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Important world events on 08 May :
The Battle of Poitiers (1356) resulted in an emphatic victory for the English forces led by King Edward III’s son, the Black Prince. The French king, John the Good, and his son, together with most of their nobles were captured. France descended into chaos: disaffected nobles ravaged the countryside, where the peasants rose in revolt, and the merchants of Paris rebelled against misgovernment and excessive taxes. In the circumstances, the Treaty of Bretigny (1360) was always going to be advantageous to England (Edward III only agreed to negotiate at all because a freak hailstorm had killed many of his troops and horses). Under the treaty, British territory doubled, and a huge ransom was agreed for the French king but, in the interests of lasting peace, Edward renounced all claims to the French throne. It did not work; in 1369, the new French king, Charles V, once more declared war.
569 years ago today in 1450, Englishman Jack Cade leads a popular uprising against King Henry VI.
Rebellion was sowed from local grievances concerned about the corruption and abuse of power surrounding the king's regime and his closest advisors. Also angering the rebels was the debt caused by years of warfare against France which had been unsuccessful. Cade mustered a force large enough to march into London to demand their grievances be addressed. However the rebel force started to loot the city and the civilian population drove them out in a battle on the London Bridge.
The Protestant Reformation was the 16th-century religious, political, intellectual and cultural upheaval that splintered Catholic Europe, setting in place the structures and beliefs that would define the continent in the modern era. In northern and central Europe, reformers like Martin Luther, John Calvin and Henry VIII challenged papal authority and questioned the Catholic Church’s ability to define Christian practice. They argued for a religious and political redistribution of power into the hands of Bible- and pamphlet-reading pastors and princes. The disruption triggered wars, persecutions and the so-called Counter-Reformation.
On May 8, 1846, shortly before the United States formally declared war on Mexico, General Zachary Taylor (1784-1850) defeated a superior Mexican force in the Battle of Palo Alto. The battle took place north of the Rio Grande River near present-day Brownsville, Texas. Taylor’s victory, along with a series of subsequent victories against the Mexicans, made him a war hero. In 1848, he was elected America’s 12th president.
On 8 May 1852, after the First War of Schleswig, an agreement called the London Protocol was signed. This international treaty was the revision of an earlier protocol, which had been ratified on 2 August 1850, by the major Germanic powers of Austria and Prussia. The second London Protocol was recognised by the five major European powers—Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—as well as by the Baltic Sea powers of Denmark and Sweden.
The Treaty of Shimonoseki, also known as Treaty of Bakan in China, was a treaty signed at the Shunpanrō hotel, Shimonoseki, Japan on 17 April 1895, between the Empire of Japan and the Qing dynasty, ending the First Sino-Japanese War. The peace conference took place from 20 March to 17 April 1895.
Scientist Ernest Rutherford on right.
In 1899 Ernest Rutherford studied the absorption of radioactivity by thin sheets of metal foil and found two components: alpha (a) radiation, which is absorbed by a few thousandths of a centimeter of metal foil, and beta (b) radiation, which can pass through 100 times as much foil before it was absorbed.
The Indian famine of 1899–1900 began with the failure of the summer monsoons in 1899 over Western and Central India and, during the next year, affected an area of 476,000 square miles (1,230,000 km2) and a population of 59.5 million. The famine was acute in the Central Provinces and Berar, the Bombay Presidency, the minor province of Ajmer-Merwara, and the Hissar District of the Punjab; it also caused great distress in the princely states of the Rajputana Agency, the Central India Agency, Hyderabad and the Kathiawar Agency. In addition, small areas of the Bengal Presidency, the Madras Presidency and the North-Western Provinces were acutely afflicted by the famine.
This painting depicts the signing of the armistice which ended World War I in Compiegne, France
Remembrance Day is a memorial day observed in Commonwealth member states since the end of the First World War to remember the members of their armed forces who have died in the line of duty.
The Battle of the Coral Sea, fought from 4–8 May 1942, was a major naval battle between the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) and naval and air forces from the United States and Australia, taking place in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. The battle is historically significant as the first action in which aircraft carriers engaged each other, as well as the first in which the opposing ships neither sighted nor fired directly upon one another.
On May 7, 1945, the German High Command, in the person of General Alfred Jodl, signs the unconditional surrender of all German forces, East and West, at Reims, in northeastern France.
