December 13 in Military History

English privateer Sir Francis Drake departed Plymouth, England, with five ships on what would become only the second circumnavigation of the globe, and the first by an English commander. Along the way, Drake raided Spanish colonial ports and treasure ships, capturing an enormous fortune that helped fund England's naval buildup against the Spanish Armada.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony's General Court organized the colony's scattered town militias into three permanent regiments, an act the modern Army National Guard recognizes as its founding moment. The regimental structure created on this date became the template for American militia organization through the Revolution and beyond.

Union forces under General Ambrose Burnside launched fourteen futile frontal assaults against entrenched Confederate positions behind a stone wall at the base of Marye's Heights in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Wave after wave of Federal troops charged across open ground into devastating fire, suffering approximately 12,600 casualties against only 5,300 Confederate losses. It was one of the most one-sided defeats of the Civil War.

Japanese forces captured the Chinese capital of Nanjing after a brief siege. What followed was the Nanjing Massacre, six weeks of mass murder, rape, and looting that killed an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers. The atrocity remains one of the most horrific war crimes of the twentieth century.

German occupation forces massacred the entire male population of the Greek village of Kalavryta, 696 men and boys over the age of 14, in reprisal for partisan attacks. The women and children were locked in a school that was set on fire, though they managed to escape. The atrocity was one of the worst committed by the Wehrmacht in occupied Greece.

The Apollo 17 Lunar Module Challenger lifted off from the Taurus-Littrow valley, carrying Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt away from the Moon. No human has returned to the lunar surface in the five decades since, making Cernan the last man on the Moon and closing an era of exploration that drew heavily on US military aviation expertise.

Protests by ethnic Hungarians defending Pastor Laszlo Tokes in the Romanian city of Timisoara escalated into wider demonstrations against the Ceausescu regime. The unrest spread rapidly across Romania and culminated in the only violent Eastern Bloc revolution of 1989, with the overthrow and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu by Christmas Day.

Five gunmen affiliated with Pakistani-based militant groups stormed the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi, killing nine security personnel before being neutralized. The attack led to a ten-month military standoff in which India and Pakistan deployed roughly 1.2 million troops along their border in the largest mobilization in South Asian history.

U.S. Special Operations forces and soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division captured former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein hiding in a cramped underground "spider hole" on a farm near his hometown of Tikrit. The disheveled and bearded Hussein surrendered without resistance, and his capture was announced by Paul Bremer with the words: "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him."

U.S. Army soldiers from the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, and Task Force 121 special operators captured former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in a camouflaged spider hole near ad-Dawr, Iraq. The operation closed the most extensive manhunt of the Iraq War and produced extensive intelligence on the insurgency that had emerged after the 2003 invasion.