June 25, 201411 yr Author 25 June 1950 At dawn on a Sunday, after weeks of preparation that had gone largely unnoticed or unheeded by both the UN and the CIA, the Korean People's Army (KPA) crosses the 38th parallel behind artillery fire, invading South Korea and launching the Korean War.
June 26, 201411 yr Author 26 June 1936 The first functional helicopter, the Focke-Wulf Fw 61 (Fa 61), takes to the air in its first flight.
June 27, 201411 yr Author 27 June 1905 The disastrous Battle of Tsushima in May 1905 having brought morale among Russian sailors to an all time low, a mutiny erupts aboard the battleship Potemkin stage a mutiny when the enlisted men are served borscht made from rotten meat.
June 30, 201411 yr Author 30 June 1934 The 'Night of the Long Knives', a purge of political rivals within the Nazi party, begins.
July 1, 201411 yr Author 1 July 1916 During the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the Newfoundland Regiment conducts its first major engagement with an assault against German lines at Beaumont Hamel. Within 30 minutes, the regiment is all but wiped out, with only 68 of more than 800 men answering the roll call the following day. The site is now preserved as a memorial, the largest on the Western Front, and 1 July is commemorated in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador (now within Canada) as Memorial Day.
July 2, 201411 yr Author 2 July 1966 France conducts its first fission test in the Pacific, codenamed Albebaran, at the lagoon in Mururoa.
July 3, 201411 yr Author 3 July 1988 Iran Air Flight 655 is brought down over the Persian Gulf in an accidental engagement by the Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes. 290 people are killed.
July 4, 201411 yr Author 4 July 1943 The largest tank battle in history, the Battle of Kursk, begins with a German armoured offensive codenamed Operation Citadel. Two weeks later, it would be the Soviet Army that was on the offensive.
July 7, 201411 yr Author 7 July 1944 During the Battle of Saipan, nearly 4,300 Japanese soldiers are killed in the course of a Banzai charge against two battalions of US infantry, which lost 650 men. Related story: US survivors of WWII battle recall Saipan attack (Stars and Stripes)
July 8, 201411 yr Author 8 July 1947 Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) public information officer Walter Haut issues a press release stating that the 509th Operations Group had recovered a "flying disk" that had crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico.
July 9, 201411 yr Author 9 July 1962 The Starfish Prime high altitude nuclear test is conducted, exploding a 1.4 megaton W49 thermonuclear warhead 400 km above the South Pacific and producing a much larger electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effect than expected.
July 10, 201411 yr Author 10 July 1985 The Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, which had been campaigning against French nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific, is sunk by limpet mines in the harbor at Auckland, New Zealand, by operatives of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) in an operation codenamed Operation Satanique.
July 11, 201411 yr Author 11 July 1798 The United States Marine Corps (USMC) is re-established, having been disbanded after the American Revolutionary War (from where it originates).
July 15, 201411 yr Author 15 July 1815 Having been defeated at Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte surrenders to the British aboard the HMS Bellerophon.
July 16, 201411 yr Author 16 July 1945 The dawn of the atomic age is marked by the detonation of Trinity, the first atomic weapon, at 05:29:21 local time in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
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