📅 On This Day in Military History
9 events across history
Landing in Africa with only 15,000 men, Belisarius marched on Carthage and met the Vandal army at the tenth milestone from the city. Gelimer's ambush went awry through poor coordination and the death of his brother in the fighting; when Gelimer paused to mourn instead of pressing his advantage, Belisarius rallied and routed the disorganised Vandals.
Ad Decimum opened the road to Carthage and the astonishingly swift destruction of the Vandal kingdom — a century of Vandal rule in Africa unravelled in a single campaign, restoring the richest provinces of the old West to the empire.
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Twenty-one years old and newly crowned, Francis I met the Swiss — the most feared infantry in Europe, undefeated for two centuries — and fought them for two days. French artillery tore lanes through the pike squares while the gendarmes charged into the gaps, and Venetian reinforcements arrived on the second morning. The Swiss withdrew in good order having lost perhaps half their men.
The battle that broke the myth of Swiss invincibility and made Francis's reputation. The pike square, unsupported, could not survive massed guns. The Swiss drew the correct conclusion, signed the Perpetual Peace with France in 1516, and never again fought as an independent great power — the origin of Swiss neutrality is a defeat in Lombardy. Francis had himself knighted on the field by Bayard.
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Wolfe's army had besieged Quebec for three months without success. Then a small cove was discovered — the Anse au Foulon — where the cliffs were climbable. In the darkness before dawn, 4,500 British troops scaled the cliff and formed up on the Plains of Abraham above the city. Montcalm came out to fight rather than wait behind Quebec's walls. In a 15-minute exchange of volleys, both commanders were mortally wounded. Quebec fell five days later.
The most decisive battle in North American history. Both commanding generals died — Wolfe on the field, Montcalm the next morning. Quebec's fall doomed New France; Montreal fell in 1760. The Seven Years' War in North America was effectively over. The entire continent east of the Mississippi became British. Without this battle, the United States as we know it might not exist.
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Following their triumph at Washington, the British turned their attention to Baltimore, a wealthy port city and privateering hub. The fleet bombarded Fort McHenry continuously for 25 hours, firing some 1,800 shells and rockets. The fort's garrison under Major George Armistead held firm throughout the night. An American lawyer named Francis Scott Key, held aboard a British truce ship while negotiating a prisoner release, watched the bombardment through the night. At dawn, he saw the American flag — a massive 30 by 42 foot garrison flag — still flying over the fort. The sight moved him to write the poem that became 'The Star-Spangled Banner.'
Fort McHenry's successful defense saved Baltimore and shattered British momentum in the Chesapeake. The battle inspired one of the most famous poems in American history, which was eventually set to music and adopted as the national anthem in 1931. The image of the flag still flying became an enduring symbol of American defiance.
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Chapultepec Castle, sitting atop a rocky hill and serving as Mexico's national military academy, was the last major fortification before Mexico City. Scott's assault combined artillery bombardment with simultaneous infantry scaling-ladder assaults from multiple directions. The cadets of the military college — the Niños Héroes — fought alongside regular troops and several died rather than surrender. The castle fell in bitter fighting, and two American officers — including young Lt. Ulysses S. Grant — took initiative to haul artillery pieces into church towers, accelerating the Mexican collapse.
The storming of Chapultepec is remembered as the decisive battle of the war and one of the most celebrated actions in U.S. Marine Corps history ('the Halls of Montezuma'). The fall of the castle opened the causeways into Mexico City. The Niños Héroes became enduring heroes of Mexican national memory. Within hours, Scott's army entered the capital.
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Following the fall of Chapultepec, American columns advanced along the causeways into Mexico City through the night of September 13–14. Street fighting continued through the early morning hours as Mexican soldiers and armed civilians resisted the advance. Santa Anna evacuated the city rather than allow it to become a charnel house. On the morning of September 14, 1847, General Scott rode into the Grand Plaza and the Stars and Stripes were raised over the National Palace — the Hall of Montezuma.
The occupation of Mexico City effectively ended the war. With their capital fallen and their army shattered, Mexican political leaders had no choice but to negotiate. The occupation lasted until June 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified and American forces withdrew. The campaign from Veracruz to Mexico City over 260 miles against superior numbers is studied at military academies worldwide.
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On the small island of Marinduque, Colonel Maximo Abad's 250 guerrillas and bolo-armed auxiliaries ambushed Captain Devereux Shields' 54-man patrol from the heights of Pulang Lupa, wounded Shields, and forced the entire surviving command to surrender — one of only a handful of American unit surrenders in the war.
News of an American company captured intact, weeks before the 1900 presidential election, fed Aguinaldo's strategy of making the war intolerable to American voters. It also triggered a ferocious pacification of Marinduque that prefigured later concentration policies.
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A company of 150 Irish UN peacekeepers at Jadotville was surrounded by some 3,000 Katangese troops and white mercenaries. For five days the Irish, short of water and ammunition, held off repeated assaults — inflicting heavy losses while suffering not a single man killed — before being forced to surrender when no relief could break through.
The stand at Jadotville became a legendary feat of arms, though it was long ignored or treated as a shameful surrender in Ireland; only decades later were the men honoured. It exemplified the strange new world of UN peacekeepers drawn into pitched battle.
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The UN launched Operation Morthor to end the Katangese secession by force, but the offensive bogged down and the Jadotville debacle followed. Flying to Ndola to negotiate a ceasefire with Tshombe, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld was killed when his aircraft crashed at night in still-unexplained circumstances — long suspected by many to have been shot down or sabotaged.
The death of Hammarskjöld — the only Secretary-General to die in office, awarded a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize — was a shattering blow to the UN and to the peacekeeping mission, and remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Cold War.
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