Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926. Her mother was emotionally unstable and frequently confined to an asylum, so Norma Jeane was reared by a succession of foster parents and in an orphanage. At the age of 16, she married a fellow worker in an aircraft factory, but they divorced a few years later. She took up modeling in 1944 and in 1946 signed a short-term contract with 20th Century Fox, taking as her screen name Marilyn Monroe. She had a few bit parts and then returned to modeling, famously posing nude for a calendar in 1949.

She began to attract attention as an actress in 1950 after appearing in minor roles in the The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve. Although she was onscreen only briefly playing a mistress in both films, audiences took note of the blonde bombshell, and she won a new contract from Fox. Her acting career took off in the early 1950s with performances in Love Nest (1951), Monkey Business (1952), and Niagara (1953).

Celebrated for her voluptuousness and wide-eyed charm, she won international fame for her sex-symbol roles in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954). The Seven-Year Itch (1955) showcased her comedic talents and features the classic scene where she stands over a subway grating and has her white skirt billowed up by the wind from a passing train. In 1954, she married baseball great Joe DiMaggio, attracting further publicity, but they divorced eight months later.

In 1955, she studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York City and subsequently gave a strong performance as a hapless entertainer in Bus Stop (1956). In 1956, she married playwright Arthur Miller. She made The Prince and the Showgirl—a critical and commercial failure—with Laurence Olivier in 1957 but in 1959 gave an acclaimed performance in the hit comedy Some Like It Hot. Her last role, in The Misfits (1961), was directed by John Huston and written by Miller, whom she divorced just one week before the film’s opening.

Empty pill bottles were found in Marilyn Monroes bedroom after she was found dead in 1962.

By 1961, Monroe, beset by depression, was under the constant care of a psychiatrist. Increasingly erratic in the last months of her life, she lived as a virtual recluse in her Brentwood, Los Angeles, home. After midnight on August 5, 1962, her maid, Eunice Murray, noticed Monroe’s bedroom light on. When Murray found the door locked and Marilyn unresponsive to her calls, she called Monroe’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who gained access to the room by breaking a window. Entering, he found Marilyn dead, and the police were called sometime after. An autopsy found a fatal amount of sedatives in her system, and her death was ruled probable suicide.

In recent decades, there have been a number of conspiracy theories about her death, most of which contend that she was murdered by John and/or Robert Kennedy, with whom she allegedly had love affairs. These theories claim that the Kennedys killed her (or had her killed) because they feared she would make public their love affairs and other government secrets she was gathering. On August 4, 1962, Robert Kennedy, then attorney general in his older brother’s cabinet, was in fact in Los Angeles. Two decades after the fact, Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, announced for the first time that the attorney general had visited Marilyn on the night of her death and quarreled with her, but the reliability of these and other statements made by Murray are questionable.

Decades after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains a major cultural icon.

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Houdini, born in Hungary as Erik Weisz, took on the challenge after rival magician Rahman Bey had spent nearly an hour locked in a partially submerged coffin on July 2. Houdini was determined to beat him. He ran two trial runs, which lasted about 70 and 73 minutes, to practice shallow breathing for oxygen preservation.

He drew a crowd for the big stunt at the hotel. Houdini stripped down to a pair of shorts to show his audience he wasn’t wearing a secret breathing tube. Then he lowered himself into an airtight iron coffin. His assistants kept the coffin submerged and only communicated with him through a telephone line. The coffin was wired with a buzzer in case Houdini was in distress.

Sealed casket containing Houdini placed in pool at Shelton Hotel.

“After one hours and twenty-eight minutes, I commenced to see yellow lights and carefully watched myself not to go to sleep,” Houdini wrote in a letter to a doctor. “There is no doubt in my mind that had this test been where fresh air could have gotten into the galvanized iron coffin as I was put in same, I could have readily stayed fifteen or thirty minutes longer.”

