Australian and New Zealand troops rioted while on leave in Cairo.
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French fighter pilot Lieutenant Roland Garros scored the first areal kill by firing a machine gun through a tractor propeller.
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Germans and Bedouins fought for perhaps the first time in World War One when a party of stranded German marines from the SMS Emden was ambushed while being escorted to Jeddah.
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The British registered Falaba was sunk by the U-28 in St. George's Channel with American citizen Leon Thrasher on board, leading to a diplomatic crisis.
Thrasher was the first American killed in World War One.
The British ferry Brussels tried to ram the German submarine U-33 after it tried to stop and board her. The submarine had to dive to evade being hit. Submarines were being treated as criminal vessels by the British due to unrestricted submarine warfare.
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The French took Hartmannswillerkopf giving them an observation post for Alsace.
The town of Miami Beach, Florida was established.
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French attacks on Hartmannswillerkopf got them within 150 metres of the summit.
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Imperial Russian Army captured Przemyśl ending the longest siege of the Great War. They took over 117,000 Austro-Hungarian POWs which included nine generals, 93 senior staff officers, and 2,500 other officers.
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The Defence of India Act was enacted to provide the colonial government in British India with sweeping powers to enforce the law during the Great War, including independence activities.
Pluto was photographed for the first time.
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The French battleship Bouvet, British battleship HMS Irresistible and the HMS Ocean struck mines and sank off of the Dardanelles. The Gaulois was beached after striking a mine.
Loss of life was heavy.
The battleship HMS Dreadnought rammed and sake the U-29.
Russian fighter pilot Alexander Kazakov used a grapnel hook to hook his aircraft to a German Albatros in flight. The mechanism didn't work and he ended up ramming the plane.
In spite of stunts like that, Kazakov survived the war only to die in an airshow in 1919.
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The United States Army took the bridge over the Rhine at Remagen intact, and by surprise.
The Battle of Remagen commenced.
The failure of the Germans to have destroyed the heavy railroad bridge, last used by U.S. forces in 1918, was a major failure and the bridge's capture a major event in the advance of the U.S. Army into Germany.
Romania declared war on Japan.
The U-1302 was sunk in the St. George's Channel by the Canadian frigates Strathadam and Thefford Mines.
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The 1914 Christmas Truce, which was now over, hit the newspapers.
Ottoman forces retreating from Sarikamish bogged down in the woods outside the city. Their numbers had started out at 12,000 and were now 2,500.
Reduced from 12,000 to 2,500 soldiers and a handful of guns, the remaining units fled and freed major routes into Sarikamish for Russians to resupply.
The French retook ground lost the prior day at Champagne.
T. S. Eliot, in a letter to Conrad Aiken from Merton College, Oxford, wrote: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead."
University towns were apparently much different then. FWIW, I like university towns.
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Actor Humphrey Bogart was born in New York City.
His father was a heart surgeon and mother a commercial illustrator whose work was highly valued. He served in the Navy in World War One and turned to acting in 1922.
He died in 1957 at age 57.
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The Spanish confiscation (Desamortización española) law, authorizing the government of Spain to steal the property and lands of the Catholic Church, a popular enlightenment and Reformation despoliation that happened in many places, was repealed.
The barbarity had been in place since 1766.
Amongst other things, the law resulted in millions of acres of forest falling into private hands, being deforested, with the cost of reforestation exceeding the value of their sales. The confiscations of the 19th Century were one of the biggest environmental disasters in Iberian history.
The Supreme Court of Hungary confiscated the property of former president Mihály Károlyi for high treason. He had been convicted of negotiating with Italy in 1915 to keep the Italians out of World War One in exchange for Austrian territory, and for allowing a communist revolution to happen in 1919 by deserting his position.
