📅 On This Day in Military History
4 events across history
The fall of Anqing — a major Taiping garrison city on the Yangtze River west of Nanjing — marked the turning point of the war. Zeng Guofan's Hunan Army had invested the city for over a year, constructing a double ring of earthwork fortifications isolating it from both river resupply and land relief. Multiple Taiping relief attempts under the brilliant general Chen Yucheng failed to break through. When the city finally fell on September 5, 1861, Zeng's forces massacred virtually the entire garrison and civilian population — approximately 16,000 people. The fall cut the Taiping capital off from the upper Yangtze and gave the Hunan Army control of the strategic approaches to Nanjing itself.
Anqing was Zeng Guofan's masterpiece — a methodical siege conducted with the same kind of patient engineering that Todleben used at Sevastopol, combined with the ruthlessness characteristic of Chinese civil war. The fall demonstrated that the Hunan Army, built from scratch by Zeng from Confucian gentry volunteers rather than the demoralized Banner forces and Green Standard Army of the regular Qing military, was a match for the Taiping in sustained operations. It also marked the beginning of the war's final phase: after Anqing, the Taiping were on the strategic defensive everywhere.
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Mediated by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire, the peace negotiations concluded a war both sides were exhausted by. Japan, despite its military victories, was financially strained and unable to continue offensive operations. Russia, wracked by revolution at home, also needed peace urgently. Count Witte, Russia's chief negotiator, skillfully prevented Japan from extracting an indemnity — a concession that outraged Japanese public opinion and sparked riots in Tokyo. Japan received southern Sakhalin, the Liaodong Leasehold, and recognition of its paramount interest in Korea.
Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation — the first American to receive the honor. The treaty reshaped Northeast Asia: Japan emerged as an imperial power, Russia conceded its Far Eastern ambitions, and Korea's path to Japanese annexation was cleared.
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German forces had swept through Belgium and Luxembourg in six weeks, advancing within 30 miles of Paris. Then the French and British counterattacked along the Marne River, exploiting a gap between two German armies. The famous 'Taxis of the Marne' ferried French troops to the front. The German advance halted, and both sides dug in. The war of movement was over.
Saved Paris and France from immediate defeat. The German Schlieffen Plan — knock out France in six weeks, then turn on Russia — had failed. Both sides dug trenches stretching from the English Channel to Switzerland, setting the grinding pattern for the next four years.
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Following the assassination attempt on Lenin by Fanny Kaplan on August 30, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars formally decreed the Red Terror on September 5. The Cheka (secret police) under Felix Dzerzhinsky launched mass executions of 'class enemies' — former nobles, clergy, tsarist officers, merchants, and anyone deemed politically suspect. Estimates of those killed by the Cheka during the civil war range from 100,000 to 300,000. Thousands more were held in early concentration camps or taken as hostages. The terror established patterns of political violence that would be institutionalized under Stalin.
The Red Terror created the institutional and ideological template for Soviet political repression that culminated in Stalin's Great Terror of 1937–38. It demonstrated that the Bolsheviks were willing to kill on an industrial scale to maintain power.
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