Today in History: September 22-26
The Iran-Iraq War begins, Saudi Arabia is born, and more
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September 22, 1965: The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, fought over Kashmir, ends with a UN-brokered ceasefire. Although the outcome was indecisive, India was able to prevent a Pakistan-backed insurgency in Kashmir and demonstrate military superiority over its rival while sending the Pakistani economy into a rough patch. The war also caused India and Pakistan to look for new allies, as the US and UK imposed an arms embargo on both countries and criticized both the Indian and Pakistani governments for their conduct. Pakistan’s current relationship with China and India’s Cold War relationship with the Soviet Union developed as a result.
September 22, 1980: The Iran-Iraq War begins with a massive Iraqi air bombardment that was intended to destroy Iran’s air power preemptively. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein feared that the fervor of the recent Iranian Revolution might spread to Iraq, particularly though not necessarily within Iraq’s Shiʿa majority. Hussein and his government also harbored longstanding resentments over Iran’s control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which links the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Persian Gulf. This initial air barrage failed to achieve its objectives and Hussein’s other strategic aim, turning the Arab population of Iran’s Khuzestan region against Tehran, also largely fizzled out. Iran seemed to be gaining the upper hand until Hussein, with Western help, turned to chemical weapons as an equalizer. The conflict settled into a brutal stalemate that finally ended in August 1988 with hundreds of thousands dead on both sides.
September 23, 1803: A small British army defeats a Maratha army as much as six or seven times its size at the Battle of Assaye. The British victory helped establish military supremacy in the Deccan, the Maratha Empire’s home turf, and led to Britain’s victory in the Second Anglo-Maratha War. It also boosted the military career of the British commander, Major General Arthur Wellesley, who would later be made the first Duke of Wellington and become a major thorn in Napoleon’s side.
September 23, 1932: Abdulaziz “Ibn Saud” unites his two kingdoms, the Nejd and the Hejaz, into one, the new Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Commemorated annually as Saudi National Day.
September 24, 1645: Amid the First English Civil War, parliamentarians defeat a royalist army at the Battle of Rowton Heath. The parliamentarians killed some 600 royalist soldiers and took some 900 more prisoner (parliamentarian casualties are apparently unknown). For the royalists, the defeat scuppered their chances of relieving the besieged Chester, the last English port still loyal to King Charles I, which eventually surrendered in February 1646.
September 24, 1877: The Japanese Army defeats a heavily outnumbered and even more heavily outgunned samurai force under the command of rebel leader Saigō Takamori, whose entire 500 man army was wiped out, in the Battle of Shiroyama. The battle ended the Satsuma Rebellion and the role of the samurai as Japan’s warrior class. The 2003 film The Last Samurai depicts a heavily fictionalized, and (arguably) quite ahistorical, version of this battle and the wider rebellion.
September 25, 1396: An Ottoman army under Sultan Bayezid I defeats a “Crusader” force at Nicopolis (modern Nikopol, in Bulgaria). The outcome was so overwhelming that it broke the nascent Crusade in one fell swoop and left the way open for the Ottomans to march on Vidin and put an end to the Second Bulgarian Empire.
September 25, 1513: Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish explorer and the governor of Veragua (a territory including the Caribbean coasts of modern Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama), leads a small detachment of men across Panama to what they knew as the “South Sea,” thereby becoming the first European in the New World to lay eyes on the Pacific Ocean. Balboa spent several years exploring his “South Sea” but eventually ran afoul of the governor of Panama, Pedrarias Dávila, and was executed in 1519.
September 25, 1962: A military coup against the Mutawakkilite ruler of northern Yemen, Muhammad al-Badr, sparks the 1962-1970 North Yemen Civil War. The conflict quickly expands from a domestic insurrection to an outlet for the “Arab Cold War,” pitting republican Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who supported the insurrectionists, against an old guard of Arab monarchies led by Saudi Arabia, which supported the Mutawakkilites (despite their sectarian differences with the Yemeni Shiʿa). In the end the republicans emerged victorious, but Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 Six Day War left Nasser greatly weakened so the “Arab Cold War” began to fizzle out.
September 26, 1799: A Republican French army under André Masséna outflanks and defeats a Russian-Austrian force at the Second Battle of Zürich. The French victory recovered what Masséna had lost in his defeat at the First Battle of Zürich in June and led to Russia’s decision to quit the Second Coalition. Shortly afterward Napoleon returned to Paris from Egypt and made himself First Consul, and the French Revolutionary Wars began to go in a whole new direction.
September 26, 1983: The Soviet Union’s early warning network determines that the United States has launched one intercontinental ballistic missile and recommends retaliating, but an air force lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov, under the assumption that the US would not launch a nuclear first strike with a single weapon, decides that it must be malfunctioning. He made a similar determination when the system later showed four more US missiles in fight, and turned out to be correct—Soviet satellites were somehow misreading sunlight reflecting off of high altitude clouds as missiles. Petrov’s decision not to rely on the warning system probably single-handedly prevented World War III.