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The first underwater nuclear explosion.
The British Ministry of Food, with the approval of the House of Commons, put bread rationing in effect in the United Kingdom. It was the first time that had occured in the country's history.
Britain continued to deal with food shortages for quite some time after the Second World War. Bread rationing, which had not occurred during the war, would last until July 1948. Other types of wartime rationing would continue on and be phased out, with the last rationing ending in 1954.
An oddity of this is that British health was noted to have improved due to rationing. We don't often think of this occurring, but it did. Likewise, it was noted that German soldiers in Allied hospitals, who had been getting by on thin rations, recovered from their wounds more quickly than well fed American ones.
Lieutenant Commander James J. Davidson landed a FH-1 Phantom on the deck of the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, becoming the first American to land a jet aircraft on a carrier.
President Gualberto Villarroel of Bolivia was murdered by a mob that stormed the presidential palace.
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The "Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack" was released. The report absolved the administration from conspiring to bring about the Japanese attack and assigned blame to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter C. Short.
U.S. Senators Homer Ferguson and Owen Brewster dissented, taking the position that President Roosevelt and his military advisors "were just as responsible for the nation's worst military disaster".
Red Chinese forces reached the region of Zhao Family's River (Zhao Jia Chuan, 赵家川) with little in the way of Nationalist forces to impede their further advance.
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And a Medal of Honor.
On board the U.S.S. Hartford, Philadelphia, Pa., 16 July 1876. Showing gallantry, Costello rescued from drowning a landsman of that vessel.
Born in 1850, Costello would live until 1887, dying at age 37, maybe. Or he may have remained in the Navy until 1902, have become a Warrant Officer, and died in 1908. I hope it's the latter.
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Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, July 6, 1976. First women at Anapolis.: The first women to do so entered the United States Naval Academy. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II began a "Bicentennial tour" of se...
We ran this a few days ago.
And now we see this article:
It's no secret that Pete Hegseth is hostile to women in combat (one of the very few things I agree with Pete about), but that's not the same thing as not noting this milestone, which is pretty darned close to saying that women don't have a place in the Navy.
Well, actually, it's exactly the same thing as saying women don't have a place in the Navy.
Women have been in the Navy since March 21, 1917, as we noted on the anniversary of that occurrence:
Incorporating women into the Navy has been sort of a peculiar problem in some ways, and those ways are heavily biological, although honesty compels us to note that it's not as problematic now as it once was, or would be suspected as being.
Approximately 75% of all sailors are assigned to sea-intensive ratings rather than shore duty ones. Only about 19% to 20% of the active fleet is deployed or underway at any one time, however. About 20% of the Navy's manpower if female, with that figure applying to both the enlisted and officers. There are instances you can find of ships that end up with a problematic number of female sailors pregnant, but on average only 0.7% to 1.5% of a female crew find that to be the case.
Not that there are not problems.* Having young men and young women in that level of close proximity is going to cause problems. Again, I'm not in favor of women in combat and while I don't think of the Navy all that much, about any ship at sea can be a combat vessel in some fashion.
The Navy changed its billeting policy in 2024 in order to allow pregnant female sailors to find land billets more easily than it had previously, so the Navy, in pre Hegseth Department of Defense it was moving towards being more accomodating.
So what's going on here?
I don't know, but it's part of a sub silentio drift in the DoD. If the Hegseth run DoD just wants women out, or out of some roles, it can move in that directly openly. Instead, it's been sort of just being hostile to them, of which this is one example.
And its not just female sailors, or servicemembers. It's being silently hostile to minorities as well. People who normally would have been promoted to senior positions are not being if they're women, or black, etc. A portrait of a legendary senior black Air Force officer was removed from display without explanation.
Without explanation, it has the appearance of a harassment campaign to quietly discourage women and blacks from joining the service.
And I have to wonder, to some degree, if the DoD is trying to make it through November before it takes a formal step of eliminating women from all combat roles. It can't eliminate blacks from the service, of course, but it's also allowing Evangelical Protestant campaigning in the service, which is hostile to various religions, including various Christian religions. At some point that has the effect of telling Catholic Hispanics and African Methodist blacks maybe they aren't welcome, or at least that they don't want to hang around with a bunch of troops who look and act like Confederate Partisan Rangers.
Or maybe it's not that extreme. Be that as it may, the treatment of women in this fashion is hard to ignore.
Footnotes
*In recent years the bigger problem has been with the Department of the Navy's female Marines, who had to be expressly told to wear shirts while doing PT overseas. Their omission of shirts clearly wasn't because it was just hot where they were.
Anticipating what would occur in Congress the Virginia Convention adopted the first constitution of the independent Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia had no constitution at all prior to that.
