December 27 in Military History

In the aftermath of the stunning victory at Trenton, the Continental Congress granted General Washington expanded powers to raise troops, appoint officers, and requisition supplies, effectively making him a military dictator for six months to save the Revolution.

HMS Beagle, a 90-foot Royal Navy sloop, sailed from Plymouth Sound on her second survey voyage with the 22-year-old naturalist Charles Darwin aboard as the captain's gentleman companion. The five-year hydrographic survey produced charts that guided Royal Navy operations in the South Atlantic and Pacific for the remainder of the nineteenth century, and Darwin's specimen collections from the voyage produced the theory of natural selection that reshaped biological and eventually military medical thinking for the following century.

The Texas Annexation Ordinance was formally proclaimed, and the Republic of Texas became the 28th state of the Union. The annexation had been opposed by Mexico, which had never recognized Texan independence after the 1836 Texan Revolution. Mexican rejection of annexation became the immediate cause of the Mexican-American War that began four months later and produced American territorial gains reshaping the continent.

General William T. Sherman launched an assault on the Chickasaw Bluffs north of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in the first major attempt to capture the Confederate fortress controlling the Mississippi River, a bloody failure that would cost over 1,700 Union casualties.

General Douglas MacArthur declared Manila an open city to spare the Philippine capital from destruction as Japanese forces advanced on Luzon, withdrawing American and Filipino forces to the Bataan Peninsula for a desperate last stand.

The German battleship Scharnhorst was sunk in the Barents Sea north of Norway by a Royal Navy force centered on the battleship Duke of York in the last big-gun surface action in European waters. Radar-directed gunfire and torpedo attacks from cruisers and destroyers overwhelmed Scharnhorst after a running engagement in polar darkness, killing 1,932 German sailors. Only 36 of her crew of 1,968 survived.

The 37th Tank Battalion of the 4th Armored Division, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, punched through the final German resistance ring and made contact with the 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne, ending the siege of the town on the ninth day of the Battle of the Bulge. The relief completed a 100-mile drive from the Saar sector that Patton's Third Army had executed in the 72 hours following his December 19 pivot orders.

Soviet special forces stormed the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul, assassinating President Amin and launching a decade-long war that killed over 15,000 Soviet soldiers and helped bring down the USSR.

Four Abu Nidal Organization gunmen attacked ticket counters at Fiumicino Airport in Rome, and a simultaneous three-man attack struck Schwechat Airport in Vienna. The attacks killed 19 people, including five Americans, and wounded 140 more before being stopped by airport security and Italian Carabinieri. The attacks were traced to Libyan support and became one of the triggers for the United States Air Force and Navy strikes against Libya in April 1986 under Operation El Dorado Canyon.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi, destabilizing the nuclear-armed nation and complicating the U.S. war effort in neighboring Afghanistan during a critical period of the conflict.