Houdini’s underwater coffin stunt capped a career filled with jaw-dropping illusions and daring escapes from handcuffs, straitjackets, a milk can and a Chinese water torture cell. Just three months later, on October 31, 1926, Houdini died at age 52, from complications of a ruptured appendix. He was buried at Machpelah Cemetery in Queens, New York.

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Two days earlier, on August 3, almost 13,000 air-traffic controllers went on strike after negotiations with the federal government to raise their pay and shorten their workweek proved fruitless. The controllers complained of difficult working conditions and a lack of recognition of the pressures they face. Across the country, some 7,000 flights were canceled. The same day, President Reagan called the strike illegal and threatened to fire any controller who had not returned to work within 48 hours. Robert Poli, president of the Professional Air-Traffic Controllers Association (PATCO), was found in contempt by a federal judge and ordered to pay $1,000 a day in fines.

On August 5, an angry President Reagan carried out his threat, and the federal government began firing the 11,359 air-traffic controllers who had not returned to work. In addition, he declared a lifetime ban on the rehiring of the strikers by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). On August 17, the FAA began accepting applications for new air-traffic controllers, and on October 22 the Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified PATCO.

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Thomas Mapother Cruise IV was born July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, New York, and made his feature film debut at age 18 in Endless Love (1981). After first earning notice for Risky Business, Cruise achieved international fame with his role as fighter pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in 1986’s Top Gun. He received Oscar nominations for his performances in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jerry Maguire (1996) and Magnolia (1999). Other notable credits include The Color of Money (1986) with Paul Newman, Rain Man (1988) with Dustin Hoffman, A Few Good Men (1992) with Jack Nicholson, The Firm (1993) and Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994). Cruise starred as the superspy Ethan Hunt in 1996’s blockbuster hit Mission: Impossible, as well as its sequels in 2000, 2006, 2011, 2015, 2018, 2023 and 2025. He acted in three films with the Australian actress Nicole Kidman, to whom he was married from 1990 to 2001: Days of Thunder (1990), Far and Away (1992) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999), the final film of the legendary director Stanley Kubrick. Other Cruise movies include Minority Report (2002), War of the Worlds (2005), Valkyrie (2008) and American Made (2017).

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The earthquake struck Ecuador’s Tungurahua Province, destroying about a third of the region’s capital city of Ambato. The earthquake completely destroyed the communities of Guano, Patate, Pelileo and Pillaro, and about one third of the city of Ambato in central Ecuador.

Witnesses described a devastating scene. “In the cities, buildings tottered and fell on terrified people as the earth rolled beneath them,” Life magazine reported in its August 22, 1949, issue. “Thousands more were buried by rock slides thundering from the mountains.”

A cold rain prevented fires after the earthquake but caused more difficulties for the estimated 100,000 residents rendered homeless, who huddled in tents and blankets as they waited for help to fly in from the U.S. and other nations. American planes arrived with relief workers from the American Red Cross and the U.S. Army.

Ecuadorian President Galo Plaza Lasso, who was born in New York, expressed gratitude to Americans for their help after the disaster.

“With deep emotion, we learned that thousands of miles away in the United States, in cities and towns, the people were organizing relief committees,” Lasso said in a statement. “It is a comfort to know that we are not alone at times like these.”

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With her red hair and spunky personality, Annie emerged as a symbol of American individualism and self-reliance. Gray’s comic strip drew inspiration from the 1885 poem, “Little Orphan Annie” by James Whitcomb Riley. Originally intended to be titled Little Orphant Allie, the poem’s name was changed due to a typesetting error—and the mistaken version stuck.

Gray’s choice of a girl as a central character was unusual at the time. The Annie character became a cultural icon in the decades since the comic strip debuted, and the story was turned into a radio drama series, several film adaptions and a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical that opened in 1977. The musical and movies feature the Annie character, her dog Sandy and the wealthy “Daddy Warbucks,” who adopts her from an orphanage.

