Today in History: July 5-8
Today in History: July 5-8
Algeria gains independence, the Nigerian Civil War begins, and more
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July 5, 1811: Venezuelan Independence Day, marking the adoption of Venezuela’s Declaration of Independence in a congress of colonial provinces.
July 5, 1960: Several Force Publique military units mutiny against their Belgian officers in the Republic of the Congo-Léopoldville (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo), sparking what has come to be known as the “Congo Crisis.” The Belgian military sent soldiers into Congo-Léopoldville and several parts of the country rebelled. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba appealed to the Soviet Union for assistance, but army chief of staff Mobutu Sese Seko ousted Lumumba in a coup in September and the country began to break apart. The Crisis ended in November 1965, after most of the rebellions had been suppressed and Mobutu, with US support, had ousted President Joseph Kasa-Vubu in a second coup and assumed absolute power.
July 5, 1962: Algeria declares its official independence from France, a few months after the close of the Algerian War. The declaration followed on the heels of an April 1962 referendum in which over 90 percent of French voters agreed with the Évian Accords, the peace treaties that ended the war, and a July 1 referendum in Algeria in which over 99 percent of respondents voted for independence. French President Charles de Gaulle declared Algeria independent on July 3 but the new provisional Algerian government set July 5 as the formal date.
July 5, 1977: Pakistan’s civilian government, under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, is overthrown in a military coup led by General Zia-ul-Haq. The mostly-conservative Pakistan National Alliance had accused Bhutto and his Pakistan People’s Party of having rigged the country’s March 1977 general election, the second such contest in Pakistani history and first since Bangladesh had won its independence. PNA leaders organized large protests that were met with violence from state security forces that left scores of people dead. Zia stepped in with promises to organize a new election within 90 days—he then ruled Pakistan as president/dictator until his death in a suspicious plane crash in 1988. Claims persist that the coup and Bhutto’s subsequent execution were carried out with at least the acquiescence, if not the encouragement, of the US government.
July 6, 371 BCE: A Theban army defeats the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra, one of the most significant military engagements of the Greek classical period. Thebes, like the rest of Greece, had come under Spartan hegemony after the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), but relations between the two cities broke down when Theban leader Epaminondas (d. 362 BCE) attempted to reform the Boeotian League against Spartan wishes. A Spartan army invaded Boeotia and the Thebans met it in battle. Epaminondas employed an innovation on the standard tactics of hoplite warfare, focusing his attack on the strong Spartan right rather than its weaker left and thereby crushing the Spartans’ best troops—killing King Cleombrotus I in the process. The rest of the Spartan army fled. Leuctra almost immediately changed the balance of power in Greece, ending the Spartan hegemony and instituting a brief Theban hegemony before the exhausted city-states eventually came under Macedonian rule.
July 6, 640: An Arab army commanded by Amr ibn al-ʿAs defeats a much larger Byzantine force under the command of a general named Theodore in the Battle of Heliopolis. Amr was the driving force behind the decision to invade Egypt, having convinced Caliph Umar I to let him take a small (around 4000 men) force into the region, possibly on a raid rather than a mission of conquest. Umar subsequently reinforced that army and made it possible to think in terms of permanently seizing territory. The Byzantines, still reeling from losing the Levant to the Arabs, were able to muster an army of around 20,000 men to drive the Arabs out of Egypt, but Theodore made the peculiar decision to pick a battle in the open field in which the Arabs’ superior maneuverability and generalship carried the day and left all of Egypt open to Arab conquest. The loss of Egypt was even more devastating to the Byzantines than the loss of the Levant had been.
July 6, 1917: An Arab army under Bedouin chieftain named Auda Abu Tayi and advised by British officer T. E. Lawrence defeats the Ottomans at the Battle of Aqaba. Coming in the wake of an Arab defeat at Medina, the battle was important for several reasons—it helped the Arab Revolt regain momentum, it opened an important Red Sea port to Britain, it cleared the Egyptian Expeditionary Force’s path north, and it allowed the EEF and the Arabs to link up and coordinate their actions moving forward.
July 6, 1967: The Nigerian Civil War begins when Nigerian forces invade the breakaway Niger Delta region of Biafra. The conflict eventually settled into a Nigerian blockade of Biafra, precipitating a massive humanitarian crisis in which hundreds of thousands of people (high estimates run to around 3 million) died of preventable causes, mostly starvation. A final Nigerian assault in December 1969 led to the Biafran rebels’ surrender a month later.
July 7, 1798: The United States Congress annuls the 1778 Treaty of Alliance between the US and France. The annulment is considered the opening act of the 1798-1800 “Quasi-War” between the two countries. Congressional opinion (and public opinion, for that matter) in the US turned decisively against France following the notorious “XYZ Affair,” in which a US diplomatic delegation to Paris (there to discuss the French Navy’s seizure of multiple US commercial ships over the previous two years) took offense at French Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord’s insistence that they pay for the privilege of speaking with him. The conflict that ensued was never formally declared a war but did involve several clashes between US and French naval vessels and/or privateers. It finally ended with the Convention of 1800 and a formal statement of US neutrality.
July 7, 1892: Anti-Spanish independence advocates in the Philippines found the Katipunan, which means “association” and is short for a Tagalog name that I won’t try to reproduce but means “Supreme and Honorable Association of the Children of the Nation” in English. Originally a secret society, the Katipunan splintered off of the reformist La Liga Filipina and included Liga members who supported armed revolution against the Spanish colonial authorities. Its discovery by those colonial authorities in 1896 was one of the immediate triggers for the Philippine Revolution.
July 7, 1937: The Marco Polo Bridge Incident, a clash between Chinese and Japanese troops near Wanping, ends with the Chinese force holding the bridge but still obliged to make concessions to the superior Japanese force in order to end the confrontation. This relatively minor incident sparked the Second Sino-Japanese War, which continued into and throughout World War II.
July 7, 1991: The Brioni Agreement ends the Slovenian War of Independence. The agreement required Slovenia and Croatia to delay their independence bids for three months in exchange for the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army from both republics. In reality this marked the end of the Slovenian phase of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, while having no effect on the war in Croatia.
July 8, 1497: A Portuguese armada sets sail under the command of Vasco da Gama bound for India. Da Gama’s completion of the route around Africa was the first direct European oceanic contact with India and stands alongside Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, for better or worse, as one of the milestones of the Age of Exploration.
July 8, 1709: A Russian army under the command of Tsar Peter I defeats a Swedish army commanded by Count Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld at the Battle of Poltava. This was the largest engagement of the 1700-1721 Great Northern War, pitting some 75,000 Russian soldiers against a Swedish force numbering around 30,000. It also proved to be a turning point in that conflict, in which a Russian-led coalition challenged the Swedish Empire’s supremacy in northern Europe. After a very successful first six years of the war, Swedish King Charles XII made the fateful decision to invade Russia in 1707. The Swedish defeat at Poltava was the culmination of that invasion. Most of the Swedish army was forced to surrender, while Charles himself fled into the Ottoman Empire for protection. He spent several years there before eventually wearing out his welcome and being sent home.
July 8, 1853: A US naval expedition commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives at Japan’s Edo (Tokyo) Bay. The “Perry Expedition” was intended to open diplomatic and commercial ties with several Indo-Pacific nations, but its main goal was to force the Japanese government to abandon its isolationism (at least with respect to the US). Perry’s threats to attack Edo had the desired effect and he was eventually permitted to carry out his main formal task, delivering a letter from US President Millard Fillmore to senior Japanese officials. He returned with a larger fleet in February 1854 and—again under threat of force—negotiated the Convention of Kanagawa, which opened the Japanese ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to US ships.