This day in history: 29 Aug

1350: The English fleet under King Edward III defeated a Castilian fleet of 40 ships, commanded by Don Carlos de la Cerda, at the Battle of Winchelsea (or Les Espagnols sur Mer).

1526: The Ottoman Turks, led by Suleiman the Magnificent, defeated and killed Louis II Jagiellon, the last Jagiellonian king of Hungary and Bohemia, at the Battle of Mohács.

1533: Inca emperor Atahualpa was executed in Cajamarca by Spanish Conquistadores led by Francisco Pizarro.

1862: Confederate General James Longstreet's corps arrived on the field on the second day of the Second Battle of Bull Run (or Second Battle of Manassas).

1907: 75 workers were killed when the Quebec Bridge collapsed during construction.

1911: Ishi, the last member of the Yana tribe, emerged from the wilderness near Oroville, California.

1916: USS Memphis (CA 10)* and USS Castine (Gunboat #6), at anchor off Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, were attempting to get under way to avoid heavy seas, when a tsunami struck. Castine, though badly battered, got clear, but Memphis was driven ashore. Lieutenant Claud A Jones, Chief Machinist's Mate George W Rud and Machinist Charles H Willey were awarded the Medal of Honour (posthumously, in Rud's case) for their heroic efforts in Memphis's fire room after her boilers burst.


1917: The 11480-ton SS Milazzo - the largest ship claimed by an Austrian submarine - was sunk by the U 14 (commanded by Linienschiffsleutnant Georg Ritter von Trapp).

1943: Germany dissolved the government of occupied Denmark. Most of the Danish navy was scuttled to prevent its being taken by the Germans for their own use.

1949: The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, a 22-kiloton device called Joe-1, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.

1958: The 1145 cadets of the United States Air Force Academy class of 1959 - its first graduating class - moved to the new site in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

1967: Dr Richard Kimble finally caught up with the one-armed man, in the final episode of The Fugitive.




1982: The element Meitnerium (symbol Mt, atomic number 109) was first synthesized at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, West Germany.

2005: Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi, flooding New Orleans, killing more than 1836 people and causing an estimated 81.2 billion dollars in damage along the Gulf coast.

In addition to Louis II (1506-1562) and Atahualpa (ca 1502-1533), Edmund Hoyle (1672-1769), Brigham Young (1801–1877), William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), Lowell Thomas (1892–1981), Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982) and Lee Marvin (1924–1987) died on this date.

And happy birthday to Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr (1809–1894), Charles Franklin Kettering (1876–1958), Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982), Isabel Sanford (1917-2004), Charlie "Bird" Parker (1920–1955), John Sidney McCain III (1936-TBD) and Elliott Gould (1938-TBD).


* Memphis was commissioned 17 July 1906 as USS Tennessee (ACR 10). She was renamed Memphis on 25 May 1916 so that the name Tennessee could be used for a new battleship (BB 43).