April 10 in Military History

The Duke of Wellington's Anglo-Allied army attacked Marshal Soult's French defenders at Toulouse in one of the final battles of the Napoleonic Wars. Tragically, news that Napoleon had abdicated four days earlier had not yet reached southern France.

Union forces began a 30-hour bombardment of Confederate-held Fort Pulaski using experimental rifled cannon at ranges thought impossible. The massive masonry walls were breached within hours, proving rifled artillery had made all existing coastal fortifications obsolete.

Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee's five Royal Navy H-class destroyers forced their way up Ofotfjord in heavy snow and attacked the ten Kriegsmarine destroyers that had landed troops at Narvik the previous day. The raid sank two German destroyers and crippled others but cost Warburton-Lee his ship and his life, winning him the war's first Victoria Cross.

President Roosevelt declared Greenland part of the Western Hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine. American troops and Coast Guard deployed to establish bases and patrol against German U-boats, months before Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into the war.

The 3rd Ukrainian Front under General Rodion Malinovsky captured the Black Sea port of Odessa from German and Romanian occupiers, completing an advance of more than 200 miles in three weeks. The fall of Odessa secured Soviet control of the northwestern Black Sea littoral and trapped German forces in Crimea.

Patton's Third Army advanced toward the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. SS guards began evacuating prisoners on forced death marches. The camp would be liberated the following day.

The U.S. Ninth Army's 84th Infantry Division captured the German industrial city of Hanover after a two-day urban assault that included house-to-house fighting through heavily damaged neighborhoods. The fall of the city cut off major rail and highway arteries leading north to Bremen and Hamburg and accelerated the collapse of Army Group H.

The nuclear submarine USS Thresher sank during deep-diving tests, killing all 129 aboard. The disaster led to the SUBSAFE program that has prevented any further losses.

The United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom simultaneously signed the Biological Weapons Convention, the first multilateral treaty to ban an entire category of weapons of mass destruction.

North Vietnamese forces encircled the South Vietnamese provincial capital of An Loc, 60 miles north of Saigon, opening a 66-day siege that featured mass PAVN armor assaults repulsed by ARVN infantry with American TOW missiles delivered by UH-1 Huey helicopters. The defense of An Loc prevented a PAVN breakthrough to Saigon during the Easter Offensive.

A Polish Air Force Tu-154M carrying President Lech Kaczynski and most of Poland's senior military and political leadership crashed on approach to Smolensk-North in Russia, killing all 96 aboard. The delegation had been traveling to a Katyn massacre commemoration, and the loss included the Chief of the General Staff and the commanders of every service branch.