By the time of his death in 1968, Gray—who had worked at the Chicago Tribune before creating "Little Orphan Annie"—had seen his comic strip syndicated in some 400 newspapers across the United States, Canada and beyond. The popularity of the strip declined in the following decades and was cancelled in 2010.

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As the Red Army advanced on Warsaw in July, Polish patriots, still loyal to their government-in-exile back in London, prepared to overthrow their German occupiers. On July 29, the Polish Home Army (underground), the People’s Army (a communist guerilla movement), and armed civilians took back two-thirds of Warsaw from the Germans. On August 4, the Germans counterattacked, mowing down Polish civilians with machine-gun fire. By August 5, more than 15,000 Poles were dead. The Polish command cried to the Allies for help. Churchill telegraphed Stalin, informing him that the British intended to drop ammunition and other supplies into the southwest quarter of Warsaw to aid the insurgents. The prime minister asked Stalin to aid in the insurgents’ cause. Stalin balked, claiming the insurgency was too insignificant to waste time with.

Britain succeeded to getting some aid to the Polish patriots, but the Germans also succeeded-in dropping incendiary bombs. The Poles fought on, and on August 5 they freed Jewish forced laborers who then joined in the battle, some of whom formed a special platoon dedicated solely to repairing captured German tanks for use in the struggle.

The Poles would battle on for weeks against German reinforcements, and without Soviet help, as Joseph Stalin had his own plans for Poland.

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Draves was the daughter of an English maid and a Filipino chef and musician, while Lee’s parents were of Korean descent and ran what he called “a little chop suey restaurant.” Both grew up in California, where public pools were whites-only and non-whites were only allowed to swim for a brief period one day a week. When he couldn’t use the pool, Lee practiced diving by jumping into a pit full of sand. Draves (nee Manalo) hoped to join the Fairmont Hotel Swimming and Diving Club but was barred due to her race—she eventually joined another club started by the Fairmont’s coach, going by Vicki Taylor to hide her racial identity.

Despite these obstacles, Lee and Draves rose to the top of the American diving scene, becoming friends in the process. It was Lee who introduced Vicki to Lyle Draves, who became her coach and husband.

Draves recounted turning to Lee and telling him “I can’t do this, Sammy” before her gold-medal dive, to which he responded, “Get up there and do what you are supposed to do.” Getting to the board turned out to be the hard part, as she later remembered: “I sort of sailed through it, and I knew I hit it when I was underwater and I thought, 'Oh boy, thank you, God.’” Draves became the first woman to win gold medals in both springboard and platform diving.

Lee’s win two days later was his first of two Olympic golds; four years later, he took gold in Helsinki, becoming the first man to win consecutive gold medals for platform diving. Weightlifter Tommy Kono and swimmers Yoshinobu Oyakawa and Ford Konno all won gold as well in 1952, and in the decades that followed many more Asian Americans would make headlines at the Olympics, including Michelle Kwan, Kristi Yamaguchi and Apolo Ohno.

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The telegraph was first developed by Samuel F. B. Morse, an artist-turned-inventor who conceived of the idea of the electric telegraph in 1832. Several European inventors had proposed such a device, but Morse worked independently and by the mid 1830s had built a working telegraph instrument. In the late 1830s, he perfected Morse Code, a set of signals that could represent language in telegraph messages. In May 1844, Morse inaugurated the world’s first commercial telegraph line with the message “What hath God wrought,” sent from the U.S. Capitol to a railroad station in Baltimore. Within a decade, more than 20,000 miles of telegraph cable crisscrossed the country. The rapid communication it made possible greatly aided American expansion, making railroad travel safer as it provided a boost to business conducted across the great distances of a growing United States.

