📅 On This Day in Military History
4 events across history
Custer's 7th Cavalry launched a dawn attack on Chief Black Kettle's Southern Cheyenne village on the Washita River in present-day Oklahoma. Black Kettle, a tireless advocate for peace who had survived Sand Creek four years earlier, was killed along with his wife and more than 100 Cheyenne — mostly women and children. Custer also destroyed the village, killed approximately 875 horses, and captured 53 women and children.
The attack demonstrated the U.S. Army's winter campaign strategy: strike villages in cold months when horses were weak and people were confined. Custer was praised by Sheridan, but critics noted the village had many non-combatants. The death of Black Kettle eliminated one of the last influential Cheyenne peace advocates.
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A Chilean column pursuing the retreating Peruvians into the Tarapacá ravine was surprised and badly beaten by a Peruvian counterattack, in which the resourceful Cáceres distinguished himself. It was Peru's finest land victory of the war.
Though Peru won the battle, it lacked the strength to hold the province and had to abandon Tarapacá anyway — a tactical triumph that could not reverse the strategic collapse, but which marked the emergence of Cáceres as Peru's great resistance leader.
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In temperatures plunging to minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, 30,000 US Marines and soldiers of X Corps found themselves completely surrounded by 120,000 Chinese troops at the Chosin Reservoir in the mountains of northeast Korea. General Oliver P. Smith's Marines executed one of history's most celebrated fighting retreats — 78 miles through enemy lines to the port of Hungnam. 'Retreat, hell — we're just attacking in a different direction,' became the battle's motto. Frostbite casualties rivaled those from combat.
Chosin became a defining legend of the US Marine Corps — an epic of courage and endurance against overwhelming odds in brutal conditions. The Marines not only survived but inflicted catastrophic losses on the encircling Chinese forces. The successful evacuation at Hungnam saved an entire corps and 100,000 Korean refugees.
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On November 27, 2024, a rebel coalition led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army launched Operation Deterrence of Aggression out of the Idlib pocket — the last opposition enclave, frozen since the 2020 ceasefire. What was expected to be a limited probing attack collapsed the front within hours. The Syrian Arab Army, hollowed out by a decade of desertion, unpaid conscripts, and officers running smuggling rackets rather than units, simply dissolved. Aleppo — the city Assad had spent four years and tens of thousands of lives reconquering between 2012 and 2016 — fell in roughly seventy-two hours, with rebels driving into the city center against almost no organized resistance. Russian airpower, absorbed by Ukraine, arrived late and thin; Hezbollah, gutted by its 2024 war with Israel, never came at all.
The speed of Aleppo's fall revealed that the Assad state had been a shell for years, propped up entirely by Russian and Iranian support that was no longer available. It converted a local offensive into a general collapse.
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