the futility of conventional defense against Japan's superior military machine.
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