In 1854, Cyrus West Field conceived the idea of the telegraph cable and secured a charter to lay a well-insulated line across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Obtaining the aid of British and American naval ships, he made four unsuccessful attempts, beginning in 1857. In July 1858, four British and American vessels–the Agamemnon, the Valorous, the Niagara, and the Gorgon–met in mid-ocean for the fifth attempt. On July 29, the Niagara and the Gorgon, with their load of cable, departed for Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, while the Agamemnon and the Valorous embarked for Valentia, Ireland. By August 5, the cable had been successfully laid, stretching nearly 2,000 miles across the Atlantic at a depth often of more than two miles. On August 16, President James Buchanan and Queen Victoria exchanged formal introductory and complimentary messages. Unfortunately, the cable proved weak and the current insufficient and by the beginning of September had ceased functioning.

Field later raised new funds and made new arrangements. In 1866, the British ship Great Eastern succeeded in laying the first permanent telegraph line across the Atlantic Ocean. Cyrus West Field was the object of much praise on both sides of the Atlantic for his persistence in accomplishing what many thought to be an impossible undertaking. He later promoted other oceanic cables, including telegraph lines that stretched from Hawaii to Asia and Australia.

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As early as March 1861, Lincoln had begun to take stock of the federal government’s ability to wage war against the South. He sent letters to cabinet members Edward Bates, Gideon Welles and Salmon Chase requesting their opinions as to whether or not the president had the constitutional authority to “collect [such] duties.” According to documents housed and interpreted by the Library of Congress, Lincoln was particularly concerned about maintaining federal authority over collecting revenue from ports along the southeastern seaboard, which he worried, might fall under the control of the Confederacy.

The Revenue Act’s language was broadly written to define income as gain “derived from any kind of property, or from any professional trade, employment, or vocation carried on in the United States or elsewhere or from any source whatever.” According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the comparable minimum taxable income in 2003, after adjustments for inflation, would have been approximately $16,000.

Congress repealed Lincoln’s tax law in 1871, but in 1909 passed the 16th Amendment, which set in place the federal income-tax system used today. Congress ratified the 16th Amendment in 1913.

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In the earliest days of the automobile, navigating America’s roads was a chaotic experience, with pedestrians, bicycles, horses and streetcars all competing with motor vehicles for right of way. The problem was alleviated somewhat with the gradual disappearance of horse-drawn carriages, but even before World War I it had become clear that a system of regulations was necessary to keep traffic moving and reduce the number of accidents on the roads. As Christopher Finch writes in his “Highways to Heaven: The AUTO Biography of America” (1992), the first traffic island was put into use in San Francisco, California in 1907; left-hand drive became standard in American cars in 1908; the first center painted dividing line appeared in 1911, in Michigan; and the first “No Left Turn” sign would debut in Buffalo, New York, in 1916.

Various competing claims exist as to who was responsible for the world’s first traffic signal. A device installed in London in 1868 featured two semaphore arms that extended horizontally to signal “stop” and at a 45-degree angle to signal “caution.” In 1912, a Salt Lake City, Utah, police officer named Lester Wire mounted a handmade wooden box with colored red and green lights on a pole, with the wires attached to overhead trolley and light wires. Most prominently, the inventor Garrett Morgan has been given credit for having invented the traffic signal based on his T-shaped design, patented in 1923 and later reportedly sold to General Electric.

Despite Morgan’s greater visibility, the system installed in Cleveland on August 5, 1914, is widely regarded as the first electric traffic signal. Based on a design by James Hoge, who received U.S. patent 1,251,666 for his “Municipal Traffic Control System” in 1918, it consisted of four pairs of red and green lights that served as stop-go indicators, each mounted on a corner post. Wired to a manually operated switch inside a control booth, the system was configured so that conflicting signals were impossible. According to an article in The Motorist, published by the Cleveland Automobile Club in August 1914: “This system is, perhaps, destined to revolutionize the handling of traffic in congested city streets and should be seriously considered by traffic committees for general adoption.”

