OCTOBER 16th

On this date in:
1793	Marie Antoinette was beheaded during the French Revolution.
1859	Abolitionist John Brown, hoping to start an anti-slavery rebellion, led 21 men in a raid on a federal armory at Harpers Ferry in present-day West Virginia. (The raid was put down and Brown was executed for treason.)
1888	Playwright Eugene O'Neill was born in New York City.
1916	Margaret Sanger opened the first birth-control clinic, in New York City.
1946	Ten Nazi war criminals condemned during the Nuremberg trials were hanged.
1962	The Cuban missile crisis began as President John F. Kennedy was informed that reconnaissance photographs had revealed the presence of missile bases in Cuba.
1970	Anwar Sadat was elected president of Egypt, succeeding the late Gamal Abdel Nasser.
1973	Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, who negotiated a cease-fire in the Vietnam War, were named winners of the Nobel Peace Prize; Tho declined the award.
1978	Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected pope by the Roman Catholic Church's College of Cardinals; he took the name John Paul II.
1984	Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
1987	Rescuers freed Jessica McClure, an 18-month-old girl who had been trapped in an abandoned well for 58 hours in Midland, Texas.
1991	A man crashed a pickup truck into a restaurant in Killeen, Texas, and opened fire, killing 23 people before taking his own life.
1995	A vast throng of black men gathered in Washington for the "Million Man March" led by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
1997	Author James Michener died at age 90.
1998	David Trimble and John Hume were named recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the Northern Ireland peace accord.
1998	British police arrested former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London.
2000	Missouri Gov. and U.S. Senate candidate Mel Carnahan was killed in a plane crash south of St. Louis.
2002	The White House announced that North Korea had disclosed it had a nuclear weapons program.
2002	President George W. Bush signed a congressional resolution authorizing war against Iraq.

Article of the day...

The Long March

The embattled Chinese Communists break through Nationalist enemy lines and begin an epic flight from their encircled headquarters in southwest China. Known as Ch'ang Cheng--the "Long March"--the retreat lasted 368 days and covered 6,000 miles, nearly twice the distance from New York to San Francisco.

Civil war in China between the Nationalists and the Communists broke out in 1927. In 1931, Communist leader Mao Zedong was elected chairman of the newly established Soviet Republic of China, based in Kiangsi province in the southwest. Between 1930 and 1934, the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek launched a series of five encirclement campaigns against the Soviet Republic. Under the leadership of Mao, the Communists employed guerrilla tactics to resist successfully the first four campaigns, but in the fifth, Chiang raised 700,000 troops and built fortifications around the Communist positions. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were killed or died of starvation in the siege, and Mao was removed as chairman by the Communist Central Committee. The new Communist leadership employed more conventional warfare tactics, and its Red Army was decimated.

With defeat imminent, the Communists decided to break out of the encirclement at its weakest points. The Long March began at 5:00 p.m. on October 16, 1934. Secrecy and rear-guard actions confused the Nationalists, and it was several weeks before they realized that the main body of the Red Army had fled. The retreating force initially consisted of 86,000 troops, 15,000 personnel, and 35 women. Weapons and supplies were borne on men's backs or in horse-drawn carts, and the line of marchers stretched for 50 miles. The Communists generally marched at night, and when the enemy was not near, a long column of torches could be seen snaking over valleys and hills into the distance.

The first disaster came in November, when Nationalist forces blocked the Communists' route across the Hsiang River. It took a week for the Communists to break through the fortifications and cost them 50,000 men--more than half their number. After that debacle, Mao steadily regained his influence, and in January he was again made chairman during a meeting of the party leaders in the captured city of Tsuni. Mao changed strategy, breaking his force into several columns that would take varying paths to confuse the enemy. There would be no more direct assaults on enemy positions. And the destination would now be Shensi Province, in the far northwest, where the Communists hoped to fight the Japanese invaders and earn the respect of China's masses.

After enduring starvation, aerial bombardment, and almost daily skirmishes with Nationalist forces, Mao halted his columns at the foot of the Great Wall of China on October 20, 1935. Waiting for them were five machine-gun- and red-flag-bearing horsemen. "Welcome, Chairman Mao," one said. "We represent the Provincial Soviet of Northern Shensi. We have been waiting for you anxiously. All that we have is at your disposal!" The Long March was over.

The Communist marchers crossed 24 rivers and 18 mountain ranges, mostly snow-capped. Only 4,000 troops completed the journey. The majority of those who did not perished. It was the longest continuous march in the history of warfare and marked the emergence of Mao Zedong as the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communists. Learning of the Communists' heroism and determination in the Long March, thousands of young Chinese traveled to Shensi to enlist in Mao's Red Army. After fighting the Japanese for a decade, the Chinese Civil War resumed in 1945. Four years later, the Nationalists were defeated, and Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China. He served as chairman until his death in 1976.

Source: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=VideoArticle&id=7052


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