Today In History

December 19, 1946


Following the bombardment of Haiphong by the French Navy in November, the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, whose independence was proclaimed in Hanoi on September 2, 1945, decides to launch an offensive to liberate the city of Hanoi . At 08:03 PM, the city electric power plant explodes. The First Indochina War begins.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 


Ceauşescu leaves the capital. "Our children will be free!"

It always amazed me, these great and aged benefactors of the people, how fast they can run sometimes... 

 

Chinese Ambassador Wei Daoming and US Secretary of State Cordell Hull signed the Treaty for Relinquishment of Extraterritorial Rights in China in Washington DC, United States. Through this treaty, the Americans gave up territorial claims in China and gave up the American portion of the Boxer Protocol.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        January 18, 1911


Having taken off from an airfield in San Francisco, American civilian aviator Eugene B. Ely successfully lands his Curtiss Pusher on the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania (ACR-4) anchored in San Francisco Bay, achieving the first aircraft landing on a warship in history.                                                                                                                                         
Ely was already famous for having been the first pilot to take off from a ship, the USS Birmingham, anchored in Hampton Roads, Virginia, two months before on November 14, 1910 with the same airplane.

Eugene Ely will die on October 19, 1911, two days before his twenty-fifth birthday, in a crash during an exhibition in Macon, Georgia.

On February 16, 1933, Ely will be posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by the United States Congress, "for extraordinary achievement as a pioneer civilian aviator and for his significant contribution to the development of aviation in the United States Navy."  



Note : I was misled by French Wikipedia that indicates this event on January 19. So many other different sources, including English Wikipedia, say it was the 18, that i finally post it one day late.