📅 On This Day in Military History
7 events across history
William Wallace and Andrew Moray let the English army begin crossing the narrow wooden bridge over the Forth, then attacked when only part of it had reached the north bank, trapping the vanguard against the river. The bridge collapsed or was cut; the divided English army was slaughtered, the hated treasurer Cressingham killed and flayed.
The first great Scottish victory proved a foot army of commoners could destroy English cavalry, and made Wallace the leader of the resistance — Guardian of Scotland in the name of the exiled Balliol.
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The bloodiest battle of the war and one of the bloodiest of the century. Allied forces attacked Villars's entrenched French army in woodland near the village of Malplaquet. Though the Allies ultimately broke the French position and Villars himself was wounded, the cost was staggering — over 24,000 Allied casualties against approximately 12,000 French. The French retreated in good order, having inflicted terrible punishment.
Malplaquet was technically an Allied victory but felt like a defeat. Public opinion in Britain and the Dutch Republic recoiled at the casualty lists. The battle revitalized French morale, made Villars a national hero, and gave the anti-war Tory party in England the argument it needed to seek peace. It marked the turning point of the war's political momentum.
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Howe landed his army south of Philadelphia and marched north. Washington chose to defend the Brandywine Creek crossing. As at Long Island, Howe sent Cornwallis on a wide flanking march through an unguarded ford. Local intelligence about the flanking column reached Washington too late and was confused by conflicting reports. Cornwallis struck the American right and rear while the main British force crossed in front. The American army was defeated but retreated in reasonable order — saved in part by a fierce counterattack by General Anthony Wayne.
The loss opened Philadelphia to British occupation — Congress fled to York, Pennsylvania. Washington's army had again survived despite a tactical defeat. Lafayette, wounded at Brandywine in his first battle, cemented his commitment to the American cause. Howe's failure to pursue aggressively allowed Washington to preserve his army.
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The most strategically significant American victory of the war came on Lake Champlain, where Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough's squadron defeated the British fleet in a brilliantly managed battle. Macdonough had prepared for the fight by rigging his flagship Saratoga so it could be winched around to bring fresh guns to bear — a tactic that proved decisive. When the British flagship Confiance was disabled, the entire British squadron struck its colors. Without naval support, Governor-General Prevost's 10,000-man invasion force — the largest British army to enter the United States during the war — retreated to Canada.
Plattsburgh was arguably the most consequential American military victory of the war. It halted the most dangerous British invasion, secured the northern frontier, and critically influenced the peace negotiations at Ghent. British negotiators, learning of Prevost's failure, abandoned their demands for territorial concessions from the United States.
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After 349 days of siege, Russian forces under General Gorchakov evacuated Sevastopol on the night of September 11–12, 1855. They blew up the remaining forts and magazines, scuttled the last warships in the harbor, and crossed to the north side of the bay. Allied forces entered a city of ruins. The fall of Russia's most important Black Sea naval base effectively ended the war, though fighting continued elsewhere until the Treaty of Paris.
The fall of Sevastopol was a profound humiliation for Russia — the city had been the symbol of Russian naval power and southern security since Catherine the Great. Its loss, after 349 days of resistance that had cost both sides enormous casualties, demonstrated that even extraordinary defensive effort could not compensate for Russia's technological, logistical, and economic inferiority relative to the industrializing Western powers.
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Salvador Allende, the world's first democratically elected Marxist head of state, had nationalized Chile's copper industry and pursued socialist economic policies since his 1970 election. With CIA funding of opposition groups, economic destabilization, and logistical support, Chilean military commanders launched a coup on September 11, 1973. The Presidential Palace was bombed; Allende died in the assault. General Pinochet's regime that followed killed over 3,000 people, tortured tens of thousands, and 'disappeared' hundreds more.
Chile demonstrated the Reagan-era logic already present in Nixon's CIA: democratic processes were expendable when they produced leftist governments. The coup became a defining moral scandal for U.S. foreign policy — evidence that American Cold War strategy was willing to destroy democracy in order to save it from communism. Documents declassified in the 1990s confirmed CIA involvement. Chile also served as a laboratory for 'Chicago School' economists whose free-market policies — implemented by the junta — influenced economic thinking worldwide.
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On the anniversary of 9/11, Islamist militants stormed the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in hours of sustained attack. The assault exposed the chaos that had engulfed eastern Libya since Gaddafi's fall — the new government had no ability to protect foreign missions or rein in armed groups. In the US, the attack became a political firestorm that dominated the 2012 election and subsequent congressional investigations, fundamentally souring American public opinion on the Libya intervention.
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