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Nine months before sinking into its watery grave, the Monitor had been part of a revolution in naval warfare. On March 9, 1862, it dueled to a standstill with the C.S.S. Virginia (originally the U.S.S. Merrimack) in one of the most famous moments in naval history—the first time two ironclads faced each other in a naval engagement. During the battle, the two ships circled one another, jockeying for position as they fired their guns. The cannon balls simply deflected off the iron ships. In the early afternoon, the Virginia pulled back to Norfolk. Neither ship was seriously damaged, but the Monitor effectively ended the short reign of terror that the Confederate ironclad had brought to the Union navy.

Designed by Swedish engineer John Ericsson, the Monitor had an unusually low profile, rising from the water only 18 inches. The flat iron deck had a 20-foot cylindrical turret rising from the middle of the ship; the turret housed two 11-inch Dahlgren guns. The ship had a draft of less than 11 feet so it could operate in the shallow harbors and rivers of the South. It was commissioned on February 25, 1862, and arrived at Chesapeake Bay just in time to engage the Virginia.

After the famous duel, the Monitor provided gun support on the James River for George B. McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign. By December 1862, it was clear the ship was no longer needed in Virginia, so she was sent to Beaufort, North Carolina, to join a fleet being assembled for an attack on Charleston. The Monitor served well in the sheltered waters of Chesapeake Bay, but the heavy, low-slung ship was a poor craft for the open sea. The U.S.S. Rhode Island towed the ironclad around the rough waters of Cape Hatteras. As the Monitor pitched and swayed in the rough seas, the caulking around the gun turret loosened and water began to leak into the hull. More leaks developed as the journey continued. High seas tossed the craft, causing the ship’s flat armor bottom to slap the water. Each roll opened more seams, and by nightfall on December 30, the Monitor was in dire straits.

That evening, the Monitor’s commander, J.P. Bankhead, signaled the Rhode Island that he wished to abandon ship. The wooden side-wheeler pulled as close as safety allowed to the stricken ironclad, and two lifeboats were lowered to retrieve the crew. Many of the sailors were rescued, but some men were terrified to venture onto the deck in such rough seas. The ironclad’s pumps stopped working, and the ship sank before 16 of its crew members could be rescued. The remains of two of these sailors were discovered by divers during the Monitor’s 2002 reemergence.

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Each of the eight infants was reportedly healthy at birth, but later died when home alone with Noe. At the time, the deaths were attributed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Noe and her husband Arthur had two other children who died from natural causes—one was stillborn and the other passed away at the hospital shortly after birth. Suspicion swirled around Marie Noe as the death toll mounted, but police lacked evidence to charge her with any crime. In the 1990s, a magazine article put the case back in the spotlight. In August 1998, Noe confessed to killing four of her children but claimed she couldn’t remember what happened to the other four. None of the children had lived beyond 14 months. Arthur Noe was not charged in the murders of his children. In June 1999, Noe was given 20 years probation and ordered to spend five years under house arrest.

In a case with eerie parallels to Noe’s, Mary Beth Tinning’s nine healthy children died suddenly and mysteriously between 1972 and 1985. None made it to the age of five. The children all died while home alone with Tinning, of Schenectady, New York, who claimed she found them unconscious. In 1987, Tinning was convicted of smothering her 3-month-old infant daughter Tami Lynne to death two years earlier. She was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.

Other infamous instances of infanticide in the United States include Susan Smith of South Carolina, who in 1994 drove a car with her two young sons into a lake. Smith, who initially blamed the boys’ disappearance on a carjacker, was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In another case, Andrea Yates drowned her five young children in a bathtub in June 2001. After being convicted of first-degree murder, Yates’ conviction was overturned and she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed to a state mental health facility in Texas.

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Television, rock and roll and teenagers. In the late 1950s, when television and rock and roll were new and when the biggest generation in American history was just about to enter its teens, it took a bit of originality to see the potential power in this now-obvious combination. The man who saw that potential more clearly than any other was a 26-year-old native of upstate New York named Dick Clark, who transformed himself and a local Philadelphia television program into two of the most culturally significant forces of the early rock-and-roll era.

