December 28 in Military History

John C. Calhoun resigned as Vice President of the United States, the first vice president to resign the office, to take his elected seat in the Senate as a representative of South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis. The resignation came three weeks after President Andrew Jackson had issued his proclamation against nullification and had begun positioning federal troops and warships to enforce federal tariff law in Charleston.

Seminole warriors ambushed and killed 107 of 110 U.S. soldiers under Major Francis Dade in central Florida, triggering the longest and most costly of the Indian Wars.

On the same day as the Dade Massacre, Seminole war leader Osceola and a band of warriors ambushed and killed Indian Agent Wiley Thompson and four companions outside Fort King, a coordinated double strike that launched the Second Seminole War.

Iowa became the 29th state of the Union, extending federal territory onto the upper Mississippi River plains and opening the ground that would become the logistical and manpower base of the Western Theater during the Civil War fifteen years later. The admission expanded the free-state column in the Senate and intensified the sectional struggle over the expansion of slavery into new western territories.

Auguste and Louis Lumiere projected ten short films to a paying audience at the Salon Indien du Grand Cafe in Paris, the first commercial screening of motion pictures. The technology the brothers developed would within two decades become the foundation of military training films, combat documentation, aerial reconnaissance photography, and strategic propaganda, reshaping every major military's approach to information, morale, and instruction.

The U.S. Army Quartermaster Department adopted the M1903 infantry pack, an improved canvas load-carrying system that separated ammunition pouches, haversack, canteen, and bayonet into a modular belt and suspender configuration. The new pack was one of the earliest modern load-bearing equipment sets, and its modular approach to infantry kit influenced pack design across most Western militaries for the following half century.

Polish insurgents in the city of Poznań rose against German rule, launching the Greater Poland Uprising that would liberate the region and help establish the borders of the newly reborn Polish state after World War I.

Canadian forces of the 1st Infantry Division captured the Italian port town of Ortona after eight days of brutal house-to-house fighting against German paratroopers of the 1st Parachute Division, earning Ortona the nickname "the Stalingrad of Italy."

German Luftwaffe staff completed final planning for Operation Bodenplatte, a mass surprise attack on Allied tactical airfields in Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern France scheduled for New Year's Day 1945. The operation, intended to destroy Allied air power on the ground in support of the faltering Ardennes offensive, would commit approximately 900 German fighters in what became the largest single-day air operation the Luftwaffe conducted after 1943.

NATO officially ended its International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan after thirteen years, transitioning to a smaller advisory role and marking the conclusion of the longest war in American history.