At first, General Jodl hoped to limit the terms of German surrender to only those forces still fighting the Western Allies. But General Dwight Eisenhower demanded complete surrender of all German forces, those fighting in the East as well as in the West. If this demand was not met, Eisenhower was prepared to seal off the Western front, preventing Germans from fleeing to the West in order to surrender, thereby leaving them in the hands of the enveloping Soviet forces. Jodl radioed Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, Hitler’s successor, with the terms. Donitz ordered him to sign. So with Russian General Ivan Susloparov and French General Francois Sevez signing as witnesses, and General Walter Bedell Smith, Ike’s chief of staff, signing for the Allied Expeditionary Force, Germany was-at least on paper-defeated. Fighting would still go on in the East for almost another day. But the war in the West was over.
Since General Susloparov did not have explicit permission from Soviet Premier Stalin to sign the surrender papers, even as a witness, he was quickly hustled back East and into the hands of the Soviet secret police. Alfred Jodl, who was wounded in the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, would be found guilty of war crimes (which included the shooting of hostages) at Nuremberg and hanged on October 16, 1946. He was later granted a pardon, posthumously, in 1953, after a German appeals court found him not guilty of breaking international law.
But did Germany surrendered twice in World War II ?
ON MAY 7, 1945, Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies in Reims, France, ending World War II and the Third Reich.
Or did it happen on May 9 in Berlin instead?
Both are true. Due to warring ideologies, tussles between the Soviet Union and its allies, and the legacy of the First World War, Germany actually surrendered twice.
As an Allied victory looked more and more certain in 1944 and 1945, the United States, U.S.S.R., France, and the United Kingdom bounced around ideas on the terms of a German surrender. But it was still unclear how the military or political surrender signing would be orchestrated by the time Adolf Hitler died by suicide in a Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, and his dictatorship reached a bloody end.
Hitler had designated Karl Dönitz, a naval admiral and ardent Nazi, as his successor in the event of his death. Dönitz was doomed not to rule a new Germany, but rather to orchestrate its dissolution. He quickly deputized Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the Armed Forces High Command, to negotiate the surrender of all German forces with General Dwight D.
Alfred Jodl, German chief of the operations staff of the Armed Forces High Command, signs an unconditional “Act of Military Surrender” and ceasefire on May 7, 1945.
Dönitz hoped negotiations would buy him time to get as many German people and troops as possible out of the path of the advancing Russians. He also hoped to convince the United States, Britain, and France, all of whom distrusted the U.S.S.R., to turn against the Soviet Union so that Germany might continue its war on that front. Eisenhower saw through the ruse, though, and insisted Jodl sign an instrument of surrender without negotiations.
On May 7, Jodl signed an unconditional “Act of Military Surrender” and a ceasefire that would go into effect at 11:01 p.m. Central European Time on May 8. When Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin heard that Germany had signed an unconditional surrender of all its troops in Reims, he was furious. He argued that since the U.S.S.R. had sacrificed the most troops and civilians during the war, its most important military commander should accept Germany’s surrender rather than the Soviet officer who had witnessed the signing in Reims. Stalin opposed the location of the signing, too: Since Berlin had been the capital of the Third Reich, he argued, it should be the site of its surrender.
But Stalin’s third objection—that Jodl was not Germany’s most senior military official—would prove the most convincing to the rest of the Allies, all of whom remembered how the signing of the armistice that ended World War I had helped plant the seeds of the next world war.
In 1918, as the German Empire had teetered on the brink of defeat, it collapsed and was replaced by a parliamentary republic. Matthias Erzberger, the new secretary of state, had signed the armistice of Compiègne, in which Germany unconditionally surrendered.
The surrender came as a shock to most German civilians, who had been told their military was on the verge of victory. As a result, rumors began to circulate that Germany’s new, civilian government—and other popular scapegoats, such as Marxists and Jews—had stabbed the military in the back. Erzberger was eventually murdered as a result of the myth, which became a common refrain among the members of the new Nazi Party as they consolidated to seize power.
Stalin argued that allowing Jodl to surrender for Germany in World War II could open the door to a new stab-in-the-back myth since he had been deputized by Dönitz, a civilian head of state. Worried that Germany could again insist that its surrender was illegitimate if anyone but Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the supreme commander of all German forces, personally signed the document, the Allies decided to restage the surrender.