The Continental Congress had Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence for one day at this point.
The Continental Navy won the Battle of Turtle Gut Inlet in Wildwood Crest, New Jersey.
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The United States completed its withdrawal of troops from Thailand and closed the last military installations that it maintained there. Thailand had played a major role in the U.S. air campaign during the Vietnam War.
The United States evacuated Americans and Westerners from Beirut by sea.
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April 30, 2026
Secretary of Defense Hegseth testified the war had cost the US $25B so far.
We clearly have absolutely no idea how to get out of it or win it.
May 1, 2026
Iran responded to King Donny's threats to ramp up the war on Iran, now in a ceasefire, with threats of their own.
They seemed rather unimpressed by Donny.
Donny's administration says it doesn't have to comply with the sixty day provision of the War Powers Act due to the ceasefire.
May 3, 2026
Iran sent the US a fourteen point peace plan.
May 4, 2026
The U.S. rejected Iranian peace proposals and is now going to escort ships through the Straits of Hormoz. Iran threatened to strike the ships and has already claimed to have hit a U.S. Navy craft with missiles, which the U.S. denies.
cont:
Iran attacked ships in the straits today with small surface vehicles and it resumed drone strikes on the UAE.
May 6, 2026
Yesterday was Taco Tuesday, and so we have this headline from the Tribune.
Trump paused his latest version of the illegal war with his escort program in the Straits of Hormuz. We have no way out of the war that anyone in D.C. grasps.
The US has clearly and absolutely lost this war, not succeeding in a single one of its objectives. At this point, absent ground operations, this is humiliating US defeat, worse than the loss in Vietnam.
May 7, 2026
Taco's flip on the most recent operation is because Saudi Arabia denied the US use of its airspace.
It seems to be the case that Taco didn't inform the kingdom of the operation before coming up with it.
cont:
So, now we're hitting targets in Iran again, the war we won several weeks ago, and which was definitely over before we started blockading Iran.
Compared to this, the Allied landings at Gallipoli in World War One were an absolutely stunning success.
May 10, 2026
Headline from the CST:
The US sent a counter proposal to Iran. They haven't replied.
What is new is that the UK and France are deploying ships to the region in anticipation of using them to keep shipping lanes open.
We'll remind everyone once again that this war is completely illegal, and Trump should be impeached and removed from office for the illegality.
May 11, 2026
Iran's counter proposal was rejected by the US.
May 18, 2026
The UAE was hit by drones yesterday, and an attempt was made on Saudi Arabia.
Donald Trump warned Iran it was running out of time.
The New York Times informed readers that Israel had constructed a secret base over a period of a year in Iraq for the war.
May 19, 2026
Trump threatened Iran with massive devastation and then called it off claiming that regional states asked him to.
Whatever.
The ignoramus has backed himself and the entire country into a corner and has no idea what to do.
May 20, 2026
Aided by a defecting Bill Cassidy and some other defecting Republicans who finally decided they weren't a complete pack of cowardly little sissies, Congress advanced a War Powers bill.
This isn't the same as voting on it, they're just advancing it so it can be voted on. Still, it's a blow to the Big Sissie.
May 24, 2026
Contrary to what reports are holding, no lasting solution to the conflict with Iran has been reached, particularly in regard to the nuclear material.
We appear to be on our way to something no better than what Trump ripped up in the form of what President Obama had negotiated.
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The first color feature film, The Black Pirate, was released.
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin addressed the British public about the ongoing strike in the UK, the first such emergency radio broadcast of that type in that nation.
The first test of the Mark 6 torpedo exploder was conducted.
Sir David Frederick Attenborough was born, and turns 100 years old today.
A major fire broke out at Fenway Park.
It was a Saturday.
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The Aerodrome: Wednesday, April 24 1946. Firsts.: The Blue Angels, flying F6F Hellcats, were formed. The first Blue Angels. The MiG-9 and the Yak-15 flew for the first time.
The Blue Angels, flying F6F Hellcats, were formed.
The April 1, 1946 Aleutian Islands earthquake occurred which resulted in an tsunami that devastated parts of Hawaii, most notably Hilo. Up to 173 people were killed, mostly in Hawaii.
Warnings were given but many ignored them, thinking them an April Fools Day joke. The event is responsible for a much improved warning system.
Bituminous coal miners went on strike in the U.S.
The U.S. Navy destroyed 24 Japanese submarines. Seems like a terrible waste really.
The UK made Singapore a Crown Colony and separated it and its mostly Chinese ethnic population from Malaya.
What does Russia want was a question that was posed (from more than one Reddit sub).
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A Second World War, over Iran, was averted.