The show that evolved into "American Bandstand" began on Philadelphia’s WFIL-TV in 1952, a few years before the popular ascension of rock and roll. Hosted by local radio personality Bob Horn, the original "Bandstand" _"_nevertheless established much of the basic format of its later incarnation. In the first year after Dick Clark took over as host in the summer of 1956, Bandstand remained a popular local hit, but it took Clark’s ambition to help it break out. When the ABC television network polled its affiliates in 1957 for suggestions to fill its 3:30 p.m. time slot, Clark pushed hard for Bandstand, which network executives picked up and scheduled for an August 5, 1957 premiere.

Renamed "American Bandstand," the newly national program featured a number of new elements that became part of its trademark, including the high school gym-like bleachers and the famous segment in which teenage studio guests rated the newest records on a scale from 25 to 98 and offered such criticisms as “It’s got a good beat, and you can dance to it.” But the heart of "American Bandstand" always remained the sound of the day’s most popular music combined with the sight of the show’s unpolished teen “regulars” dancing and showing off the latest fashions in clothing and hairstyles.

_"_American Bandstand" aired five days a week in live national broadcast until 1963, when the show moved west to Los Angeles and began a 24-year run as a taped weekly program with Dick Clark as host.

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The film report sparked indignation and condemnation of the U.S. policy in Vietnam both at home and overseas. At the same time, the Department of Defense announced that it was increasing the monthly draft call from 17,000 in August to 27,400 in September and 36,000 in October. It also announced that the Navy would require 4,600 draftees, the first such action since 1956.

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Discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning a ban on nuclear testing began in the mid-1950s. Officials from both nations came to believe that the nuclear arms race was reaching a dangerous level. In addition, public protest against the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons was gaining strength. Nevertheless, talks between the two nations (later joined by Great Britain) dragged on for years, usually collapsing when the issue of verification was raised. The Americans and British wanted on-site inspections, something the Soviets vehemently opposed. In 1960, the three sides seemed close to an agreement, but the downing of an American spy plane over the Soviet Union in May brought negotiations to an end.

The Cuban Missile Crisis provided a major impetus for reinvigorating the talks in October 1962. The Soviets attempted to install nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba, bringing the Soviet Union and the United States to the brink of a nuclear war. Cooler heads prevailed and the crisis passed, but the other possible scenarios were not lost on U.S. and Russian officials. In June 1963, the test ban negotiations resumed, with compromises from all sides. On August 5, British, American, and Russian representatives signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. France and China were asked to join the agreement but refused.

The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was a small but significant step toward the control of nuclear weapons. In the years to come, discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union grew to include limits on many nuclear weapons and the elimination of others.

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By August 4, the German 1st, 2nd and 3rd Armies—some 34 divisions of men—were in the process of aligning themselves on the right wing of the German lines, poised to move into Belgium. In total, seven German armies, with a total of 1.5 million soldiers, were being assembled along the Belgian and French frontiers, ready to put the long-held Schlieffen Plan—a sweeping advance through Belgium into France envisioned by former German Chief of Staff Alfred von Schlieffen—into practice. The 2nd Army, commanded by Field Marshal Karl von Bulow, was charged with taking the city of Liege, located at the gateway into Belgium from Germany. Built on a steep 500-foot slope rising up from the Meuse River, some 200 yards wide, and defended by 12 heavily armed forts—six on either side of the river, stretching along a 30-mile circumference—Liege was considered by many to be the most heavily fortified spot in Europe.

Bulow’s 2nd Army, numbering some 320,000 men, began its attack on Liege and its 35,000 garrison troops on August 5. Six brigades, commanded by General Otto von Emmich, were detached from the 2nd Army to form a special “Army of the Meuse” that would open the way for the rest of its comrades through Liege. Confident of an easy victory with little significant Belgian resistance, the Germans assumed Emmich’s men could topple Liege while the rest of the German troops were still assembling. In fact, the Belgians put up a valiant defense from the first moment—a struggle led by their sovereign, King Albert, who had earlier urged his subjects to fight this threat to their neutrality and independence at all costs. By the end of the day on August 5, all of Liege’s 12 fortresses remained in Belgian hands.

