In the first half of April, the Civil War both began and ended; shortly after President Lincoln visited the surrendered Confederate Capital, John Wilkes Booth assassinated him. We entered WWI and lost control of the Philippines in WWII.

 

On 1 Apr 1945, during WWII, after suffering the loss of 116 planes and damage to three aircraft carriers, 50,000 US combat troops of the 10th Army, under the command of Lieutenant General Simon Buckner Jr., landed on the southwest coast of the Japanese island of Okinawa.

 

Determined to seize Okinawa as a base of operations for the army ground and air forces for a later assault on mainland Japan, over 1,300 ships converged on the island, finally putting ashore 50,000 combat troops. The Americans quickly seized two airfields and advanced inland to cut the island’s waist. They battled nearly 120,000 Japanese army, militia, and labor troops under the command of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima.

 

The Japanese surprised the American forces with a change in strategy, drawing them into the mainland rather than confronting them at the water’s edge. While Americans landed without loss of men, they would suffer more than 50,000 casualties, including more than 12,000 deaths, as the Japanese staged a desperate defense of the island, a defense that included waves of kamikaze air attacks. Eventually, these suicide raids proved counterproductive, as the Japanese finally ran out of planes and resolve, with some 4,000 finally surrendering. Japanese casualties numbered some 117,000. Lieutenant General Buckner, son of a Civil War general, was among the casualties, killed by enemy artillery fire just three days before the Japanese surrender. Japanese General Ushijima committed ritual suicide upon defeat of his forces.

 

On 3 April 1865, during our Civil War, the Rebel capital of Richmond fell to the Union. For ten months, General Ulysses Grant had tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate the city. After Lee made a desperate attack against Fort Stedman along the Union line on March 25, Grant prepared for a major offensive. He struck at Five Forks on April 1, crushing the end of Lee’s line southwest of Petersburg. On April 2, the Yankees struck all along the Petersburg line, and the Confederates collapsed.

 

On the evening of April 2, the Confederate government fled the city with the army right behind. Now, on the morning of April 3, blue-coated troops entered the capital. Richmond was the holy grail of the Union war effort, the object of four years of campaigning. Tens of thousands of Yankee lives were lost trying to get it, and nearly as many Confederate lives lost trying to defend it. Now, the Yankees came to take possession of their prize. The city’s black residents were “completely crazed, they danced and shouted, men hugged each other, and women kissed.” Among the first forces into the capital were black troopers from the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry, and the next day President Abraham Lincoln visited the city. For the residents of Richmond, these were symbols of a world turned upside down. It was, one reporter noted, “…too awful to remember, if it were possible to be erased, but that cannot be.”

 

On 4 April 1949, the US and 11 other nations established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact aimed at containing possible Soviet aggression against Western Europe. NATO stood as the main US-led military alliance against the Soviet Union throughout the duration of the Cold War. NATO lasted throughout the course of the Cold War, and continues to play a role in post-Cold War Europe. In recent years, for example, NATO forces were active in trying to bring an end to the civil war in Bosnia.

 

On 5 April 1614, American Indian princess Pocahontas (d.1617) married English Jamestown colonist John Rolfe in Virginia. Their marriage brought a temporary peace between the English settlers and the Algonquians. In 1616, the couple sailed to England. The “Indian Princess” was popular with the English gentry.

 

On 5 April 2003, on the 18th day of Operation Iraqi Freedom US 3rd Infantry troops entered Baghdad for the first time. Coalition troops took several objectives surrounding the capital in the north and northwest. US warplanes hit Iraqi positions near the commercial center of Mosul. Up to 3,000 Iraqi fighters were killed as American armored vehicles moved into Baghdad.

 

On 6 April 1917, two days after the Senate voted to declare war against Germany, the House endorsed the declaration, and America formally entered WWI. When WWI erupted in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the US, a position that the vast majority of Americans favored. Britain, however, was one of America’s closest trading partners, and tension soon arose between the US and Germany over the latter’s attempted quarantine of the British Isles. Several US ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines, and in February 1915 Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain. On May 7, the British-owned Lusitania ocean liner was torpedoed without warning just off the coast of Ireland. Of the 1,959 passengers, 1,198 were killed, including 128 Americans. The German government maintained that the Lusitania was carrying munitions, but the US demanded reparations and an end to German attacks on unarmed passenger and merchant ships. In August, Germany pledged to see to the safety of passengers before sinking unarmed vessels, but in November sunk an Italian liner without warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. With these attacks, public opinion in the US began to turn irrevocably against Germany.

