“Not on my watch nor the watch that follows me
for I will ensure they are properly trained.”
for I will ensure they are properly trained.”
Today in History
The Marine Corps History Items are taken from the Annual USMC History Calendar published by the Marine Corps Association and Foundation.
The other history items are key portions of selected historical events from www.HistoryChannel.com. For more information on these events and to see the other events which occurred on this day in history, follow this link: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history
The “Today in History” page is updated daily; 7 days a week.
26 April
1794
USMC
With the Revolutionary War over, the Continental Navy and Continental Marines are disbanded.
1865
Civil War
John Wilkes Booth is killed when Union soldiers track him down to a Virginia farm 12 days after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
1937
WW II
During the Spanish Civil War, the German military tests its powerful new air force--the Luftwaffe--on the Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain.
1954
Medicine
The Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8 million children, begin at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. Children in the United States, Canada and Finland participated in the trials, which used for the first time the now-standard double-blind method, whereby neither the patient nor attending doctor knew if the inoculation was the vaccine or a placebo. On April 12, 1955, researchers announced the vaccine was safe and effective and it quickly became a standard part of childhood immunizations in America. In the ensuing decades, polio vaccines would all but wipe out the highly contagious disease in the Western Hemisphere.
1965
USMC
Staff Sergeant Josephine (Davis) Gebers became the first woman awarded the Combat Action Ribbon after she served under enemy fire in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
1986
Disaster
The world's worst nuclear power plant accident occurs at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Thirty-two people died and dozens more suffered radiation burns in the opening days of the crisis, but only after Swedish authorities reported the fallout did Soviet authorities reluctantly admit that an accident had occurred. The radiation that escaped into the atmosphere, which was several times that produced by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was spread by the wind over Northern and Eastern Europe, contaminating millions of acres of forest and farmland. An estimated 5,000 Soviet citizens eventually died from cancer and other radiation-induced illnesses caused by their exposure to the Chernobyl radiation, and millions more had their health adversely affected. In 2000, the last working reactors at Chernobyl were shut down and the plant was officially closed.
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