On May 8, Keitel headed to Karlshorst, a suburb of Berlin, to sign the document in front of Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a small Allied delegation. But Keitel argued a minor point, hoping to add a clause giving his troops a grace period of at least 12 hours to ensure they received their cease fire orders before facing any penalties for continuing to fight. Zhukov ultimately offered Keitel a verbal promise but did not grant his request to add the clause. Due to the delay, the document was not executed until after the ceasefire was supposed to begin—and May 9 had already arrived.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signs the unconditional surrender of the German army. Berlin, 9 May 1945.
The Russians celebrate May 9 as Victory Day to this day. The Reims surrender wasn’t even reported in the Soviet press until a day afterward, proof according to some observers that the second surrender was a propaganda move orchestrated so Stalin could claim a larger part of the credit for ending the war. In the rest of the world, though, V-E (Victory in Europe) Day is celebrated on May 8, the day the ceasefire was officially slated to begin.
Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev
After the establishment of diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Cuba became increasingly dependent on Soviet markets and military aid, becoming an ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In 1972 Cuba joined the COMECON, an economic organization of states designed to create cooperation among the communist planned economies dominated by the large economy of the Soviet Union. Moscow kept in regular contact with Havana, sharing varying close relations until the collapse of the bloc in 1991.
35th US President John F. Kennedy
On May 8, 1963, during a press conference, then President John F. Kennedy offered Israel assistance against any aggression when he responded to a question on the military balance in the Near East and U.S. policy on the security of Israel and Jordan.
Heavyweight Boxing Champion Muhammad Ali
On April 28, 1967, boxing champion Muhammad Ali refuses to be inducted into the U.S. Army and is immediately stripped of his heavyweight title. Ali, a Muslim, cited religious reasons for his decision to forgo military service.
- 1360 Treaty of Brétigny signed by English & French, ending the first phase of the Hundred Years' War
The Battle of Poitiers (1356) resulted in an emphatic victory for the English forces led by King Edward III’s son, the Black Prince. The French king, John the Good, and his son, together with most of their nobles were captured. France descended into chaos: disaffected nobles ravaged the countryside, where the peasants rose in revolt, and the merchants of Paris rebelled against misgovernment and excessive taxes. In the circumstances, the Treaty of Bretigny (1360) was always going to be advantageous to England (Edward III only agreed to negotiate at all because a freak hailstorm had killed many of his troops and horses). Under the treaty, British territory doubled, and a huge ransom was agreed for the French king but, in the interests of lasting peace, Edward renounced all claims to the French throne. It did not work; in 1369, the new French king, Charles V, once more declared war.
- 1450 Jack Cade's Rebellion: Kentishmen revolt against King Henry VI
569 years ago today in 1450, Englishman Jack Cade leads a popular uprising against King Henry VI.
Rebellion was sowed from local grievances concerned about the corruption and abuse of power surrounding the king's regime and his closest advisors. Also angering the rebels was the debt caused by years of warfare against France which had been unsuccessful. Cade mustered a force large enough to march into London to demand their grievances be addressed. However the rebel force started to loot the city and the civilian population drove them out in a battle on the London Bridge.
- 1521 Parliament of Worms installs edict against Martin Luther (Protestant Reformation)
The Protestant Reformation was the 16th-century religious, political, intellectual and cultural upheaval that splintered Catholic Europe, setting in place the structures and beliefs that would define the continent in the modern era. In northern and central Europe, reformers like Martin Luther, John Calvin and Henry VIII challenged papal authority and questioned the Catholic Church’s ability to define Christian practice. They argued for a religious and political redistribution of power into the hands of Bible- and pamphlet-reading pastors and princes. The disruption triggered wars, persecutions and the so-called Counter-Reformation.
- 1846 1st major battle of Mexican War fought at Palo Alto, Texas
On May 8, 1846, shortly before the United States formally declared war on Mexico, General Zachary Taylor (1784-1850) defeated a superior Mexican force in the Battle of Palo Alto. The battle took place north of the Rio Grande River near present-day Brownsville, Texas. Taylor’s victory, along with a series of subsequent victories against the Mexicans, made him a war hero. In 1848, he was elected America’s 12th president.
- 1852 Second London protocol signed reaffirming Danish federation control of independent Duchies of Holstein, Lauenburg and Schleswig
On 8 May 1852, after the First War of Schleswig, an agreement called the London Protocol was signed. This international treaty was the revision of an earlier protocol, which had been ratified on 2 August 1850, by the major Germanic powers of Austria and Prussia. The second London Protocol was recognised by the five major European powers—Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—as well as by the Baltic Sea powers of Denmark and Sweden.