 

On June 26, the first 14,000 US infantry troops landed in France to begin training for combat. After four years of bloody stalemate along the western front, the entrance of America’s well-supplied forces into the conflict marked a major turning point in the war and helped the Allies to victory. When the war finally ended, on November 11, 1918, over two million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives.

 

On 7 April 1776, Navy Captain John Barry, commander of the American warship Lexington, made the first American naval capture of a British vessel when he took command of the British warship HMS Edward off the coast of Virginia. The capture of the Edward and its cargo turned Captain Barry into a national hero and boosted the morale of the Continental forces.

 

On 9 April 1865, at Appomattox, Virginia, Confederate General Robert Lee surrendered his 28,000 troops to Union General Ulysses Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War. Forced to abandon the Confederate capital of Richmond, blocked from joining the surviving Confederate force in North Carolina, and harassed constantly by Union cavalry, Lee had no other option.

 

On 9 April 1942, Major General Edward King Jr. surrendered at Bataan, Philippines–against General Douglas MacArthur’s orders–and 78,000 troops (66,000 Filipinos and 12,000 Americans), the largest contingent of US soldiers ever to surrender, were taken captive by the Japanese. The prisoners were at once led 55 miles from Mariveles, on the southern end of the Bataan peninsula, to San Fernando, on what became known as the “Bataan Death March.” At least 600 Americans and 5,000 Filipinos died because of the extreme brutality of their captors, who starved, beat, and kicked them on the way; those who became too weak to walk were

bayoneted. Those who survived were taken by rail from San Fernando to POW camps, where another 16,000 Filipinos and at least 1,000 Americans died from disease, mistreatment, and starvation.

 

On 12 April 1861, the bloodiest four years in American history began when Confederate shore batteries under General Beauregard opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay. During the next 34 hours, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 rounds at the poorly supplied fort. On April 13, US Major Robert Anderson surrendered the fort. Two days later, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers to quell the Southern “insurrection.”

 

On 14 April 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington. Lincoln occupied a booth above the stage with his wife. The Lincolns arrived late for the comedy, but the president was in a fine mood and laughed heartily during the production. At 10:15, Booth slipped into the box and fired his .44-caliber single-shot derringer into the back of Lincoln’s head. Rathbone rushed Booth, who stabbed the soldier in the shoulder. Booth then leapt from the president’s box to the stage below, breaking his leg as he landed. He shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus ever to tyrants!”–the Virginia state motto) and ran from the stage. There was a pause, as the crowd initially thought the unfolding drama was part of the production, but a scream from Mrs. Lincoln told them otherwise. The stricken president was carried from the box to a house across the street, where he died the following morning.

 

On 14 April 1918, six days after being assigned for the first time to the western front, two American pilots from the US First Aero Squadron engaged in America’s first aerial dogfight with enemy aircraft. In a battle fought almost directly over the Allied Squadron Aerodome at Toul, France, US fliers Douglas Campbell and Alan Winslow succeeded in shooting down two German two-seaters. By the end of May, Campbell had shot down five enemy aircraft, making him the first American to qualify as a “flying ace” in WWI.

The First Aero Squadron, organized in 1914 after the outbreak of WWI, undertook its first combat mission on March 19, 1917, in support of the 7,000 US troops that invaded Mexico to capture Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. Despite numerous mechanical and navigational problems, the American fliers flew hundreds of scouting missions for Brigadier General John Pershing and gained important experience that would later be used over the battlefields of Europe in WWI.

 

On 15 April 1952 – President Harry Truman signed the official Japanese peace treaty.

 

COMING UP ON FRONTLINES OF FREEDOM

 

On the weekend of April 6-7, David Bobb will discuss our Bill of Rights. Then we’ll learn about the Military Officers Association of America, and vet Theresa Robinson will introduce another female veteran.

 

And on the weekend of April 13-14, Marine vet Tim Taylor from Concerned Veterans for America will present some key issues for our nation. Col Bill Prince will present the MacArthur Society of West Point grads—they oppose all the changes. Gil and Skip will present the Border and a Book.