25 JUNE 1813 BOMBSHIP EAGLE Smarting from the British blockade of American seaports during the War of 1812, Congress turned for help to our private citizens. Legislation was passed in March 1813 allowing a bounty equal to one-half the value Read More
18 JUNE 1942 LTJG RALPH RICH With Hitler’s 1 September 1939 invasion of Poland, the citizenry of the United States remained divided over whether or not we should become involved. However, enlistments in our military went up as men prepared Read More
14-30 JUNE 1985 HIJACKING OF TWA 847 At 1000 on Friday June 14th, TWA Flight 847 began rolling down the runway at Athens, Greece. The Boeing 727 was bound for Rome on a flight that had originated in Cairo and Read More
8-10 JUNE 1944 THE FIGHT TO SAVE GLENNON USS GLENNON (DD-620), JEFFERS (DD-621), and BUTLER (DD-636) spent June 7th close inshore against “Utah” beach, the former expending 430 five-inch rounds against enemy pillboxes and machine gun nests from which American Read More
6 JUNE 1944 CORRY CONTROVERSY The morning of 18 December 1941 dawned at the Charleston Navy Yard with palpable anticipation. Our citizenry was united against the Pearl Harbor attack only 11 days earlier, and this morning our Navy was set to Read More
30 MAY-3 JUNE 1997 OPERATION “NOBLE OBELISK” The Clinton administration’s National Security Strategy emphasized “selective engagement” in world affairs where US interests were at stake. And by the mid-1990s, US armed forces had executed a dizzying succession of peacekeeping, non-combatant evacuations Read More
26 MAY 1960 GREAT SEAL BUG On 4 August 1945, as WWII ended, a Moscow school children’s group, the Young Pioneers, presented US Ambassador W. Averell Harriman with a gift of friendship–a 2-foot carved wooden likeness of the Great Seal of Read More
200th ANNIVERSARY 22 MAY 1823 AVENGING CAPTAIN PERKINS On 1 March 1823 the American merchant brig Belisarius of Kennebunk, Maine, departed Port au Prince, Haiti, bound for Mexico. The new-found independence of such former Spanish colonies as Venezuela, Colombia, and Read More
17 MAY 1987 ATTACK ON USS STARK On 22 September 1980, years of animosity between Iran and Iraq erupted into a shooting war. Early in that conflict Iranian jets destroyed Iraq’s only Persian Gulf oil terminal, greatly hindering the flow of Read More
100th ANNIVERSARY 12 MAY 1923 THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF PETE ELLIS After World War I several of defeated Germany’s Pacific island possessions passed to Japan under a League of Nations mandate. Japan’s subsequent fortification of these islands in defiance of the Read More