June 13
0823 Birth: Charles II (the Bald), king of France (843-77), emperor (875-77).
1373 The world's oldest treaty, the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of Alliance, is signed.
1381 Peasants' Revolt: A popular uprising led by Wat Tyler, sparked by the implementation of a poll tax, begins in Britain; the first popular rebellion in English history.
1773 Birth: Thomas Young, proponent of the wave theory of light.
1786 Birth: Winfield Scott, US Army General. "...diplomat, and presidential candidate. He served on active duty as a general longer than any other man in American history and most historians rate him the ablest American general of his time...Scott earned the nickname of "Old Fuss and Feathers" for his insistence of military appearance and discipline in the U.S. Army, which consisted mostly of volunteers. In his own campaigns, General Scott preferred to use a core of U.S. Army Regulars whenever possible. Gen. Scott was later known as the Grand Old Man of the Army. In the administration of President Andrew Jackson, Scott marshaled United States forces for use against the state of South Carolina in the Nullification Crisis. In 1838, following the orders of President Martin Van Buren, Scott carried out the initial removal of Cherokee Indians from Georgia — what later became known as the Trail of Tears. Scott also helped defuse tensions between officials of the state of Maine and the British Canada province of New Brunswick in the undeclared and bloodless Aroostook War in March 1839. As a result of his success, Scott was appointed major general (then the highest rank in the United States Army) and general-in-chief in 1841. He held this position until November 1, 1861, when he resigned under political pressure from Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan after the Union defeat at Ball's Bluff. McClellan replaced him as general-in-chief. During his time in the military Scott also fought in the Black Hawk War, the Second Seminole War, and, briefly, the American Civil War. He also disobeyed the "order" by colorful San Francisco eccentric Emperor Norton to disband the U.S. Congress by force during this time...In the 1852 presidential election, Scott was the unsuccessful Whig Party candidate, losing to Democrat Franklin Pierce. Despite his faltering in the election, Scott was still a wildly popular national hero..."
1789 Mrs. Alexander Hamilton serves ice cream, a new dessert originating in France, for General George Washington and other guests at the White House.
1865 Birth: William Butler Yeats, Irish poet and dramatist, 1923 Nobel Prize-winning poet; Wild Swans at Coole.
1884 Birth: Anton Drexler, Cofounder of the "German Workers Party" (DAP); will become the Nazi party. It is Drexler who will invite Hitler to join the DAP and then accompany him on speaking engagements throughout Germany and Austria during the early twenties. Drexler will break with Hitler in 1925 and die in Munich virtually forgotten.
1886 Death: King Ludwig II of Bavaria, drowns in Lake Starnberg.
1888 The US Congress creates the Department of Labor.
1893 Birth: Dorothy L. Sayers, the only child of Henry Sayers, headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School, Oxford, and Helen Leigh Sayers, great-niece of Percival Leigh, 'the Professor' of Punch, novelist; Best known to many readers as the creator of that debonair, aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, who solves the mysteries in Murder Must Advertise, Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors.
1898 The Yukon is separated from the Northwest Territories in Canada and given separate territorial status.
1900 China's Boxer Rebellion, targeting foreigners as well as Chinese Christians, erupts into full-scale violence.
1908 Birth: Maria Viera da Silva, artist.
1917 WW1: 14 German Gotha bombers carry out the first large-scale bombing raid by planes on London, killing 162. The only previous aerial bombs were dropped by zeppelins.
1927 For the first time, an American flag is displayed from the right hand of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
1932 Weimar: Bavaria and Württemberg object to the proposed removal of the ban against the SA and SS. See April 14.
1935 Birth: Christo Javacheff, known as Christo, bizarre Bulgarian-born artist. Note: Yes, the above is indeed a picture of the German Reichstag wrapped in cloth; one of Christo's 'works.'
1936 Britain is forced to declare martial law in Palestine.
1937 The Swiss state of Geneva bans the Communist Party.
1939 Holocaust: Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands (Holland) agree to take in the Jews aboard the SS St. Louis. Those who find shelter on the Continent will come under German control in the summer of 1940 and most will later be murdered in the concentration camps.
1940 President Roosevelt subverts the US Neutrality Laws by having shipments of artillery and arms "sold" to a steel company and then "resold" to the British government. The first shipment leaves the US on the SS Eastern Prince.
