📅 On This Day in Military History
3 events across history
As part of the American plan to capture Montreal by advancing down the St. Lawrence River, a force of some 8,000 soldiers under General James Wilkinson was harassed by a much smaller British force under Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Morrison. When the Americans turned to fight on a riverside farm owned by John Crysler, Morrison's disciplined regulars delivered a devastating defeat to troops twice their number. The American attack was poorly coordinated, and Morrison's veterans repulsed every charge with steady musket fire. The defeat, combined with reverses further south, doomed the Montreal campaign entirely.
Crysler's Farm demonstrated the growing tactical competence of British and Canadian regular forces. The defeat ended the 1813 American offensive on the St. Lawrence and ensured that Montreal — and the heart of Canada — remained safe for the war's duration.
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As three American columns raced to trap Aguinaldo in northern Luzon, Wheaton's force landed at San Fabian on the Lingayen Gulf and pushed inland. At San Jacinto, Manuel Tinio's brigade fought a sharp delaying action from wet rice paddies and bamboo groves before withdrawing north.
Part of the great November 1899 pincer that ended the conventional war — the Republic's army disintegrated into the mountains, and Aguinaldo escaped the closing trap by days, beginning his long flight that ended at Palanan.
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After the Polish-Soviet armistice freed Red Army forces for the southern front, Frunze's armies smashed through Wrangel's defenses on the Perekop Isthmus and flooded into Crimea. Wrangel organized a remarkable evacuation: 126 ships carried 145,693 soldiers, civilians, and families out of Crimean ports in four days. Those who remained — White officers, civil servants, soldiers who surrendered — were executed by the Cheka in mass killings estimated at 50,000–150,000 victims. The evacuation marked the end of organized White resistance in European Russia.
The fall of Crimea ended the Russian Civil War in European Russia and marked the final defeat of the White movement. The mass Cheka executions of those who remained were among the largest single atrocities of the war.
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