Today in history: May 1

By

Jon Guttman

and

HistoryNet

FILE – In this April 3, 2007 file photo, President Bush speaks about the congressional debate on Iraq war spending, in Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. A dozen years later, American politics has finally reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake. Liberals have been saying that for years, of course, and polls show most of the public already had judged the war a failure. Even many Republican politicians have allowed that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermined the rationale for the 2003 invasion. Now the nation has come to the point where presidential candidates find it safer to acknowledge that 4,491 Americans and countless Iraqis died as a result of a colossal blunder than to defend President George W. Bush’s war. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak. File)

2003: One for the age: Aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln off the California coast, President George W. Bush declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” and crows “Mission accomplished.”

Also today in history, in the U.S. and elsewhere:

1863: The opening rounds of the Battle of Chancellorsville took place while the Battle of Port Gibson raged in Mississippi and the Confederate Congress passed a resolution to kill any black soldiers seen wearing Yankee blue.

1864: While Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman got his Atlanta campaign under way, the Battle of Alexandria took place in Louisiana.

1944: The Messerschmitt Me 262A-2a Sturmvogel, the “Blitz Bomber” version of the jet fighter that Adolf Hitler insisted upon, made its debut flight.

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Jon Guttman

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HistoryNet