1940 WW2: In Romania, Horia Sima is liberated and granted an audience with King Carol.
1940 WW2: French Prime Minister Reynaud once again appeals to Roosevelt to intervene, again without success.
1940 Diary of Leon Gladun: "Suddenly we leave--nobody knows where to."
1941
1941 WW2: The Soviets, who had taken over Bessarabiain June 1940 and had immediately closed all Jewish institutions, arrest many of the region's leading Jewish citizens and exile them to Siberia, where many die. (Atlas)
1942 WW2: President Roosevelt creates the Office of War Information, and appoints news commentator Elmer Davis to head it.
1944 The wire recorder, the precursor of much easier to use magnetic tape recorder, is patented by Marvin Camras.
1944 Holocaust: Men from the slave labor camps at Auschwitz are transferred to Mauthausen. (Atlas)
1944 WW2: Just 7 days after D-Day, Hitler orders the release of the first V-1 rockets from bases along the French coast in the Pas de Calais sector. These robot bombs reach speeds of 400 mph on a predetermined course aimed a London. The first V1 flying bomb (Fieseler Fi-103), or doodlebug, or buzz bomb, of WW2, lands in southern England. Hitler's secret weapon hits a house in Southampton, killing three people. RAF pilots quickly learn to shoot them down. Note: V-1's will eventually kill nearly 6,000 Londoners, injuring 40,000, and destroying more than 75,000 homes.
1945 WW2: The Battle of Kunishi Ridge is waged on Okinawa. "...With the return of daylight on 13 June six companies occupied the lower end of Kunishi Ridge, and none of them could move. All were dependent upon tanks for supplies and evacuation. Twenty-nine planes dropped supplies, but with only partial success since a portion of the drops fell beyond reach and was unrecoverable. One hundred and forty men from the two battalions were casualties on 13 June; the seriously wounded were returned in tanks, men with light wounds stayed on the ridge, and the bodies of the dead were gathered near the base of the ridge. The burden of offensive action fell upon the tanks on 13 June and the three days following. Flame and medium tanks moving out on firing missions carried supplies and reinforcements forward and then, on the return trip for more fuel or ammunition, carried wounded men to the rear. Soft rice paddies made it necessary for the tanks to stay on the one good road in the sector, and this road was effectively covered by Japanese 47-mm. shells and other artillery, which destroyed or damaged a total of twenty-one tanks during the five day battle..."
1946 Nuremberg War Crimes Trials: Testimony is heard concerning Reich Commissioner of the Netherlands Seyss-Inquart, from one of his subordinates. "...DR. STEINBAUER: Now I pass over to the next chapter, and that is the combating of so-called enemies of the State. Yesterday it was mentioned that the property of the Freemasons and Jehovah's Witnesses was confiscated. I should like to ask you, so that there may be no mistake, whether it was only the property of the organizations which was claimed, or was it also the property of the individual members? And so, taking the Freemasons as an example, was the property of the individual Freemason claimed as well as the property of the lodges? WIMMER: In all these cases property that belonged to organizations was demanded, never that belonging to individuals. If there were individual cases where this happened, then these were abuses by individuals, but I cannot recall any such abuses. DR. STEINBAUER: The Dutch Jews were also counted among the so-called enemies of the State. Who was responsible for handling the Jewish question in the Netherlands-you have really already told me that. WIMMER: From the very beginning, the Police laid claim to the handling of the Jews, to jurisdiction over the treatment of the Jews, as a matter of fundamental principle. DR. STEINBAUER: Now, we have an entire list of decrees here which bear the name of Seyss-Inquart and which indicate encroachments on the right of the Jews. Can you remember when the legislation against the Jews was introduced and in what form? WIMMER: The development was briefly more or less as follows: Seyss-Inquart was opposed to the entire idea of taking up the Jewish question at all in the Netherlands, and in one of the Reich Commissioner's first conferences it was ordered that this question was not to be dealt with. After a certain time-it may have been a few months-the Reich Commissioner informed us that he had received an order from Berlin to take up the Jewish problem because Jews had participated in a relatively large number in various movements and actions in the Netherlands which at that time, indeed, could only be characterized essentially as conspiracies. Apart from that, one had to expect that if the war should last a fairly long time, the Jews who naturally because of the treatment they had undergone were not, and could not be, friends of the Germans..."