- 1895 China cedes Taiwan to Japan under Treaty of Shimonoseki
The Treaty of Shimonoseki, also known as Treaty of Bakan in China, was a treaty signed at the Shunpanrō hotel, Shimonoseki, Japan on 17 April 1895, between the Empire of Japan and the Qing dynasty, ending the First Sino-Japanese War. The peace conference took place from 20 March to 17 April 1895.
- 1899 Ernest Rutherford publishes his discovery of two different kinds of radiation (Alpha and Beta Particles)
Scientist Ernest Rutherford on right.
In 1899 Ernest Rutherford studied the absorption of radioactivity by thin sheets of metal foil and found two components: alpha (a) radiation, which is absorbed by a few thousandths of a centimeter of metal foil, and beta (b) radiation, which can pass through 100 times as much foil before it was absorbed.
- 1901 A British appointed commission estimates today that some 1,250,000 Indians have died after a severe drought, lasting since 1899
The Indian famine of 1899–1900 began with the failure of the summer monsoons in 1899 over Western and Central India and, during the next year, affected an area of 476,000 square miles (1,230,000 km2) and a population of 59.5 million. The famine was acute in the Central Provinces and Berar, the Bombay Presidency, the minor province of Ajmer-Merwara, and the Hissar District of the Punjab; it also caused great distress in the princely states of the Rajputana Agency, the Central India Agency, Hyderabad and the Kathiawar Agency. In addition, small areas of the Bengal Presidency, the Madras Presidency and the North-Western Provinces were acutely afflicted by the famine.
- 1919 Edward George Honey first proposes the idea of a moment of silence to commemorate The Armistice of World War I, leads to the creation of Remembrance Day
This painting depicts the signing of the armistice which ended World War I in Compiegne, France
Remembrance Day is a memorial day observed in Commonwealth member states since the end of the First World War to remember the members of their armed forces who have died in the line of duty.
- 1942 Aircraft carrier USS Lexington sunk by Japanese air attack in Coral Sea
The Battle of the Coral Sea, fought from 4–8 May 1942, was a major naval battle between the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) and naval and air forces from the United States and Australia, taking place in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. The battle is historically significant as the first action in which aircraft carriers engaged each other, as well as the first in which the opposing ships neither sighted nor fired directly upon one another.
- 1945 Germany surrenders unconditionally to the Allies at Reims - WWII ends in Europe (V-E Day)
On May 7, 1945, the German High Command, in the person of General Alfred Jodl, signs the unconditional surrender of all German forces, East and West, at Reims, in northeastern France.
At first, General Jodl hoped to limit the terms of German surrender to only those forces still fighting the Western Allies. But General Dwight Eisenhower demanded complete surrender of all German forces, those fighting in the East as well as in the West. If this demand was not met, Eisenhower was prepared to seal off the Western front, preventing Germans from fleeing to the West in order to surrender, thereby leaving them in the hands of the enveloping Soviet forces. Jodl radioed Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, Hitler’s successor, with the terms. Donitz ordered him to sign. So with Russian General Ivan Susloparov and French General Francois Sevez signing as witnesses, and General Walter Bedell Smith, Ike’s chief of staff, signing for the Allied Expeditionary Force, Germany was-at least on paper-defeated. Fighting would still go on in the East for almost another day. But the war in the West was over.
Since General Susloparov did not have explicit permission from Soviet Premier Stalin to sign the surrender papers, even as a witness, he was quickly hustled back East and into the hands of the Soviet secret police. Alfred Jodl, who was wounded in the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, would be found guilty of war crimes (which included the shooting of hostages) at Nuremberg and hanged on October 16, 1946. He was later granted a pardon, posthumously, in 1953, after a German appeals court found him not guilty of breaking international law.
But did Germany surrendered twice in World War II ?
ON MAY 7, 1945, Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies in Reims, France, ending World War II and the Third Reich.
Or did it happen on May 9 in Berlin instead?
Both are true. Due to warring ideologies, tussles between the Soviet Union and its allies, and the legacy of the First World War, Germany actually surrendered twice.
As an Allied victory looked more and more certain in 1944 and 1945, the United States, U.S.S.R., France, and the United Kingdom bounced around ideas on the terms of a German surrender. But it was still unclear how the military or political surrender signing would be orchestrated by the time Adolf Hitler died by suicide in a Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, and his dictatorship reached a bloody end.