Liege eventually fell to the Germans on August 15, but only after they had brought up the most powerful land weapons in their arsenal, the enormous siege cannons. One type of cannon, built by the Austrian munitions firm Skoda, had a barrel measuring 12-inches (305mm); the other, manufactured by Krupps in Essen, Germany, was even more massive at 16.5 inches (420mm). Until that point, the largest guns had measured 13.5 inches and were used by the British navy; the largest on land had only measured 11 inches. The heavy shelling of Liege began on August 12; on August 15, after taking 11 of Liege’s 12 forts and exploding the walls of the 12th , Fort Loncin, with a shell, Emmich and his comrade Erich Ludendorff entered Loncin to find Liege’s commander, General Gerard Mathieu Leman, alive but unconscious. Taken prisoner by the Germans, he later wrote to King Albert from Germany, “I would gladly have given my life, but Death would not have me.” For their parts, Emmich and Ludendorff were awarded Germany’s highest military medal, the Pour la Merite cross, for their capture of Liege.

The main German advance through Belgium, towards France, began three days later, on August 18. Fearful of civilian resistance, especially from snipers, or franc-tireurs, shooting at them from hidden positions in trees and bushes, German troops from the first day in Belgium took a hard line against the native population. As early as August 5, the Germans had begun not only the shooting of ordinary civilians but the deliberate execution of Belgian priests, whom German propaganda at home insisted were encouraging franc-tireur activity. “Our advance in Belgium is certainly brutal,” wrote German Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke to his Austrian counterpart, Conrad von Hotzendorff, on August 5. “But we are fighting for our lives and all who get in the way must take the consequences.” In total, German troops killed 5,521 civilians in Belgium and 896 in France, earning Germany the full measure of Belgian hatred and damning it in the eyes of many foreign observers. The steadfast Belgian resistance, meanwhile, at Liege and elsewhere during the German advance, would earn the small country and its valiant king the world’s respect, and provide a shining example, and a worthy cause, to the other Allied nations then entering what would become Europe’s most devastating conflict.

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Mobile became the major Confederate port on the Gulf of Mexico after the fall of New Orleans, Louisiana, in April 1862. With blockade runners carrying critical supplies from Havana, Cuba, into Mobile, Union General Ulysses S. Grant made the capture of the port a top priority after assuming command of all Federal forces in early 1864.

Opposing Farragut’s force of 17 warships was a Rebel squadron of only four ships; however, it included the C.S.S.Tennessee_,_ said to be the most powerful ironclad afloat. Farragut also had to contend with two powerful Confederate batteries inside of forts Morgan and Gaines. On the morning of August 5, Farragut’s force steamed into the mouth of Mobile Bay in two columns led by four ironclads and met with devastating fire that immediately sank one of its iron-hulled, single-turret monitors, the U.S.S. Tecumseh_._ The rest of the fleet fell into confusion but Farragut allegedly rallied them with the words: “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!” Although the authenticity of the quote has been questioned, it nevertheless became one of the most famous in U.S. military history.

The Yankee fleet quickly knocked out the smaller Confederate ships, but the Tennessee fought a valiant battle against overwhelming odds before it sustained heavy damage and surrendered. The Union laid siege to forts Morgan and Gaines, and both were captured within two weeks. Confederate forces remained in control of the city of Mobile, but the port was no longer available to blockade runners.

The Battle of Mobile Bay lifted the morale of the North. With Grant stalled at Petersburg, Virginia, and General William T. Sherman unable to capture Atlanta, Georgia, the capture of the bay became the first in a series of Union victories that stretched to the fall election.

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