December 15 in Military History

The first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, were ratified, including the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms and the Third Amendment's prohibition against quartering soldiers in private homes. These amendments reflected the Founders' deep suspicion of standing armies and their determination to protect individual liberties against military overreach.

Napoleon Bonaparte's remains arrived at Les Invalides in Paris after transportation from Saint Helena, twenty years after his death in exile. The Retour des Cendres ceremony reinforced French military identity under the July Monarchy and formalized the Napoleonic legend that shaped French military doctrine through the end of the Third Republic.

Union forces under Major General George H. Thomas launched a devastating two-day attack against Confederate General John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee at Nashville, virtually destroying it as a fighting force. Thomas's meticulously planned assault was one of the few battles in the Civil War that resulted in the near-total annihilation of one side, Hood's army was shattered, losing over 6,000 casualties and thousands more as prisoners, ending the Confederate threat in the Western Theater.

Hunkpapa Lakota chief Sitting Bull was killed by Indian agency police at his cabin on the Standing Rock Reservation during an attempt to arrest him. The government feared Sitting Bull would join the Ghost Dance movement. The killing, which occurred when Sitting Bull's supporters fired on the police, who then shot the chief in the chest and head, intensified tensions that would explode two weeks later at the Wounded Knee Massacre.

The film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's Civil War epic "Gone with the Wind" premiered at Loew's Grand Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia. The film's vivid depiction of the burning of Atlanta, the siege of Vicksburg, and the devastation of Sherman's March to the Sea shaped popular understanding of the Civil War for generations, for better and worse, and remains the highest-grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation.

Major Glenn Miller, commander of the Army Air Forces Orchestra, disappeared on a flight from Britain to liberated France aboard a Noorduyn UC-64 Norseman. The loss of the most popular American bandleader of the war period demonstrated the reach of the USAAF morale mission and produced one of the enduring unsolved aviation mysteries of World War II.

An Israeli court sentenced former SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann to death for his role in organizing the Holocaust. Eichmann, who had been captured by Israeli intelligence agents in Argentina, was found guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes for his central role in planning and implementing the "Final Solution", the systematic murder of six million Jews during World War II.

Gemini 6-A and Gemini 7 conducted the first successful rendezvous of two crewed spacecraft in orbit, demonstrating the techniques required for the Apollo lunar program and for future military satellite servicing operations. The maneuver involved NASA astronauts drawn exclusively from active-duty military test-pilot ranks.

President Jimmy Carter announced the formal normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, effective January 1, 1979. The decision ended 30 years of US recognition of the Republic of China on Taiwan and reshaped US military posture in East Asia, including the withdrawal of US forces from Taiwan under the Mutual Defense Treaty termination.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and senior US and Iraqi officials presided over a ceremony in Baghdad formally ending Operation New Dawn and the US military mission in Iraq after nearly nine years. The last American combat units had already withdrawn across the Kuwaiti border, closing a campaign that had reshaped US ground forces and counterinsurgency doctrine.