This Day in History Mar. 11

Mar. 11

1779 US army Corps of Engineers established (1st time)
1789 Benjamin Banneker with L'Enfant begin to lay out Washington DC
1791 Samuel Mulliken, Philadelphia PA, is 1st to obtain more than 1 US patent
1861 Confederate convention in Montgomery, adopts constitution
1862 General Stonewall Jackson evacuates Winchester Virginia
1862 Lincoln removes McClellen as general-in-chief & makes him head of Army of the Potomac
1864 Skirmish at Calfkiller Creek (Sparta), Tennessee
1865 General Sherman's Union forces occupy Fayetteville NC
1916 USS Nevada (BB-36) is commissioned as the first US Navy "super-dreadnought"
1917 British troops occupy Baghdad
1918 Moscow becomes capital of revolutionary Russia
1935 Hermann Goering officially creates German Air Force, the Luftwaffe
1938 German troops enter Austria
1941 FDR signs Lend-Lease Bill (lend money to Britain)
1942 Japanese troop land on North-Sumatra
1943 Nazi Militia forms in Netherlands
1945 1,000 allied bombers harass Essen, 4,662 ton bombs
1945 Japanese Navy attempts a kamikaze attack on the Pacific Fleet anchored at Ulithi atoll
1953 American B-47 accidentally drops a nuclear bomb on SC, the bomb doesn't go off
1963 Somalia drops diplomatic relations with Great Britain
1966 Military coup led by Indonesian General Suharto breaks out
1970 Iraq Ba'th Party recognizes Kurd nation
1982 Menachem Begin & Anwar Sadat sign peace treaty in Washington DC
1986 Japanese probe Sakigake flies by Halley's Comet at 6.8 million km

Sorry, BW. Lend-lease was not lending money to Britain. The German u-boats were choking the British isles to death, and we couldn't run to the rescue without risking being drawn into the conflict. So, FDR 'lent' 50 old four pipe destroyers to GB in exchange for leases on several British territories to build airbases. One of those leased islands was Ascension island in the south Atlantic. My dad was deployed there in March of 1942 with a regiment of engineers. They cut the tops off two mountains and filled them in between the two peaks to build an airbase for fighters flying from Brasil to Africa. They didn't have the range and had to use belly tanks to get just to get to Ascension and refuel for the rest of the flight.