Hitler had designated Karl Dönitz, a naval admiral and ardent Nazi, as his successor in the event of his death. Dönitz was doomed not to rule a new Germany, but rather to orchestrate its dissolution. He quickly deputized Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the Armed Forces High Command, to negotiate the surrender of all German forces with General Dwight D.
Alfred Jodl, German chief of the operations staff of the Armed Forces High Command, signs an unconditional “Act of Military Surrender” and ceasefire on May 7, 1945.
Dönitz hoped negotiations would buy him time to get as many German people and troops as possible out of the path of the advancing Russians. He also hoped to convince the United States, Britain, and France, all of whom distrusted the U.S.S.R., to turn against the Soviet Union so that Germany might continue its war on that front. Eisenhower saw through the ruse, though, and insisted Jodl sign an instrument of surrender without negotiations.
On May 7, Jodl signed an unconditional “Act of Military Surrender” and a ceasefire that would go into effect at 11:01 p.m. Central European Time on May 8. When Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin heard that Germany had signed an unconditional surrender of all its troops in Reims, he was furious. He argued that since the U.S.S.R. had sacrificed the most troops and civilians during the war, its most important military commander should accept Germany’s surrender rather than the Soviet officer who had witnessed the signing in Reims. Stalin opposed the location of the signing, too: Since Berlin had been the capital of the Third Reich, he argued, it should be the site of its surrender.
But Stalin’s third objection—that Jodl was not Germany’s most senior military official—would prove the most convincing to the rest of the Allies, all of whom remembered how the signing of the armistice that ended World War I had helped plant the seeds of the next world war.
In 1918, as the German Empire had teetered on the brink of defeat, it collapsed and was replaced by a parliamentary republic. Matthias Erzberger, the new secretary of state, had signed the armistice of Compiègne, in which Germany unconditionally surrendered.
The surrender came as a shock to most German civilians, who had been told their military was on the verge of victory. As a result, rumors began to circulate that Germany’s new, civilian government—and other popular scapegoats, such as Marxists and Jews—had stabbed the military in the back. Erzberger was eventually murdered as a result of the myth, which became a common refrain among the members of the new Nazi Party as they consolidated to seize power.
Stalin argued that allowing Jodl to surrender for Germany in World War II could open the door to a new stab-in-the-back myth since he had been deputized by Dönitz, a civilian head of state. Worried that Germany could again insist that its surrender was illegitimate if anyone but Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the supreme commander of all German forces, personally signed the document, the Allies decided to restage the surrender.
On May 8, Keitel headed to Karlshorst, a suburb of Berlin, to sign the document in front of Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a small Allied delegation. But Keitel argued a minor point, hoping to add a clause giving his troops a grace period of at least 12 hours to ensure they received their cease fire orders before facing any penalties for continuing to fight. Zhukov ultimately offered Keitel a verbal promise but did not grant his request to add the clause. Due to the delay, the document was not executed until after the ceasefire was supposed to begin—and May 9 had already arrived.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signs the unconditional surrender of the German army. Berlin, 9 May 1945.
The Russians celebrate May 9 as Victory Day to this day. The Reims surrender wasn’t even reported in the Soviet press until a day afterward, proof according to some observers that the second surrender was a propaganda move orchestrated so Stalin could claim a larger part of the credit for ending the war. In the rest of the world, though, V-E (Victory in Europe) Day is celebrated on May 8, the day the ceasefire was officially slated to begin.
- 1960 USSR & Cuba resume diplomatic relations
Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev
After the establishment of diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Cuba became increasingly dependent on Soviet markets and military aid, becoming an ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In 1972 Cuba joined the COMECON, an economic organization of states designed to create cooperation among the communist planned economies dominated by the large economy of the Soviet Union. Moscow kept in regular contact with Havana, sharing varying close relations until the collapse of the bloc in 1991.
35th US President John F. Kennedy
On May 8, 1963, during a press conference, then President John F. Kennedy offered Israel assistance against any aggression when he responded to a question on the military balance in the Near East and U.S. policy on the security of Israel and Jordan.
- 1967 Muhammad Ali is indicted for refusing induction in US Army
Heavyweight Boxing Champion Muhammad Ali
On April 28, 1967, boxing champion Muhammad Ali refuses to be inducted into the U.S. Army and is immediately stripped of his heavyweight title. Ali, a Muslim, cited religious reasons for his decision to forgo military service.
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