📅 On This Day in Military History
2 events across history
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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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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