1956 The last British troops leave the Suez Canal Zone in Egypt.
1966 Miranda vs. Arizona: The Supreme Court issues its landmark Miranda decision, ruling that police must inform suspects of their constitutional rights before questioning them.
1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson nominates Solicitor-General Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, succeeding the retiring Tom Clark.
1971 The New York Times begins publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of America's involvement in Vietnam.
1976 Death: Don Bolles, Arizona Republic investigative reporter who had been working on a Mafia story, dies as a result of injuries suffered when a bomb blew up his car 11 days earlier.
1977 James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is recaptured in a Tennessee wilderness area, following his escape three days earlier from a Tennessee prison.
1982 Death: King Khalid of Saudi Arabia, at 69. Fahd replaces him.
1982 The French government announces a prices and incomes freeze as part of an economic package following devaluation of the franc.
1983 After more than a decade in space, Pioneer 10, the world's first outer-planetary probe, crosses the orbit of Neptune and becomes the first man-made object to leave the solar system. The next day, it radios back its first scientific data on interstellar space. On 2 March 1972, the NASA spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet. In December 1973, after successfully negotiating the asteroid belt and a distance of 620 million miles, Pioneer 10 reached Jupiter and sent back to Earth the first close-up images of the spectacular gas giant. NASA will officially end the Pioneer 10 project on 31 March 1997, with the spacecraft having traveled a distance of some six billion miles. Headed in the direction of the Taurus constellation, Pioneer 10 will pass within three light years of another star, Ross 246, in the year 34,600 A.D. Bolted to the probe's exterior wall is a gold-anodized plaque, 6 by 9 inches in area, that displays a drawing of a human man and woman, a star map marked with the location of the sun, and another map showing the flight path of Pioneer 10. The plaque, intended for intelligent life forms elsewhere in the galaxy, was designed by astronomer Carl Sagan.
1986 President Reagan criticizes the South African state of emergency.
1989 The wreck of the German ship Bismarck, which was sunk in 1941 during WW2, is found 600 miles west of Brest, France.
1990 East Germany begins the final demolition of the Berlin Wall, knocking out concrete slabs all over the city to reopen streets sealed off since the Cold War barrier was built in 1961.
1990 US Secretary of State James Baker, testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, urges Israel to accept a US plan for peace talks.
1991 Revising a policy with roots to the McCarthy era, the George H. Bush administration agrees to remove almost all 250,000 names on a secret list of unacceptable aliens.
1992 The UN Earth Summit ended in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
1993 20 Somalis are killed and 50 more wounded when Pakistani members of the UN peacekeeping forces fire into a crowd of demonstrators protesting UN attacks on warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid.
1993 Rockets fired by Serb forces kill more than 50 people in a makeshift hospital in the besieged Muslim enclave of Gorazde in eastern Bosnia.
1994 North Korea announces that it is withdrawing from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and will no longer permit its inspectors into the country.
1995 France announces the abandonment of its moratorium on nuclear testing and proceeds to conduct eight more tests.
1996 Members of the Freemen militia surrender, 10 days after the FBI cut off electricity to their Montana compound. The standoff has lasted 81 days, the longest siege in US federal history.
1996 Copper prices tumble around the world after Sumitomo Corporation declares that it has lost an estimated $2.6 billion over 10 years from unauthorized copper trades. The trader responsible will be sentenced to eight years in jail in March 1998.
1997 Ira Einhorn, age 57, a hippie guru who had gained a following among the rich and influential in the 1970s before he beat his girlfriend to death and stuffed her body in a steamer, is captured in France after 16 years on the run. Einhorn had fled to Europe in 1981, shortly before his murder trial was to begin. A Philadelphia court in 1993 convicted him in absentia and sentenced him to a life in prison. His Swedish girlfriend's recent application for a French driver's license and tips that followed a story about Einhorn on TV's Unsolved Mysteries lead authorities to the fugitive this day.
1997 Jurors unanimously recommend that convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh be sentenced to death.
1999 NATO soldiers shoot dead two armed men as peacekeepers attempt to contain new violence in Kosovo. Russian troops, meanwhile, block British troops from entering the airport in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo.
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